Material Concerns
Material Concerns is a book by author and economist Tim Jackson. Published in 1996, it pioneered the concept of preventive environmental management, a core principle of the circular economy framework. Description Twenty years before the Ellen MacArthur Foundation established its now widely recognised circular economy mission, Tim Jackson began developing what was called at the time preventive environmental management. The core idea was: prevention is better than cure, "preventing environmental damage at the outset is better than cleaning up after the fact". Material Concerns - Pollution, Profit and Quality of Life was published in 1996 as a synthesis of his findings in Clean Production Strategies – Developing Preventive Environmental Management in the Industrial Economy, an edited collection drawing chapters from pre-eminent writers in the field, such as Walter R Stahel, Bill Rees, and Bob Costanza. Rooted in the laws of thermodynamics and explicitly considering the ecological limits of the planet (chapter 8), the driving idea was to move industrial production away from an extractive linear system towards a reconceptualisation of the production cycle from design stage, prefiguring the concept of the circular economy. The book outlines Tim Jackson's early views on the relationship between human wellbeing and economic growth (chapter