The Form of Service Green manufacturing produces material things, but it does so primarily as a means to provide services to meet human and environmental need. It tries to directly target end-use and service needssuch as nutrition, access, entertainmentand works backwards to find the most elegant and efficient ways of meeting these needs. This enduse approach allows major savings in materials and energy. Such resource-efficiency is cultivated even further by the green economys cyclical form, mimicking the closed-loop organization of naturewhere every output is also a useful input and there is no waste. In most of the popular literature about green economics, there is more awareness of the need for recycling than for service-oriented production. But the two dimensions go hand-in-hand in the eyes of industrial ecologists. The very logic of conservation in fact leads to service production. Figure 12 (next page) is a representation of various strategies for cycling materials and for what is called product life extension. It shows the course of a life cycle that can get the most out of our use of materials. But it also shows that that all loops are not the same, and that various social and economic benefits accrue from focusing a products life on the tightest loop of production-consumptionreuse. What the popular mind commonly calls recycling is actually a continuum of activities, ranging from recycling on one side (the largest loops), to technological upgrading, to reconditioning and remanufacturing, to repair and finally to pure reuse (the tightest loop) on the other side. The smaller the loop, the less is energy is required; the more skilled and service-like the work tends to be; and the more local-regional the process is. Proximity is highly desirable for systems based in reuse, while conventional