Key Sectors: Extraction Industry and Petrochemicals In considering the problems of the River Economy, and the challenges for using fewer resources (dematerialization) and making them more benign (detoxification), two key sectors of the industrial economy immediately come to the fore: extraction industry and petrochemicals. Not incidentally, the current character of both sectors are made possible by fossil fuels. Resource extraction is especially implicated in environmental destruction. Mining may be the worlds most destructive industry, moving more rock and soil (an estimated 28 billion tons) than all the erosion caused by the worlds rivers. The industry today is more destructive than it ever has been. It favours surface mining over underground mining techniques, which generates many times more waste. Canadas mining wastes are, for example, 58 times larger than its municipal refuse (Gardner & Sampat, 1998). In the US, mining has contaminated over 19,000 kilometers of the nations rivers. Declining ore gradesor low-gradingmeans that much more ore must be hauled each year to produce the same amount of metal. Over the 20th century, for example, copper production grew 22 times, and waste from copper production 73-