Priorities for Dematerialization and Detoxification Dematerialization basically means reducing the volume of materials moving through the economy, as well as reducing their speed of flow. Detoxification means changing the composition of materials, making them out of more benign materials and doing this in less poisonous ways. Even if these processes dont always require each other, in practice they complement each other in important ways. On one hand, as discussed above, the cyclical organization of the Lake Economy demands outputs that can be inputs for another process, and ultimately benign enough to be safely returned to nature. On the other hand, detoxifying the economy is much simpler and straightforward if the mass of materials flowing through the economy is greatly reduced.