Positive subsidies can certainly be a useful tool in supporting conservation, renewable energy, eco-industrial development, benign and secondary materials industry, compact eco-development, etc. But many innovators, entrepreneurs and activists in these areas would be more than happy just to have perverse subsidies removed. This is because it would force polluters to internalize their costs, immediately levelling the playing field for green forms of production. In many countries, the environmental movement has spawned movements to eliminate perverse subsidies, like the Green Scissors campaign in the US, coordinated by Friends of the Earth. Ecological Tax Reform (ETR) is an even bigger focus of activists and ecopreneurs. The most radical (i.e. fundamental) reform is known as ecological tax shifting, since it is designed to effect a major shift from taxing goods to taxing badsin particular effecting a shift from resource-intensive to people-intensive production. Tax shifting is intended to be revenue neutral since the idea is not to increase the tax burden on the average person, but rather create incentives for producers to constantly improve (Friends of the Earth [FOE], 1998). While a detailed discussion of green taxation is beyond the scope of this paper, it must be noted that tax shifting can and must play a central role in transforming building materials use. Every area discussed in this paperfrom engineered wood, to carbohydrate-based plastics, to reused building materials, to design for disassembly, to natural building techniques, and morecan and must benefit from tax measures designed to internalize social and environmental costs, and jumpstart larger commercial markets for eco-production, eco-building and eco-materials.