Detoxification is an essential dimension of green production. For the food webs of eco-industrial organization to work properly to eliminate waste, all outputs and by-products have to be non-toxic and nutritious enough to be used as inputs for some other process, and eventually to be safely returned to nature (Tibbs, 1998). The toxicity of the modern economy is essentially a symptom of design failure, or outright absence of design. Certain materials are toxic because they are intended to be e.g. pesticides, disinfectants, etc. Other materialscatalysts, solvents, etc.are not toxic by intent but because their functional properties or chemical structure makes them likely to be. The toxicity of other materialslike many metals like cadmium and leadis completely unrelated to their functionse.g. providing flexibility or corrosion-resistance or pigmentation (Geiser, 2001, p. 336). Especially in the last category, there are materials that can be substituted for the toxic ones to accomplish their purposes. Increasingly this is true of the second category. And in the first categoryintentionally toxic materialsmore often than not we find that poisoning is a substitute for proper design. This is particularly true in agriculture where the use of industrial chemicals not only poisons the food system, but interferes with the proper cycling of nutrients in the soil. The killing of organisms in the supposed interest of health undermines the diversity and vitality upon which real ecosystem health depends. The starting point for detoxification begins with this examination of why materials are toxic, and then evaluating them in terms of their toxicity, persistence and bioaccumulative capacityas discussed in Chapter I and illustrated in Figure 2.