Building Materials in a Green Economy As discussed earlier, building is a strategic sector in the economy and a key to social transformation for a number of reasons: the volume of materials flow; the role of the built-environment in daily life and every community; the importance of spatial design; etc. The uniqueness of the building industry presents many important questions about what an ecological economy would look like, and how it can be implemented, there. Building deals with very solid heavy materials, and relatively long-lived products, and yet the design and construction industries are essentially service industries. If a green economy is basically one that provides services, the question remains is how can building materials become strictly means to the end of providing services, rather than big sources of profitable sales in themselves? This is a particularly difficult challenge when we recognizeas I described more thoroughly in my first bookthat the fragmentation of the North American builtenvironment after WWII through suburbanization and sprawl was designed to maximize effective demand for all sorts of materials, especially building materials. The techniques of design and constructionfrom International-style curtain-wall office building to platform-frame housing constructionwere premised on massive (undervalued) resource inputs and vast amounts of waste. This waste was a tremendous economic stimulus for a quarter century, but by the late seventies it was starting to