The building industry can be a strategic fulcrum for green economic conversion in society as a whole. Not only is it decentralized, present in every community, but the built environment constitutes everyones personal habitat and has a direct bearing on all peoples well-being. Equally significant, it is responsible for perhaps forty percent of the economys materials and energy throughput, and so changes in building have great potential impacts in extraction, manufacturing and waste management. Creating a green economy is not just about encouraging environmental protection, but about establishing closed-loop ecological alternatives in every sector that substantively contribute to both dematerialization and detoxification of the economy. Besides creating cyclical material flows, green development is also geared to increasing production of service (i.e. directly meeting human and environmental need) rather than material output. What would the role of building materials be in an ecological construction industry geared to service and cyclical flows? This dissertation surveys the many dimensions involved in transforming materials use in building to create a closed-loop service-oriented building industry. The thesis includes chapters on, respectively, the evaluation, production, consumption, recycling, and regulation of building materials. It attempts to explore potentials in these areas by