Incinerationan option increasingly pushed by corporations and technocrats as a solution to the waste crisisis an end-of-pipe solution to this crisis that avoids dealing with fundamental problems by extending the River Economy. Experts and environmentalists have documented the waste intrinsic to incinerationwhich in the case of paper, for example, squanders four times as much energy as recycling. Incineration also aggravates problems with toxic waste. Incinerators are notorious sources of mercury emissions and dioxins, and while reducing the volume of solid waste, they concentrate toxicity into the remaining ash, which becomes an even more difficult disposal problem (Platt, 2004). Perhaps most importantly, incinerators are very expensive and reinforce the capital-intensive nature of local economies. Municipal investment in incineration inevitably pre-empts more people-intensive community-based closed-loop development in recycling, reuse, repair and remanufacturingall activities essential to an ecological closed-loop lake economy. As I mentioned briefly in the previous section, postindustrial productive forces based on knowledge and human creativity should offer possibilities for the dematerialization of production by doing more with less. It might seem that the current information revolution and the rise of lighter stronger materials would make it possible for advanced economies to use fewer materials. But capitalist tendencies of constant growth have more than offset these potentials. Materials intensitythe tonnage of material used to generate a dollars worth of outputdid in fact decline by 18 percent between 1970 and 1995 (Gardner & Sampat, 1998). But materials production and consumption have both risen dramatically over the past century, with total consumption of materials swelling by 67 percent between 1970 and 1995. This is by no means due