no waste?

Zero waste: can we achieve it? This article made me wonder how right some economists are that the market will solve problems. Maybe they are right, but the time scale could be wrong for certain kinds of problems.

For example, it could be that we need the doomsayers to move the population to act; they could be the impulse function in reaction to the recognition of a problem (say, global warming). In that metaphor, government and the media act as delay functions. The problem is that if the time needed to act is longer than the delay imposed by the delay function...