Making the World Summary and Analysis

This chapter on manufacturing, and explains that innovations in improving efficiency come much faster than industry's ability or willingness to adopt them, but their possibilities are as endless as imagination. Factories reuse heat for manufacturing with simple changes like sealing leaks, improving insulation and using "pinch technology" to precisely apply and recapture heat; likewise microchip makers in China and Singapore have been able to save millions of dollars by improving efficiency at a cost of less than one million dollars. Energy, resources and money, as well as pollution and waste can be saved, even eliminated, if industry is willing to make improvements in six categories: design, new technologies, controls, corporate culture, new processes and saving materials.

Scientist Edwin Land called invention simply a "cessation of stupidity," and the authors suggest that simply using existing technologies to their...