Energy vs Waste: https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2019/11/energy-vs-waste/
“Erwin Schrodinger has described life as a system in steady-state thermodynamic disequilibrium that maintains its constant distance from equilibrium (death) by feeding on low entropy from its environment—that is, by exchanging high-entropy outputs for low-entropy inputs. The same statement would hold verbatium as a physical description of our economic process. A corollary of this is that an organism cannot live in a medium of its own waste products.” - Herman Daly & Kenneth Townsend