A good chef will take anything not used in the final dish and use it for something else. Extra dough gets baked as a smaller cookie or cake, extra vegetables are turned into a soup, and extra batter goes to hovering children. Nothing gets wasted.
Same with carpenters. Good carpenters will plan their cuts to maximize the wood that they have.
We need to have that same attitude in the way we live and work now, given all that we produce. Waste should be seen as failure to innovate. We should look at what remains and think: what can we do with that? Ultimately nothing should go to waste, for everything will have a use somehow. We need to get creative
P.S. I thought of this while reading the tweets of Andrew McAfee (amcafee) who is at an MIT conference, and who wrote:
#mitee: McDonald’s Mike Cramer: “I hate waste. We’re allowed to fail forward, but we’re not allowed to waste.”
Smart People I Know 