When it was published in 1973，E.F. Schumacher’s book, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, made a lot of people think about the ways we make money, and what we use it for. Here is a quote taken from the book: 

　　“A modem economist is used to measuring the ‘standard of living，by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is ‘better off’ than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. ... The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. Modem economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity.” 

　　The quote makes sense to a lot of people who are tired of always working harder to buy things that don’t really make them feel a lot better. What do people really want, and what do they really need? Suppose someone decides that a bigger or better television would make life more enjoyable. Perhaps. But what does the person have to pay for that TV? It’s not just the money; it’s the lost hours spent earning that money. 

　　In any case, a family decides to buy a big television for the living room. But then the parents decide that they want a second television for their bedroom. What happens? They all can’t watch both televisions at the same time. Perhaps one person in the family watches the one in the bedroom, while someone else watches the one in the living room. But then they are missing out on the happiness of being together as a family. There are lots of things we do that don’t really improve our lives.

       Many who study Toyota’s way of working are often initially surprised at the lack of specific, step-by-step, how-to instructions. But the Toyota culture is intended to draw upon the creative abilities of employees; if the processes were put into a manual featuring steps 1, 2 and 3，then people would likely follow the steps robotically, doing their job each day precisely the same way they did it the day before. The Toyota system is teaching people to think for themselves and find a better way to do the job, and to take individual ownership.

  Newspapers have traditionally been made from wood for many years. But what would happen if the process were reversed? Could wood be made from newspapers to complete the full cycle? A Dutch designer sought out the answer to this question. 

  Mieke Meijer was a student when she first began exploring a way to extend the life of newspapers and make something useful from waste. The result of her project was the creation of a new material called NewspaperWood, which reversed the traditional wood-to-paper process and results in a wood-like product from recycled newspapers. She later joined a design team that helped her simplify the process so that it was less time-consuming and less complicated. The process of making NewspaperWood involves coating each sheet of newspaper with environmentally friendly glue and then rolling the sheets up together tightly to form logs. The logs are then milled into planks just like wood. The result is a product that can be sanded, nailed, cut, and treated just like any other wood product. It can be used to make many items but cannot be used for largescale construction. If you cut open a NewspaperWood log, you can see the layers of paper that look like the lines of grain in a piece of real wood.     NewspaperWood is not invented to be a replacement for wood. It aims at making use of the surplus of waste paper and creating something more valuable out of it. Meijer calls the process “upcycling.”   NewspaperWood is being used by several designers to create products ranging from small pieces of jewelry to larger pieces of furniture.