抄録
An important characteristic of the Industrial Age is a simultaneous appearance of technological progress and environmental disruption. Why dose the former fail to prevent the latter? This paper deals with this problem using a thermodynamic approach applied to the material substance of the economic systems. The Kondratieff's Long Waves are found to correspond to a successive change in the industrial transformation of energy and matter. A new technology produces a new waste because products themselves, besides the industrial wastes, are to be dumped when used up. Thus the total amount of the environmentally inappropriate matter equals to the accumulated amount of the material production except biomasses. Therefore, it seems inevitable and not necessarily undesirable to decrease the scale of non-agricutural, material production.
