ALL goods manufactured should be designed to be recyclable where possible, and full details of the materials used in construction and the intended means of recycling should be registered before any product can be manufactured and sold.  This should lead to designs not changing quite as frequently as they do now, and ease of disassembly / recycling being uppermost in the designer’s minds for all products.

Manufacturers of goods designed with a built-in obsolescence or limited lifespan should be obliged to recycle their own products for no additional charge.  This should lead to longer-lifespan products and a much higher frequency of leasing arrangements rather than outright purchases.  Longer-lifespans are necessary because consumers will only pay the cost of recycling in the price if it lasts a reasonable amount of time.

There should be taxes on all natural resources that are so high that it will always be much cheaper to use recycled materials.  Thus quarries and mines will operate on a much smaller scale than ever before, and it will become economical to work poorer-quality mining areas that were previously abandoned.

There should be a complete ban on building development on all undeveloped land, unless express permission is supplied by the government, but since the population will be decreasing this should not be a problem.  Taxes will mean that it will always be cheaper to redevelop existing buildings rather than try to build on new land.  The houses that will be vacated will be the worst inner city buildings, so these will tend to be redeveloped with a much lower density of housing than before, with plenty of green areas between the buildings.

Energy sources will tend to be high-tech mixes of electricity generation using hydrogen-burning furnaces, solar power, wind power and nuclear fusion.  In this way, the energy can be generated efficiently and transported around the country very easily.  Superconductors will be utilised for transmission of the electricity along major routes, thereby eliminating losses along those routes.