industrial ecology uses the principles of sustainability to define manufacturing and businesses into a sort of "organismal" structure so that recycling of industrial byproducts works like natural attenuation.
Like a lot of postmodern stuff, playing with definitions. How will competition fit into this organismal structure if one government and not all others enforce it?
You've highlighted the major failing of private/competition-driven society there. Private capital sees all business as output and consumption, and judges them according to efficiency and profitability. It would be like a human body made of nothing but organs - producing and processing all the time. Capitalism sees fatty tissue, skin, skeleton (social care; the arts; leisure - let's say) as "waste", because there is no production, just maintenance. "What is the value of maintenance," - say the capitalists - "when our competitors are not only maintaining their position, but
growing it too? We shall be left behind." It is no coincidence that the collapsing western world has now started to crack out the old Keynes textbooks again.
There are a couple of ways to answer the "how?" question. Firstly: monetise ecological growth. This is what the US wanted to introduce in Copenhagen, albeit in a crafty way. If you simply pay money to low emitters, then all of Africa must become extremely rich; if you monetise the decrease in net output, then China becomes hugely wealthy, because it has such huge emissions figures to play about with. It looks like the US will want to monetise the
rate of emission decrease, as this allows them to market-manipulate the rates and ensure that they synchronise emissions-cuts of their own with the most favourable market payouts.
Second - warfare. If enough of the world holds that ecology is of greater value than money, you could potentially see the first "acceptable" war for 100 years - the war to save the earth. In this case, major emitters would be punished by force. This seems far-fetched now, but if populations begin to see that the shit is about to hit the fan, it is fair to say that everyone would prefer it be Johnny Foreigner who bites it, rather than themselves.
There are probably some more - trade sanctions, totalitarian military governments, police states, forced poverty, etc but they are hopeless deconstructive solutions and this post is already too long.