Abstract
This article examines the efforts over the past thirty years at producing an urban landscape based on reusing waste for input into production. The article is a case study of Newark, New Jersey's, efforts to construct a resource recovery facility as the cornerstone of their industrial development policy. This innovative approach to economic development was replete with the rhetoric of “closed-loop” systems similar to the current proposals for developing a sustainable employment and economic base for cities. Despite the emphasis on environmentally sound economic development, the resource recovery experiment was both an economic and environmental debacle. Several of the assumptions that guided resource recovery as a mechanism for revitalization continue to inform planning.