The Story of Stuff Project

At the end of the movie an alternative model for the materials economy was presented. The keywords were sustainability, equity, green chemistry, zero waste, closed-loop production, renewable energy and local living economies.

Why these keywords? How would it look like as a whole?

How would the transition toward that model look like?

What are the obstacles? Where are the leverage points?

And most importantly, what can we do as individuals in a family, a community, an organization, a country and a planet?

It's a nice set of keywords since it combines an overview of materials and resources with some clues about the wider economic and social changes needed to get materials right. Starting with your last question Bowo, the fun thing is how it is possible to implement at every level that you noted. Resource flows are easy to see in food production and recycling for example and everyone can take action with these - making compost and growing food, buying local and organic, switching investment from shiny junky gadgets into things that last and can be fixed, returning unrecyclables to retailers, opposing dumb waste management such as incineration, etc. 

On the big scale (national and global) it isn't more complicated, just tricky because the leverage points for action are not conveniently positioned where the problems appear. So the problem of waste is seen as a question of what to do and not to do with the stuff locally, rather than how to rejig the entire global economy to end dependence on waste. This explains why my preferred language for the big picture is 'circular economics', since we get a clue that it's about the whole economy. (Also China has adopted a national goal of 'circular economy'.) 

The main leverage point for making this happen at a meaningful scale and speed is the correction of markets to deal with the unaccounted 'externalities' of products that exploit nature and pass on the burden and harm of waste to others. The EU WEEE directive has a suitable economic tool, 'recycling insurance' that can be simply extended to prevent all accumulation of waste in ecosystems, including GHG causing climate change. Please see this presentation on how to do it as a way of creating a lasting revival of today's terminally ill linear economies: From credit crunch to planet crunch - or revival?

As Lawrence says, this would mean a paradigm shift in how we view resources. Whether circular economics is implemented to help with waste, with climate chaos or with economic recovery doesn't really matter since the outcome of paradigm shift would be the same. As a bonus, this shift would help reveal other necessary shifts in how people relate to nature and each other.