We must think of everything as a cycle, and consider how to close the cycle. There should be no "waste" ideally.
Let me share an example:
Birds in the wild don't lay an egg a day for no reason. Some birds, like geese, might lay a few eggs during a specific season when the eggs are most likely to be fertilized (a specific mating season, if you will, usually the spring). Laying eggs requires energy and nutrients, and wild animals don't spare either of these without good reason in general. However, with chickens we took jungle fowl and selectively bred and selectively bred them until they became today's prolific layers: chickens that lay 2-300 eggs a year (an egg approximately every 25 hours with the exception of molting and winter when daylight hours are shorter). In exchange, we feed our captive bred friends differently: more, for one, and at different macronutrient proportions (higher protein and calcium supplementation are two examples).
This is excellent when it's a mutual, closed cycle. We get the extra eggs, and the chickens get to spend their lives pecking and scratching in the sunshine in a protected area. Originally, these chickens would have been fed agricultural or other "wastes", and this makes this a closed circuit. The chickens eat something that might otherwise need to be thrown away or directly composted, composting it more efficiently (well, kind of, chickens aren't ruminants and pass a lot of undigested food, but anyway) and providing a valuable source of nutrition for us in the process.
When, however, we order commercial feed rations in plastic bags this ceases to be a closed cycle. We are now creating waste in the form of plastic, energy loss from shipping, labor and resources expended to house and store this feed (in a store or warehouse) and so on.
The question, then, as we're creating this space and changing our lifestyles from "consumers" to zero-waste producers, is largely how to close all of our cycles. How do we use everything? How do we produce what we need? How can we truly never see a single thing as "waste"?
We aren't there yet, but this is absolutely vital to making positive ecological changes and to building a true ecosystem.
*Quick edit: ruminants also pass a lot of undigested food. Slightly more efficient than chickens, different diet still not perfect. Neither are we humans, but you get the point.
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