Every gram of mercury or cadmium that we take out must go somewhere. In the end, the compound will remain dispersed into the environment. Therefore, the concentration of such heavy metals, greenhouse gasses, and acid rain from sulphurous compounds continues to build up, as long as we don't meet that first condition. The third system condition is that we must not exploit natural resources more than nature can build up new resources . For instance, we cannot take more fish out of the sea than is repopulated.
Fish are part of a large productive system, which breaks down as such imbalance occurs.
We cannot turn forests into desert in a systematic exploitation process, because it negatively affects the productive capacity of the ecosystem by putting asphalt on the Earth, or turning it into desert. We are cutting the trunk of the tree we are sitting on from several sides at the same time. It will eventually reconstitute itself. But now we come to the fourth system condition, which is that, since we have restrictions on what we can do, due to the first three system conditions, we must be efficient when we use natural resources to meet human needs. It is not sufficient for only the United States to be efficient, or only Sweden or anyone else, because we all live on the same globe.