what the chemical industry calls “verbund.” This is a setup ...

what the chemical industry calls “verbund.” This is a setup in which the inevitable by-product of one production line becomes the resource for another, which again produces by-products that can be used in other processes and so on, until a network of production lines becomes so efficiently intertwined that there is no chance of an isolated factory competing with it anymore.

This is also how we get over-optimized and specialized production systems.

www.joshbeckman.org/notes/479137836