Approaching material circularity through minimising waste is an essential component of strategies to secure sustainability of the planetary environment. Elaborations of the 3R waste hierarchy (reduce, reuse, recycle), including circular economy, ‘zero waste’ and zero discharge movements, signpost pathways towards overcoming the challenge. Potential technical solutions require major inputs from the chemical sciences, in strong cooperation with others, to deliver the material basis of sustainability. This must address not only the question of limited resources, but also the totality of consequences connected to massive material and product flows. Three examples, involving aluminium, plastics and textiles, explored using the systems-oriented concept map extension (SOCME) tool, illustrate the complexity of problems and need for integration of chemistry-based solutions into achieving a post-trash approach to sustainability.