Efficiency in the "Olden Days"

In Cradle to Cradle, authors William McDonough and Michael Braungart explore pretty much every type of consumer product imaginable, how it is made, and how the mind frame of "efficiency" has affected its production. The authors are against this idea of efficient production because they think it ignores the true ways that production could prove sustainable, and does not "reach deep enough" (62). Eco-efficiency tries to make the best of the mess we have already created, work with a tangled, badly designed system, and reduce waste instead of just creating a whole new system that wouldn't create any waste at all. This is what we need to do, the authors express, in order to live and work in a world that acknowledges the entire linking relationship of all things. But capitalism does not allow for this. Unfortunately, I don't think we will ever reach a system like this because companies care only about producing goods quickly and cheaply--and that's their definition of efficiency. For many companies, eco-efficiency isn't even something they will consider because it constricts them to regulations and limits them to how much waste they can produce.
The authors also discuss our consumer culture of waste. Waste has become embedded in our daily lives to a point that it is completely unavoidable to live a zero-waste life (unless maybe we go transcendentalist and live outside for the rest of time). Most of the products we use are comprised of parts that come from many different spheres of the globe and are extracted from nonrenewable sources. I found a lot of similarities from this reading and the video "The Story of Suff," which examines our shopping culture as a driver behind "perceived obsolescence," which the authors also discuss in Cradle to Cradle. Products today are designed not to last long so that we feel we need to throw them away and buy more. This contagious mind set is dangerous and must, somehow, be expelled if we want to continue living on this planet.
One particular story in the book I found interesting was the discussion of prior leather shoe production. Conventional leather shoes, they say, are "monstrous hybrids" (99) comprised of too many different biological and technical materials. In the past, leather shoes were tanned with vegetable chemicals and the wastes posed no real problem becuse the shoe could biodegrade after use. But this required a lot of time to produce, and has therefore been replaced with a cheaper, quicker mode: chromium tanning. But this is emits dangerous toxins (often in undeveloped regions, pointing to the unequal disparities within the system), and leather shoes can no longer biodegrade. So why don't we go back to the old design? Because capitalism does not idealize it.

After reading this, I am completely at a loss. What can I do, then, if there is an ethical issue behind literally every product I use in my daily life? Perhaps well-educated architects could come up with a new system to remedy the situation, but will the world ever adopt it and let it replace the old one? Doubtful. I'm curious to see what others have to say about this.