Concept
By-product
Overview
A by-product or byproduct is a secondary product derived from a production process, manufacturing process or chemical reaction; it is not the primary product or service being produced.
A by-product can be useful and marketable or it can be considered waste: for example, bran, which is a byproduct of the milling of wheat into refined flour, is sometimes composted or burned for disposal, but in other cases, it can be used as a nutritious ingredient in human food or animal feed. Gasoline was once a byproduct of oil refining that later became a desirable commercial product as motor fuel. The plastic used in plastic shopping bags also started as a by-product of oil refining. By-products are sometimes called co-products to indicate that although they are secondary, they are desired products. For example, hides and leather may be called co-products of beef production. There is no strict distinction between by-products and co-products.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where By-product is discussed.
The aim of efficiency (like any educational aim) must be included within the process of experience. When it is measured by tangible external products, and not by the achieving of a distinctively valuable experience, it becomes materialistic. Results in the way of commodities which may be the outgrowth of an efficient personality are, in the strictest sense, by-products of education: by-products which are inevitable…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
states what it is; names the idea
It may, indeed, be said that even now the state provides those conditions of security which are necessary if private persons are to engage effectually in discovery and invention. But this service is a by-product; it is foreign to the grounds on which the conditions in question are maintained by the public. And it must be offset by noting the extent to which the state of affairs upon which the public heart is most…
John Dewey, The public and its problems
states what it is; names the idea
Still more strongly will a similar presumption exist, when the object itself, as in the case of organized beings, is no primeval agent, but an effect, which depends on a cause or causes for its very existence. The Kinds, therefore, which are called in chemistry simple substances, or elementary natural agents, are the only ones, any of whose properties can with certainty be considered ultimate; and of these the…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
states what it is
For there are some causes which of themselves produce results, and some which only contribute to the production of a result. Therefore, the first are called efficient causes; and the last are classed as such, that without them a thing cannot be brought about. Again, of efficient causes, some are complete and perfect in themselves; some are accessory to, and, as it were, partners in the production of the result in…
Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4
states what it is
They are always real, because they concern the existence of substance (negations are only determinations, which express the non-existence of something in the substance). Now, if to this real in the substance we ascribe a particular existence (for example, to motion as an accident of matter), this existence is called inherence, in contradistinction to the existence of substance, which we call subsistence. But hence…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
states what it is
Philosophers who discussed By-product
Place in the tradition
Part of Epiphenomenalism.