available raw materials are one of the limiting factors regulating carrying capacity
Some aspects of a system's carrying capacity may involve matters such as available supplies of food, water, raw materials, and/or other similar resources. In addition, there are other factors that govern carrying capacity which may be less instinctive or less intuitive in nature, such as ever-increasing and/or ever-accumulating levels of wastes, damage, and/or eradication of essential components of any complex functioning system. Eradication of, for example, large or critical portions of any complex system (envision a space vehicle, for instance, or an airplane, or an automobile, or computer code, or the body components of a living vertebrate) can interrupt essential processes and dynamics in ways that induce systems failures or unexpected collapse. (As an example of these latter factors, the ``carrying capacity'' of a complex system such an airplane is more than a matter of available food, or water, or available seating, but also reflects total weight carried and presumes that its passengers do not damage, destroy, or eradicate parts, doors, windows, wings, engine parts, fuel, and oil, and so forth.) Thus, on a global scale, food and similar resources may affect planetary carrying capacity to some extent so long as Earth's human passengers do not dismantle, eradicate, or otherwise destroy critical biospheric life-support capacities for essential processes of self-maintenance, self-perpetuation, and self-repair.
Carrying capacity