The sixth international conference on industrial ecology (ISIE 2011) was reviewed. To stimulate sustainable development, ISIE 2011 set its main theme as “Science, Systems and Sustainability” and selected 23 topics, including life-cycle methodology, industrial symbiosis, environmentally extended input-output analysis, and material flow analysis. In this paper, four research fields were reviewed: societal material metabolism, industrial symbiosis and eco-industrial development, industrial system complexity, climate change/energy/bioenergy. The trends of industrial ecology and their implications to the Chinese industrial ecology community were summarized briefly.