Production and consumption are basic human activities that impact on the environment, and sustainable consumption (SC),which emphases on fairness in and between generations, on sustainable use of energy and resource, is an effective way to get the goal of sustainable development. Industrial ecology (IE) strives to discover the relationship between industrial activities and their environmental impacts, and life cycle analysis (LCA) provides a method to evaluate the environmental impact of specific products or services, from cradle to grave. Strong Sustainable Consumption, in which life quality rises while resources and energy needs decline for the improvement of environmental awareness and the changes of consumption of consumer, is a senior model of SC, and Weak Sustainable Consumption, characterized by calling on producing more environmentally friendly products, is a junior stage of SC.
The research interesting of SC changed with the development of SC theories and methods. Firstly, sustainable consumption studies mainly focused on the direct environmental impacts of consumption behaviro in 1990s, and then household metabolism was used to distinguish household environmental impacts by quantitative analysis of material flows and energy requirements. The HOMES (Household Metabolism Effectively Sustainable) project implemented by Groningen University unfolded that direct environmental impacts of consumption couldn't represent all the impacts, and the embedded parts were important too. The second stage of SC concerned for the whole life cycle environmental impacts of products and services with LCA. Because LCA is a bottom-up model and intact data of residential consumption is too hard to collect, so Hybrid LCA, or economic input-output LCA (EIO-LCA), was a substitute to overcome the limitation of data requirement for traditional LCA. Hybrid LCA is base on the complex relationships between industrial sectors, and can be used to detect how economic structure, life style, and technologic innovation affect environmental impacts. The third stage involved discussion of consumer responsibility due to increasing interesting in carbon responsibility and carbon responsibility allocation caused by international trade. By the use of Multi-Regional Input-Output (MRIO) analysis, the focus of SC shifts to consumer responsibility of global carbon emission from environmental impacts of consumption. MRIO is supposed to be significant to discriminate the carbon footprint of different consumption pattern and to calculate the carbon emission allocation globally in the future.
SC is an important part of Circle Economy and Resource saving and environment friendly society in China. Based on the process of urbanization and industrialization in the next decades, the authors make the following three suggestions for sustainable consumption researches in China: 1) Highlight the urban resident's consumption. Urban residents consume much more products and services than rural residents, and the quantity of urban residents will keep arising in the future. 2) Construct fundamental national LCA database by integrating acquired LCA database of related institutions and universities and establish standard methods. 3) Focus on sustainable production in short term.