There is a general consensus that today's highly intensive consumption is inevitably unsustainable. As Thomas Princen states in his book “Confronting Consumption”, “if consumption is self-evidently a major driver of environmental change, consumption itself isn't self-evident.
There is a need, therefore, to distinguish problematic forms of consumption that lead to significant environmental problems. This usually is a matter of degree, as for example a single purchase of an automobile may have a very small effect on the environment but a large number of similar decisions across society can cause substantial resource and emissions implications. One of the basic questions that Industrial Ecology poses to the consumption issue is why such behaviour occurs. The explanations can be divided into two discrete levels:
Individual level:
Changes in consumption patterns may occur because of peer pressure (all the kids in school must have the same kind of bag), age or gender (girls and boys identifying with certain products like cosmetics or sports items) or even economics (consumption patterns correlate with the person's ability to purchase certain products).
Society level:
Changes in consumption patterns may occur because of marketing pressures (popular marketing campaigns lead to major changes in trends of consumption), peer group choices (similar patterns are usually identified within groups with common societal characteristics) and even because of the availability of different options (specific options in transportation and infrastructure lead people in riding bikes in the Netherlands)
Even though these issues are not new in the environmental and social sciences, their complexity and their significance towards environmental concerns of modern societies require our attention towards them. There may be no other place where the physical and the social sciences meet so directly.
