Household Metabolism and social practices. A model for assessing and changing household consumption

This paper, quite oriented toward the perspective of the science of consumption, presents the Household Metabolism (Moll et al. 2005) model and a coupled hybrid assessing tool with some sociological aspects related to its application. As suggested by Shove and Warde (2002), sociology of consumption has made real progress in identifying and dissecting a series of mechanisms, which maintain and expand demand for goods and services. However, few sociologists of consumption have taken account of the environmental impact of practices they describe. Sociology of consumption needs tools for the evaluation of the environmental sustainability of the way people produce and consume. Several consumption patterns (or more generally lifestyles) are claimed to be sustainable but evaluation of different social scenarios from an environmental point of view is quite difficult to achieve and suitable tools are required. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) should be one of the most suitable tools for this challenge, nevertheless theoretical problems in the application of a product oriented LCA to arrays of social behaviour may arise and a number of hybrid methodologies are proposed (e.g. Wiedmann, 2009; Hertwich, 2011). A number of hybrid LCA methods were used as assessment tool for comparison of family consumption in some European countries (e.g. Kok et al., 2003), but no complete applications have been conducted yet in Italy.