Social Practices of Ordinary Consumption: An Introduction to Household Metabolism

In recent years, the evaluation of environmental sustainability of consumption practices has gained a central role in European research. Several analytical tools and methodologies are proposed in order to quantify the environmental burden of production and consumption. Such models can be very precise and efficient in the evaluation of energy consumption, emissions and land use, but most of the time; they are unsuitable to catch the social dimension of the investigation. Thus, many of them are unsuitable for investigating at the level of consumption practices. In this article we focus on Household Metabolism, a model that links social and environmental performances in order to perform a systemic investigation of the impact of consumption. Yet, housing metabolism implies not only quantitative aspects of consumption and the merging of different methods of analysis. It engenders some redefinitions of the sociology of consumption such as the discovery of the environmental aspects of consumption itself, the implication of household models in order to identify specific environmental impacts, and the significance of social practices as the principal activator of societal metabolism, and as the key driver for future changes in consumption behaviou