Sustainable Consumption

Consumption is an activity that consumers spend time, money, energy and innovation in maintaining, including material consumption, spiritual consumption and ecological consumption, which is also an activity that everyone is undertaking at any time. Consumption can guarantee human being's survival. Consumption communicates people with nature closely through demanding, processing, circulating and discarding. Consumption itself is neutral, but to the whole world system, it has differential of sustainability and non-sustainability. In the current consumption model, people usually regard consumption behavior as individual or domestic behavior. Individualism of consumption and decentralization of consumers lead to understand consumption restriction based on moral standards. In addition, at present, income system, consumption policy, tax system and consumption laws have some own limitations in our country, which resulted in inequality between eras and inequity within era. Because of soft limitation of consumption and defects of institution, there have appeared phenomena of non-sustainable consumption, which directly lead to deterioration of ecology & environments and speeding-up deletion of resources. Furthermore non-sustainable consumption is contradicted to concept of sustainable development. Therefore 21st Century Agenda was instituted at the Environment and development convention presided over by United Nations in 1992, it was the first time that advanced concept of sustainable consumption. 21st Century Agenda pointed out that we must change our current consumption model if we are anxious to realize sustainable development, and emphasized that the main reasons of persistent degeneration of environment had been caused by non-sustainable consumption andproduction model. The book advocated all nations should take our pains to promote and establish sustainable consumption model. Later on, sustainable consumption has been focuses of international environment and development conventions. In 1994, at the meeting of Organization for Economic cooperation and Development (DECD), United Nations Sustainable Development Commission called on establishing a feasible program of sustainable consumption and production model, and fundamental elements of which was elaborated. Hence, many states and theoretical circles commenced on researching issues of sustainable consumption as strategical subject of realizing sustainable development.Facing up to the acute challenges of population, resource and environment, sustainable consumption was advocated earlier in our country. In 1994, China 21st Century Agenda: China 21st Century White Book of Population, resources and environment was issued, which analyzed the status of consumption in our country, and pointed out that consumption in our country is non-sustainable. Therefore we must consume rationally relying on the situation of population, resource and environment, and establish sustainable consumption model. No doubt, these concepts have significant theoretical and practical meaning. In the academe, some scholars, such as Cao Fengzhong, Yang Jiadong and Qin Xingfang, have explored sustainable consumption, and achieved great progress. However most of consumption researchers just remain in the field of traditional consumption economics, meanwhile the research of sustainable consumption's institutional arrangements and the relations of sustainable consumption, sustainable production and sustainable development haven't been mature, systematic. Based on pressing reality of practice and theory, this article chooses sustainable consumption as my thesis, and try to continue exploring and perfecting institutional arrangement and mechanism of sustainable consumption promoting sustainable development upon the previousachievements of consumption research.The article is divided into five sections: Chapter One is about theory of sustainable consumption. First it evaluates traditional industrial consumption model from the theoretical viewpoint, analyzes theoretical o...