The relationships between economic growth and environmental pressures are complex. Since the early nineties, the debate on these relationships has been strongly influenced by the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis, which states that during the first stage of economic development...

Material throughput is a means of measuring the so-called social metabolism, or physical dimensions of a society’s consumption, and can be taken as an indirect and approximate indicator of sustainability. Material flow accounting can be used to test the dematerialisation hypothesis, the idea...