International Industrial Ecology Day 2021

Research in the past twenty years has demonstrated that services were provisioned in an unsustainable way in our societies. The sustainability transformation of the stock-flow-service nexus is however still an unresolved issue. A reason may lie in the usual decomposition of the sustainability concept into the economic, social and environmental pillars. Indeed, this decomposition framework does not follow the usual formulation of an optimization problem. An optimization problem should be clear about the objectives and constraints of the system. During the presentation, I will introduce the EMMIT model as an optimization framework for sustainability where EMMIT stands for the Energy, Material, Money, Information, and Time model.