The OECD Work Programme on Sustainable Consumption provides new data and analysis to help countries reduce the environmental impacts from household consumption patterns. It combines empirical studies of consumption trends in OECD countries with conceptual and policy analysis.

The OECD has been working on Sustainable Consumption since 1994. The activity was initiated with a comprehensive programme combining conceptual framework, sector case studies documenting trends, environmental impacts, and policy response in five areas of household consumption (food, tourism-related travel, energy, water and waste generation), and policy recommendations to influence household consumption. The results of this work were released as a publication "Towards Sustainable Household Consumption? Trends and Policies in OECD Countries" and a series of free documents .
 

As a follow-up stage, work focussing on energy-consuming consumer durables such as motor vehicles or household appliances was undertaken addressing key issues to reduce impacts from durable design, production, use and disposal. A report on consumer durables reviewing some of the challenges facing policy makers as they seek to design environmentally effective and economically efficient environmental policies in this area is available.
 

The importance of using a combination of policy instruments to promote more sustainable consumption patterns was emphasized in previous work. An activity on policy mixes currently carried out in the context of the broader programme on “Policy mixes and instruments” with one case-study on residential energy efficiency and the second on municipal solid waste management. The possible links and interactions between different policy measures are examined with the aim to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the application of policy mixes.