Dematerialization vs. Detoxification. Dr. Jaccard received his PhD at the Institute of Energy Economics and Policy at the University of Grenoble in 1987, and has been a Professor in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University since 1986. At this graduate school, he directs the Energy and Materials Research Group.
Environmental sustainability is notoriously difficult to define.
For our purposes, it should be defined in terms of the quantity and toxicity of material and energy throughputs, combined with an appraisal of human preferences. Sustainability has been measured via the Ecological Footprint. If, for a given area, human energy and materials use and waste release exceeds the former natural system's energy use and waste assimilative capacity, then we have overshot the area's Ecological Footprint, and the situation is not sustainable. Calculations of our Ecological Footprint have developed countries using resources and producing waste at a rate several times that at which their physical areas would warrant. Dematerialization, reducing flows of energy and material for a given level of well-being, is where most of our efforts on the environmental front have been concentrated over the last few decades.