Among the most important are A special topic of ecological modernization research during recent years was sustainable household, i.e. environment-oriented reshaping of lifestyles, consumption patterns, and demand-pull control of supply chains (Vergragt, 2000; OECD 2002).
Some scholars of ecological modernization share an interest in industrial symbiosis, i.e. inter-site recycling that helps to reduce the consumption of resources via increasing efficiency (i.e. pollution prevention, waste reduction), typically by taking externalities from one economic production process and using them as raw material inputs for another (Christoff, 1996).
As a strategy of change, some forms of ecological modernization may be favored by business interests because they seemingly meet the triple bottom line of economics, society, and environment, which, it is held, underpin sustainability, yet do not challenge free market principles.
Under ecological modernization, the state is seen in a variety of roles and capacities: as the enabler for markets that help produce the technological advances via competition; as the regulatory (see regulation) medium through which corporations are forced to 'take back' their various wastes and re-integrate them in some manner into the production of new goods and services (e.g. the way that car corporations in Germany are required to accept back cars they manufactured once those vehicles have reached the end of their product lifespan); and in some cases as an institution that is incapable of addressing critical local, national, and global environmental problems.
Political modernization of this sort requires certain supporting norms and institutions such as a free, independent, or at least critical press, basic human rights of expression, organization, and assembly, etc.
Critics argue that ecological modernization will fail to protect the environment and does nothing to alter the impulses within the capitalist economic mode of production (see capitalism) that inevitably lead to environmental degradation (Foster, 2002).
Ecological modernization, its effectiveness and applicability, strengths and limitations, remains a dynamic and contentious area of environmental social science research and policy discourse in the early 21st century.