Growing overall environmental impact of the EU's consumption of goods, services and raw materials require political action tackling prevailing unsustainable consumption and production patterns. A significant shift of such patterns towards bringing EU's consumption and overall footprint within the earth’s carrying capacity while achieving high levels of quality of life and well-being among European citizens require profound structural changes. In order to support such shifts, from an overarching perspective the following cluster of policies seems promising: incentivising resource-lighter consumption through use of taxes (e.g. lower VAT for environmentally advantageous products), encouraging circular material flows through life-cycle performance standards, fostering business models developing product-service-systems, and re-focusing infrastructure spending programmes towards enabling sustainable consumer behaviour.