For their reproduction and maintenance, societies draw matter and energy from nature, which they transform, distribute, consume and reject. This process is called societal metabolism. Despite all the work on societal metabolism and its environmental impacts, little has been revealed about the regulation of its two main dynamics: production and consumption. Analysis of regulation implies the identification of agents involved in practices of production and consumption (reproduction). This is clearly a functionalist approach but it is useful as preliminary exercise to identify main social sectors of societal reproduction and their rulers or drivers. The way in which different agents perform certain activities and the telos they pursue gives rise to different metabolic regimes. Metabolic regimes have two functions: on one hand, they fulfil social needs for transforming resources into usable and consumable objects; on the other hand they provide the ground for the process of wealth accumulation. This means that societal metabolism is not a clearly delimited, socially disembedded sphere of physical relations, which tend towards general stability. Rather, metabolism is a complex process that tends to accumulate capitals (natural, human, technical and monetary) while it provides socially useful objects, artefacts and services. These functions are apparently not in contrast but are complementary. However, metabolic processes that are too fast and too linear might overrun social stability, generating crisis, like, for instance, the rift between consumption and resource availability.