Inertia is an attribute of various systems, including sustainable development. The study of the inertia of sustainable development as a complex industrial-ecological and socio-economic supersystems is necessary to give due depth to theoretical explanations of the processes implemented in the practice of regulating industrial production, economic relations that determine the environmental load, the level of consumption of natural resources, to identify qualitative and quantitative relationships between factors of changes in structural proportions in production and consumption, their sources and relocation productive forces. The result if the study of inertia as a quality of macroeconomic structural changes, immanent to sustainable development, should be a knowledge of the forms of the transition of economic achievements of society into environmental ones. The study of sustainable development inertia is intended to improve the forecasting of various processes of interaction between man and the environment through the use of productive forces. The content of structural inertia of sustainable development can be revealed through the dynamic and actively transforming properties of structural shifts no less than through the conservatism of the structure of the economy, therefore, the creation of conditions for the regulated implementation of structural inertia, its transition into its opposite – acceleration of positive structural transformations – is associated with the regulation of economic relations in the system of environment management, production and consumption of natural resources, dynamization of changes in structural proportions between raw materials production and its processing, to overcome delaying the formation of new structural elements.