13. From Sustainable Production to Sustainable Consumption

This section provides an overview of the secondary consequences that purchase, use and end-of-life of a product can induce outside the actual product system itself. These consequences go beyond functional relationships with other products, i.e. beyond part-system and system-system relationships that are part of regular product LCA, and which are described in the ILCD Handbook, Chap. 7.2.2.

The following consumption-induced secondary consequences and aspects that modify them can be differentiated (compiled from Becker 1976; Eyerer and Wolf 2000; Hofstetter et al. 2006; Weidema 2008; Girod et al. 2010, with additions):

The above listed secondary consequences cause additional or reduced consumption.

Beyond these, other secondary consequences occur on local, regional, national or international scales that are not addressed in this chapter.

In three additional sub-sections the authors look briefly into higher order consequences due to economic transactions, present a new measure of the environmental life cycle performance of products from consumption perspective and reflect on possible harm due to needs over-fulfilment.

The following household resources have been considered for studies on sustainable consumption (compiled from Becker 1976; Eyerer and Wolf 2000; Hofstetter et al. 2006) Weidema 2008; Girod et al. 2010, with own additions and examples):

Moreover the following elements, which are better understood as constraints to consumption, are to be considered (Hofstetter et al. 2006):

Cross category effects (Hofstetter et al. 2006), also termed technology rebounds by Weidema (2008)), relate to technology changes that affect the availability of other technologies or alter their effect on the available household resources. An example is the parallel use of a product A, enabled by a new product B, while not relevantly impacting on each other’s functions. An example is the use of a laptop during a train travel (enabled by the portability of the computer and by the trains power outlet and Wi-Fi access). This situation can be argued to free time, as the work on the laptop is working time, if assuming that total working time is not increased.

Other effects are more indirect and can interact with other mechanisms on society level, affecting e.g. infrastructure availability.

The knowledge (or sometimes only belief) that a product X is more environmentally friendly may lead to an additional consumption “because the product X has less impacts”, as Girod et al. (2010) argue. Examples are the more fuel-efficient car or more energy-efficient lighting that lead to driving further or having more lamps, respectively.

Similar to the use of freed household resources, also the mental consequences can lead to more use of the same product, as in the above examples, of products that fulfil the same function or meet the same need, or of other products or activities (e.g. “because I separate my waste, it is ok that I …”). These mental consequences can also be interpreted as having a mental budget for environmental impacts, as Girod et al. (2010) suggest. However, this mental budget is less accurate than the income or time budget and we can easily be misled as to the actual environmental benefit of a product.

Next to such negative secondary consequences that were in focus in previous work, the authors argue here that these can also be positive: the individual may like the good feeling that e.g. the decision of “being a vegetarian for a week” trial gives and he/she becomes fully vegetarian. Or the positive feeling of knowing to do something good for the environment leads to the decision to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle, i.e. consumption decisions in other product categories and meeting other human needs.

In addition, spending the saved money on other products means that this money is made available to individuals in a different product’s supply chain. The net effect of the individual’s available household income is hence not only depending on what he/she spends it, but also on the net change in impacts due to changed consumption depending on where the money that is being spent is going: buying a banana from Gran Canaria will – next to the local retailer – bring income to the wholesale/importer and the Spanish farmer. Buying it from Costa Rica will bring the income to people in different countries and cultures. The spending of additional income can be expected to differ between cultures, age classes, education levels, and between different income groups. If we however assume for simplification that the consumption profile of the different supply-chains do not differ from each other, the secondary consequence in the supply-chain is zero and the net effect is exclusively the extra consumption by the consumer.⁵

The fact that “money is conserved”, as e.g. Dragulescu and Yakovenko (2000) highlight, makes it distinct from the other household resources. Saved time, as example, is actually net extra time available for activities and not handed over to the producers of the purchased products, in contrast to the situation for money that is merely transferred when purchasing a product.⁶

Eco-efficiency, i.e. the quotient of price per environmental impact of a product therefore is a useful indicator: in its most simple form, a twice as expensive product of the same impact effectively reduces the ability of the consumer to spend the money on consuming other goods (Huppes and Ishikawa 2005).

However, we argue here that the concept of eco-efficiency is not considering the effect of additional consumption if the product is only produced cheaper, but a higher profit is kept by the producer: this profit is used for investment by the producing company or distributed to the company owners, e.g. shareholders, and hence available for additional consumption, the same way as it would be available to the consumer of that product if instead the product price would be reduced. More precisely, all profits along the supply-chain (and of consumables during product use and end-of-life services) need to be excluded from the economic component of eco-efficiency, to avoid this distortion.

This insight clarifies from a different perspective that the limiting factor in global consumption is global production, which is obviously limited by the output of the active labour force: If a product is produced with less workforce along its supply-chain, the not anymore required workforce is available for producing more of this product (or other products), hence increasing global production and consumption and hence environmental impacts. And the more qualified this not anymore required workforce is, the more overall production is increased, given the on average higher productivity of the higher qualified workforce. In short: The higher the quotient of the qualification-weighted amount of human working time q*t of a product and overall (i.e. normalized and weighted) environmental impact over the life cycle of a product, the less impacting the product, including considering the secondary effects of freed human work productivity (what is structurally equivalent to the effect by the enabled additional consumption by the product’s consumer due to additionally available income).⁷ This is called “Environmental work productivity” WP _ENV (Eq. 13.1):With N being the normalization factor, W the weighting factor, and LCIA the LCIA result of the product, per impact category j.

The price of a product of the eco-efficiency concept is hence replaced by the work productivity, avoiding the distortion due to profits that are part of the consumer price of a product.

If we inverse this quotient, we get a measure for the environmental intensity of human work productivity WI _ENV (Eq. 13.2):If using the global human productivity and global environmental impact, this is the global average environmental intensity of qualification-weighted human work WI _ENV,G .

We can use this measure to integrate the effect of different work intensity of a product to correct the life cycle wide environmental impact of the product. By forming the quotient of the product-specific WI _ENV,P and the global average WI _ENV,G , we obtain a normalized factor that expresses the potential net change of environmental impacts due to the amount of human productivity our product binds. Applying this factor to the normalized and weighted LCIA results of the analyzed product yields it’s actual impact IMP _net , including considering the approximated secondary consequences due to the specific environmental intensity of its production (Eq. 13.3):It is important to highlight that this formula does not capture other secondary consequences and that it takes a product perspective.

The whole economy of human society is based on one general and simple principle: I want to be happy…. Denis Diderot (1713–1784), as cited in Elchardus (1991) (see Eckersley et al. (2001)

Hofstetter et al. (2006) propose an explicit approach to measure semi-quantitatively the contribution of a product to the fulfilment of the various needs, i.e. to the consumer’s happiness. We can use this idea to expand on the new measure that we have proposed in the preceding subsection by integrating the utility of the product to the consumer, i.e. how much it is contributing to the consumer’s needs fulfilment, i.e. happiness. The approach by Hofstetter et al. (2006) needs further refinement and testing, as the authors make clear. Among others, we see as one main aspect for improvement the way of how the different kind of information is aggregated (see also the recommendations in Wolf and Chomkhasmri (2012) on substitutability/orthogonality of criteria). It should also be considered to exclude limitations due to required skills and information, as it can be argued that for the individual, who will make a consumption decision, only those products for which he/she has the necessary skills and information will be considered anyway. Finally and as a general limitation, the degree of needs fulfilment for the ‘softer’ needs, such as identity, participation, and so on, will much depend on the individual, and will likely escape a general agreement when trying to quantify a specific product’s fulfilment of such needs.

Combining the net environmental impact of the analysed product IMP _net,P that we have proposed above with a quantitative happiness-utility indicator of the analysed product HU _P (that we do not further work out here), we obtain a measure for the environmental intensity of needs fulfilment (aka of the product’s happiness-utility) HUI _P . Note that this one is yet excluding yet other social and socio-economic secondary consequences other than those captured by the creation of qualified work and income in the supply-chain (Eq. 13.4):In contrast to the average consumer, to which we refer with this formula, for any specific consumer any specific consumption decision will of course look at activities and products that enable these that best meet that consumer’s currently least well fulfilled needs. The indicator would still be the same, but the consumer would only consider those products that contribute to fulfilling his/her specific, most pressing current needs.

Finally, it needs to be highlighted that an over-fulfilment of some of our needs is leading to physical and mental health issues, be it overweight, dependence on alcohol, nicotine and other drugs (including on medication, gaming). Also information overload and the limited ability to keep abreast with new technologies can be understood to potentially counteract needs fulfilment and happiness.

Hence, maximizing needs fulfilment in the sense of summing up the happiness-utility results has limits for some of the needs. Also the linearity and the balance across the needs should be observed when looking at the overall needs fulfilment of a person.

Further work is needed here.

Comparative product LCA studies analyse the life cycle wide impact products per functional unit of each product; i.e. in relation to “which function(s)” each product provides, “how much” of the function, “how well” and for “how long”. This basis serves to compare alternative products.

In a consumption perspective, and particularly for consumer products, it makes sense to expand this functional unit also to the human needs fulfilment: The direct function of a product ultimately serves to meet a range of human needs. While its primary, technical function of many or most products typically relate to only one of the physical basic needs, e.g. mobility, housing, or food, it always contributes also to meet other, psychological basic needs, such as for example affection, participation, and identity (Max-Neef 1991). The relevance for consumption decisions to meet also needs such as “identity” can be illustrated by the relevance that brands have in clothes consumption decisions. This example also illustrates that it will be an individual judgment how well a product meets these “soft” needs.

Moreover, it should be highlighted that needs fulfilment is often done rather by complex activities, that involve different products in a specific combination that create a new quality, rather than by simply consuming each of them: a simple walk in the park may involve a combination of outdoor clothing, maybe an umbrella, a bus trip to reach the park and for the way back, using the restaurant service to have a cake or ice-cream etc. and – important in the context of secondary consequences – involve an individually decided period of time. While the distance walked and the life time of the shoes have some relevant causal relation, otherwise the duration of many activities can be largely independent from the actual consumption of goods. Particularly the fulfilment of higher needs are less directly related to product consumption, other than more basic needs such as food and shelter.

In view of efforts to a more sustainable consumption and lifestyles, it is important to consider that very different activities – using possibly also the same amount of the household resources, but with a hugely different environmental impact – may still contribute to the same degree to the needs fulfilment and happiness for the same individual person. Using leisure time and money for meetings our “soft” needs can differ as much as taking a longer motorbike ride, playing a game on a smartphone, or practicing yoga, depending on the person’s preference. Also meeting our physical basic needs can be done in different ways, while again using the same amount of the other household resources. One of the possibly most widely discussed component of sustainable consumption is eating vegetarian versus a meat-rich diet. As another example, for the need shelter/housing, zero-energy houses have much lower overall life cycle impacts than less well designed and insulated houses, possibly at the same total cost of ownership.

On the next more complete level, we look at the entire consumption of a person or it’s household. We agree with the literature that the individual will aim at optimizing the use of his or her household resources to achieve a maximum fulfilment of the needs. Which needs are considered how relevant and how well the individual understands which products best contribute to fulfil these needs, is obviously different for each individual.

The quantification of the impact of consuming a product, i.e. including the many secondary consequences, carries a very high uncertainty, as illustrated in the preceding chapters. Somewhat surprisingly, a much more accurate guidance can be given to individuals if looking at the entirety of consumption: The sum of all consumption – e.g. in form of lifestyle scenarios – has no secondary consequences across the person’s available household resources, as they are all covered in the total by definition. This allows to build scenarios of different lifestyles and calculate and compare their overall environmental impacts.

Some limitations will still reduce the accuracy and precision of the results of lifestyle-level studies:

However, defining alternative lifestyles and assessing their overall environmental impact and utility, using the approach proposed in Sects. 2.7 and 2.8, will allow individuals to reflect on his/her own lifestyle and allow to adopt or adapt a more sustainable one. In summary, sustainable consumption decisions mean to meet the same needs in a less impacting way without overly triggering secondary consequences by changing the available household resources.

Quantifying the environmental impact of different lifestyles on national level would have to look at different adoption-levels, as e.g. sparsely distributed electro-charging stations means additional travel to recharge the vehicle and additional transport means to come to these stations and back home or to the office. On a national level of consumption, we can hence capture such effects on infrastructure within the country. The only secondary consequences that escape the analysis are changes in international infrastructure, such as e.g. airports, and via changed amount of imports from those countries.

On the national level, past studies on the nations “footprint” have often looked at the territorial level only. However, since a number of years, more and more studies also consider the import and export of goods and delivery of international services, and the upstream burdens associated with their life cycles.

An advanced approach to this idea has been piloted in a study commission by the European Commission in 2008 on the consumption-based national resource efficiency (European Commission 2012): Territorial data, mostly based on official statistics, were combined with full process-based life cycle data for the 15 most important traded product groups. These product groups were represented by representative products (e.g. “passenger car” for the product group “road vehicles” or “methanol” for “organic chemicals”) and the inventories were scaled up to the amount of goods traded in each product group. The rest of trade was approximated by the mix of those that were explicitly modelled. It was moreover possible to model the inventories of the traded goods for the two or three most important source countries. Despite some weaknesses, particularly in the territorial data, the study could show for many impact categories that a shifting of burdens occurred from Europe to other countries, i.e. while territorial impacts were slowly reducing, due to an increased import or higher processed products, the overall EU consumption-based environmental impact is increasing with time.

The main sources of lack of accuracy and of uncertainty in such approaches – next to the mentioned territorial data that is weak in several impact categories – are limitations in life cycle data on specific products for a range of product groups, particularly more complex consumer products and services. Also, the approximation of a product group by one representative product carries a relevant uncertainty, which can be overcome only by increasing the number of products to approximate a product group. The recent increase in availability of Environmental Product Declarations and Footprints for all kinds of products is a promising development, which can be expected to substantially ease such calculations.

Such studies are valuable to inform policy makers about true consumption-based trends in environmental impact, and to identify the main product groups and trade partners from and to where such a shifting of burdens happens and inform related policies. One key advantage of this approach is that these studies can be tailored and further developed to be very specific on traded products to address specific policy questions. In contrast, Environmentally Extended Input Output (EEIO) studies are limited by the very broad range of whole industry sectors, which cannot well differentiate below industry sectors. Moreover, EEIO is based on economic relations across the economy, hence its life cycle data is closely correlated with money that is an important limiting factor to consumption as discussed above, hence will lead to only rough and possibly distorted results.

Studies on global level necessarily take a more comprehensive perspective, including all human activities. Monitoring the overall environmental impact is a very high-level indicator that can be used also to evaluate in how far we surpass the planetary boundaries. It shows on the largest of scales and only slowly over years whether all the measures by individuals up to national governments and international agreements show success in terms of slowing or reversing the trend of increased environmental impact on a global level.

One important topic under discussion in the context of sustainable consumption is shifting production to low income countries with potentially lower environmental standards: Cheap products have often been criticized as increasing the environmental impact, as they allow for more consumption. If we moreover assume that the most cheap products are so because the staff in their supply-chain are poorly paid (next to general productivity increase), the cheaper products mean also a shifting of parts of the income and hence consumption from middle or higher income countries to low income countries, but also to richer people (in both low and high income countries), since the cheaper products mean they have additional household income available. As statistics show, the allocation of the available household income considerably varies depending on income level. The net effect of this consumption shift still needs to be quantified.

As argued initially, the main sphere of influence for companies is the development and production of goods and the operation of services. It is essential that the environmental performance of these goods and services is improved, based on their functional unit. If these products change the available household resources, it is a consumer choice what to do with any additional resources.

Still, companies might want to better understand the secondary consequences of their products and how well the products meet the individual needs beyond the mere function. This should help companies to be prepared for the discussion on sustainable consumption. In fact, many companies do parts of this analysis already: fashion and lifestyle, time and space saving are key selling points in many product segments. The environmentally negative secondary consequences are however out of the scope of the analysis. This also means that conflicts are to be expected between offering an environmentally more efficient product with time-saving properties to the consumer, while at the same time trying to avoid that this leads to secondary consequences that party or fully compensate the environmental advantages of the product.

A design for sustainable consumption would then be an extension of conventional Ecodesign by considering consumption-related secondary consequences, and – as Hofstetter et al. (2006) argue – basic needs that require satisfaction. A first step would be to provide quantitative information on the effect on the consumer’s household resources, particularly time and space saving, and expand on the information on the cost of ownership, that is currently legally to be provided for some consumer goods only. Regarding food calories, this information is already standard information on food products.

On lifestyle level, companies across sectors may start working together to develop and promote a portfolio of products for sustainable lifestyles and/or ecosystems.

All final consumption is decided on by the consumer, while marketing, the role models that media personalities play, and the media in general, but also family and friends are influencing consumption decisions. For implementing sustainable consumption to reach a sustainable life style, consumers require awareness of sustainability and need to receive sufficient and correct information to support their consumption decisions (Wolf 2014a).

Taking more sustainable consumption decisions means purchasing, using, and end-of-life managing products that – while fulfilling the consumer’s human needs in at least the same degree as alternative products do – have a lower environmental life cycle impact, including to quantitatively consider the secondary consequences, including the higher order consequences in the society and due to possibly freeing human working time. In Sects. 2.7 and 2.8 we have already sketched a respective quantitative measure on this last named aspect “Sustainable consumption” has been defined quite early already, such as in (Norwegian Ministry of the Environment 1994).⁸

The entirety of consumption of a citizen is facilitating the person’s lifestyle. A lifestyle is – in its broadest sense – “Ways of life, encapsulating representations, values and beliefs, behaviors and habits, institutions, economic and social systems.” (UNEP 2011). In context of this chapter however, we refer mainly to the consumption of goods and services that enables the individual to create and live his or her lifestyle, similar to the definition promoted in context of the Marrakech process: “Sustainable lifestyles are patterns of action and consumption, used by people to affiliate and differentiate themselves from others, which: meet basic needs, provide a better quality of life, minimise the use of natural resources and emissions of waste and pollutants over the lifecycle, and do not jeopardise the needs of future generations.” (Thidell 2011, adopted from CSD 2004).

The individual will aim at maximising the utility of his or her household resources, i.e. optimize the needs fulfilment. In Sect. 3.2 it was explained why it will be more accurate to calculate the environmental impacts of the entire consumption profile of an individual’s lifestyle, than of individual products. We therefore argue that it makes sense to define a range of lifestyles and calculate their overall environmental profile. Individuals can then learn which lifestyles have which environmental consequences and see if they want to shift their own lifestyle into the direction of one of the less impacting ones.

However, such “model lifestyles” needs variation, not only because of differences in the individual taste and belief, but already because the available household resources vary (e.g. different times and income bound for commuting distances, with/without children, different health, other long-term obligations, etc.).

Moreover, when defining one’s lifestyle, people often refer to approaches, rather than individual products or to concepts that would capture the entirety of the lifestyle. “I am vegetarian”, “I separate waste”, and “I buy local” are a few examples of such approaches. These approaches help consumers to group specific decisions and to communicate them, as well as combining a lifestyle. The challenge is that not all decisions that are taken in line with such approaches are actually environmentally beneficial (already if not considering secondary consequences). Some approaches that are perceived as environmentally advantageous can even be more impacting, see e.g. examples for misconceptions about polymers in Wolf et al. (2010). It will be important to analyse which of these approaches are actually environmentally beneficial, again including considering the secondary consequences on available household resources.

If any such approaches are fully followed, they can also lead to infrastructural changes at the consumer. For example, “I prefer public transport” may lead to the decision to not have a private car anymore.

We would like to add that the above refers implicitly to middle and upper consumers, while families of low and lowest income classes will have less choices to shift to more sustainable lifestyles, in their struggle to meet at least their most basic needs. Moreover, given their low income, they typically have a lower per person environmental impact than better-off families.

Several past and current policies and initiatives have supported sustainable consumption (and production). Starting on the international level, the Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) program by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is based on the achievements of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (the Earth Summit), and the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg (UNEP 2012). The European Union launched the Beyond GDP initiative, aiming at developing indicators that are as clear and appealing as GDP, but intend to be more inclusive of environmental and social aspects of progress, and the Action Plan on Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) that has life cycle thinking in its core, to name a few. Similar programs have been started in many other countries worldwide.

The government itself is a big consumer, with governmental spending in the range of 1/6 of nation-wide spending (e.g. in the EU 2002: 16 %). Green Public Procurement (GPP) is therefore a means that can have a key steering effect for more sustainable products. Continuous efforts are made for better informed GPP with comprehensive, life cycle based indicators (e.g. in the recently started project EURECA for GPP of data centre services (NN 2015)).

Beyond this product-perspective and next to creating markets for less impacting products, the scale of government procurement can also facilitate the creation of infrastructures in support of green procurement by consumers: Governments set the rules of the society and establishes or steers the development of key infrastructures, which can be favouring more sustainable consumption. Government can hence also provide options for less environmentally impacting consumption, e.g. public transport.⁹ Similar to the situation of companies that offer cost and time saving aspects of their products for the direct benefit of the consumers, also governments generally follow the approach of saving costs and time for the citizen. Therefore, only by understanding the society-wide implications including due to secondary consequences of their projects and policies, the governments can fully take their role of steering consumption towards a long term stable, i.e. sustainable one. This includes to steer or counteract the transformational effect (Greening et al. 2000).

Identifying or developing elements that make up sustainable lifestyles and facilitating their adoption by implementing the required infrastructure are key tasks. Promoting sustainable consumption and sustainable lifestyles, as well as facilitating them by financial measures are other, main leverages of governments, on the way to a sustainable society. R&D investments into sustainable products and lifestyles and their infrastructure, Green Public Procurement, and education courses and campaigns for schools and university courses, are further examples for suitable governmental activities. On international level, the coordination with other national governments will help improving the common understanding of sustainable consumption and measures. This list above illustrates the crucial role that governments have in steering the society to sustainability.

A range of other actors play a role in society and also in efforts to a more sustainable consumption:

Industry associations – similar to companies – are important sources of high quality life cycle data for products that best represent the industrial reality. They can moreover disseminate information about sustainable products and sustainable consumption aspects to their members and bring in the voice of the represented industry into the public discussion on sustainable consumption.

Green and consumer NGOs can support bringing understanding and knowledge on sustainable consumption to consumers and contribute to the public discussions on sustainable lifestyles.

Research bodies and consultants are essential to help increasing the understanding and knowledge base on secondary consequences of consumption decisions, by developing better methods and models, and by offering software tools and data to support the analysis.