Sustainable Societies:
Sustainable Consumption

Which consumption clusters dominate the environmental impact of consumers? What is their influence as compared to other actors? How do trends like individualisation, globalisation and new technologies influence the environmental and social impact of household consumption?

As a matter of principle, sustainable consumption needs to be sustainable in all four dimensions of sustainability. It should be environmentally sound, socially just, economically efficient and enhancing institutional equity. Unfortunately, neither concepts nor data are available for most of these aspects.

For the time being, we have thus focussed on the environmental aspect of sustainable consumption, analysing the main environmental impacts, the driving forces behind and the potential influence of consumers. The indicators developed for this behalf are capable of guiding consumer decision towards an environmentally improved consumption pattern, without neglecting the fact that in the majority of instances consumers are just one amongst a series of influential actors.

These consumption indicators have been put to work in a number of applications: When applying them to different income groups, a higher consumption of environmental resources is clearly detectable. The higher level of environmental disturbances caused by wealthy consumers is caused by a pattern which can be described by rather 'more of the same' than 'new quality, less quantity'.

These findings have been used to challenge the micro-economic resoning behind the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis: increasing incomes are not correlated to decreasing levels of pollution, and the consumption pattern of the rich cannot serve as an example to follow on the route towards sustainability.

Publications

Spangenberg, J.H. (2001a). "Investing in Sustainable Development." Int. J. Sustainable Development 4(2): 184-201.

Spangenberg, J.H. (2001b). "The Environmental Kuznets Curve - a Methodological Artefact." Population and Environment 22(6).

Spangenberg, J.H., Omann, Ines, Hinterberger, Friedrich (1999a). Sustainability, growth and employment in an alternative economic policy. Theory, policy and scenarios for employment and the environment. Paper presented at the 5th Workshop on alternative economic concepts for Europe, Brussels.

Lorek, S., Spangenberg, J.H. (2001). "Environmentally Sustainable Household Consumption." Wuppertal Papers 11(i.pr.): 1-52.

Lorek, S., Spangenberg, J.H., (2001). "Indicators for environmentally sustainable household consumption." Int. J. Sustainable Development 4(1): 101-120.

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Joachim Spangenberg