No such thing as a green consumer?

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Introduction

In this project we set out to find out how green consumers make decisions about buying domestic appliances (like cookers, fridges, freezers, dishwashers and washing machines) and other electrical goods (like stereos, televisions, computers and light bulbs). For each of these kinds of product there is a huge range of brands and models available. Some of them make much less environmental impact, both when they are made and when they are used, than others. Equally, some are made by companies who take better care of their employees than others. Consumers who want to buy products that don’t harm the environment or exploit others have lots of extra requirements that they need to take into account as part of their purchasing process. This makes buying fridges or computers a very complicated business.

The aim of our project was to find out about how green consumers make decisions to buy household electrical products in a lot more detail. We asked a wide range of green consumers about their recent purchases and how they decided between a whole range of factors such as price, brand, availability, colour, size as well as energy efficiency, water consumption, fuel used in distribution, working conditions or even the other activities that a company was involved in. Not only do green consumers have to decide whether standard factors like price was more important to them than green factors like energy efficiency, but they might also have to decide between different green factors. For example if the most energy efficient fridge was made by an unethical company then the consumer would have to decide which of these issues was most important to them. In order to be able to increase the number of people buying green products, it is important to understand as much as possible about this process of making trade-offs between different factors.

Our research has made some important discoveries about how people buy household appliances and also about the different ways of being a green consumer.

Throughout this website we talk about green and grey consumers. By green consumers we mean consumers who buy, use or borrow environmentally friendly or ethically sound products and services. We use the term grey consumers to mean all the other consumers who are not motivated by environmental or ethical issues.

This project, Trade-offs in decision-making for sustainable technologies was funded by the ESRC as part of their Sustainable Technologies Programme