Developing a Benchmark Tool for Sustainable Consumption: An Iterative Process

Abstract

This article presents the development process of a consumer-oriented, illustrative benchmarking tool enabling consumers to use the results of environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) to make informed decisions. LCA provides a wealth of information on the environmental impacts of products, but its results are very difficult to present concisely and in a way that is understandable to non-experts. A participatory co-development process was thus deemed necessary to create an easy-to-use presentation format. A brochure presenting the benchmarking tool was developed in an iterative process involving consumer focus groups, stakeholder workshops, and questionnaire-based feedback. The co-development process proved its value: in addition to learning what works and what does not, detailed suggestions on improved wording and figures were obtained, as well as a wealth of ideas for future applications.

Notes

¹Asymmetric information is one of the classical market failures in economics. It occurs when one party to a transaction has more information than the other party. Typically the seller knows more about the product than the buyer; this is the case, for example, for used cars (Postlewaite, 1987). It is also likely that the seller of a product knows more about the environmental impacts from producing the product than the buyer, and the seller may or may not disclose these impacts when offering the product for sale.

²The total environmental impact of a national economy, of course, does not necessarily equal the total impact of consumption in that country. There are issues of imports, exports, and investments. However, these issues are too complex to sort out at a level of detail equivalent to that of environmental LCAs of individual products (see Nissinen et al., 2005)—thus, using the total environmental impact within the country is perhaps justified at this stage.

³A small questionnaire was administered to focus group discussion participants in order to ascertain their environmental knowledge level and level of concern in comparison to the general population. For this purpose, we used questions from representative national surveys (Nurmela et al., 2002; Statistics Finland, 2002). General concern was measures with an instrument asking respondents to rate their level of concern about five environmental problems on a five-point Likert scale. Knowledge level was measured with two items, one objective (ability to identify the correct cause of global warming in a multiple choice question) and the other subjective “Do you feel you know enough about what to do in your everyday life to protect the environment” (yes, no, do not know alternatives). Attentiveness to media communications was measured with the question: “Do you make an effort to find information on the environment,” with a number of response options describing the respondents' media usage patterns (checking multiple alternatives was allowed). The exact wording used in national representative surveys was retained in order to ensure comparability.