Get Sust! Issue 48

Who’s the greenest of them all?

Urbanites versus country-dwellers; vegetarians vs meateaters; ‘greenies’ vs the habitually frugal. It’s not easy to predict household energy consumption, as a team of researchers from the Institute for Environmental Decisions, Zurich, Switzerland have found out.

Their study, reported in the journal Energy Policy, shows that household energy consumption varies considerably between the best and worst households. Differences between the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ energy users are, predictably, mainly caused by heating, car use, air travel and electricity, which together account for 80 to 90 per cent of the range in GHG emissions, but digging a little deeper into the data revealed some surprising anomalies.

The researchers examined the consumption patterns of 14,300 Swiss households from 2000-2003 using income and expenditure surveys, and then estimated the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with different lifestyle areas, such as food, travel, leisure and housing. Then they compared the 10 per cent of households with the highest emissions per capita and the 10 per cent of households with the lowest emissions.

They found that low emitters not only consume fewer products, but they also tend to consume products that emit low levels of GHGs. For example, they tend to spend less on travel and consume less meat and have fewer electronic appliances. Interestingly, this group also spend more time on leisure activities, such as cinema, theatre or sport, which have relatively low GHG emissions. This group tends to live in urban areas where leisure and public transport are more accessible.

The study looked for consumption patterns that align with the ‘green consumer’ but found that, although households show certain tendencies, there was no clear indicator that always identified green consumers. For example, there were high emitters who bought organic food, lived in car-free households and were vegetarian.

Overall, the study concluded that emissions reduction targets could be achieved if 9 per cent of the worst practice households changed their consumption patterns sufficiently that they produced the average amount of emissions. Although the data and analysis focused on Swiss households, the researchers suggest that such behavioural changes could produce similar results in other OECD countries.

Learn more:

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Girod, B. & de Haan, P. (2009). GHG reduction potential of changes in consumption patterns and higher quality levels from Swiss household consumption survey. Energy Policy. 37(12): 5650-5661. www.sciencedirect.com.