Q : On the environmental side, your team looked at two types of sustainability behaviors—green buying and reduced consumption. How are these different and what different effects might they have on the planet?
A : For a long time, sustainability meant having enough economic means to do what you wanted and needed to do. That was a connotation of the term sustainability long before we talked about environmental sustainability. All of these behaviors relate to managing restricted resources.
We were interested to see whether there are links and what factors affect consumers’ well-being in the context of limited resources. And that’s why we were interested in this interplay between materialism, proactive financial behaviors, and what we termed “proactive environmental behaviors,” and how those combine to affect consumers well-being.
If we strive to become more sustainable, we have to look at the composition of what we buy and we have to look at the overall volume of what we consume. If you look at green buying, that means consumers are concerned with looking for products that have less of an environmental impact than traditional kinds of products. That has to do with the composition of our consumption—we buy differently.
If you look at the other form of pro-environmental behaviors that we were looking at, reduced consumption is directed at the volume of what is being consumed. Reduced consumption really means that we try to buy less, that we repair items that break, that we avoid all sorts of impulse purchases. We try to stay within our own needs or perceived needs of what we want to buy.
Materialism has to do with the importance that possessions have in your life, whether you perceive high value and involvement with the possessions that you have, whether you feel a need to acquire more possessions, whether the act of acquiring more possessions leaves you with a positive feeling. Materialism has a variety of different facets, but overall it has to do with how important material possessions are in your life. Our argument is that if you follow your materialist aspirations and you continue to buy products, even if they are green products, and thus have a better composition from an environmental perspective, that still does not mean that you are altering your lifestyle. You’re still accumulating more and more possessions and may also think that they are very important in your life.
That is in opposition to what we call reduced consumption, which is not linked with materialism. Because if you don’t buy, you don’t accumulate more possessions, and that means your possessions are most likely not as relevant in your life itself. Green materialism is a loophole for continued consumption and not changing your lifestyle.
Materialism is a trait, a value orientation, whereas green buying is a behavior. There’s a lot of literature that directly links materialism with mostly negative well-being consequences. We thought originally that both of these greener behaviors—buying green and buying less—should have a positive impact on well-being, because they are proactive coping mechanisms.
We did not see that emerge with green buying, but we did see that emerge with reduced consumption. That’s in-line with literature on voluntary simplicity, which tells us that if people no longer feel burdened by all their possessions and try to reduce their footprint in terms of all the stuff that they accumulated, that gives them a positive well-being effect. Green buying, by definition, still means buying more stuff and therefore does not alleviate the burden of possessions.
Developing a mindset that questions the consumerist model that we have followed is increasingly helpful. That has to do with how we perceive status in our consumer culture and what it takes to be part of the in-group. Can I achieve that if I don’t have the right possessions? And there’s some indications that maybe that’s happening.
– Sabrina Helm. Associate professor of retailing and consumer sciences and director of the Consumers, Environment, and Sustainability Initiative at the University of Arizona
I really liked this Q&A! Do you mind sharing the source link or any other similar books or articles that she’s written?
I copied it from a university magazine paperback. I will look into finding more of her work to feature on the blog for sure.