Constructing Sustainable Consumption

The Ethical Values Paradigm

Let us begin by unearthing the assumptions, often implicit, that together serve as the foundation for the ethical values paradigm, which I synthesize as follows:

The vast majority of influential scholarship, policy initiatives, and activist campaigning on sustainable consumption either assumes or explicitly invokes these ethical values axioms.

The Market Construction Paradigm: Three Orienting Propositions

To explain why the ethical values paradigm has not produced effective interventions and to inform the development of an alternative paradigm, I draw from an important alternative theoretical tradition—what I call the market construction paradigm—that is a subdisciplinary specialty within consumer culture theory (CCT); management studies; and science, technology and society (STS), among other disciplines. These three literatures each develop a different aspect of market construction that, when combined, offers a powerful alternative to the ethical values paradigm. These traditions cohere in their interest in conceptualizing how markets come into being and are transformed over time. These theories specify how market actors repurpose particular cultural, institutional, and technological resources to construct and transform markets, often leading to unintended consequences as the market evolves. Consumption patterns are a key part of what gets “constructed” as markets evolve.

This paradigm suggests that we should abandon the ethical values notion that consumption can be treated as an autonomous set of actions that are structured by general ethical frameworks, and move instead toward a view of consumption as an integral aspect of the construction of markets. Furthermore, from the paradigm, one can infer that we must understand the differing mechanics of sustainability across particular markets, rather than attempt to generalize to consumer society as a whole.

From CCT, I draw on my prior work on the cultural construction of markets for new brands (Holt 2004, 2006; Holt and Cameron 2010; also see Thompson 2004). From management studies, I adapt ideas on the influence of social movements on market construction (Weber, Heinze, and DeSoucey 2008) and the way in which different market actors work in unknowing concert to construct new “institutional logics” that eventually become sedimented as market ideologies and practices (King and Pearce 2010; Humphreys 2010). From STS, I draw on historical studies of the construction of socio-technical systems (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987; Bijker 1995), which describe how these market constructions structure the way in which new technologies are transformed into new consumer markets. Applying this market constructionist logic to sustainable consumption reveals three foundational flaws in the ethical values paradigm.

From Abstract Values to Market Ideologies

The ethical values paradigm assumes that citizens of consumer societies hold consumerist values: generalized abstract beliefs that guide their consumption across many facets of their lives. Consumers are assumed to be philosophically consistent actors who hold overarching ideologies and continually connect the dots between these abstract values and a wide variety of specific consumption behaviors. So consumerist values are assumed to lead to unsustainable consumption. Sustainable consumption strategies, then, should seek to trade out consumerist values for environmental values. Researchers have long sought to find empirical support for this axiom by measuring how proenvironmental values and attitudes impact environmentally significant consumption, with little success and considerable confusion (Stern 2000). After nearly 40 years of research that industriously sought out linkages between “environmental concern” and environmental behaviors, the answer is clear—the relationship barely exists.

An overview of this literature, surveying several meta-analyses, reports that “environmental concern seems to explain not more than 10 percent variance of specific environmental behaviors” (Bamberg 2003, 22). In a decade-long investigation of the ethical values hypothesis, the authors of The Myth of the Ethical Consumer (DeVinney, Auger, and Eckhardt 2010) demonstrate that when people are forced to make real trade-offs between ethical considerations and the perceived value of the purchase, they are rarely willing to trade benefits for ethics. In consumer research, this type of value-attitude-behavior model, which was in vogue in the 1960s and 1970s, has all but disappeared from contemporary theory because it provides little insight or explanatory power (Holt 1997; Thompson and Troester 2002).

Despite this theoretical and empirical dead end, the abstract values axiom shows no sign of fading. Leading environmental psychologists continue to advance this axiom as if it were a widely accepted truth (e.g., Yale’s Anthony Leiserowitz begins a major review article on sustainability with the claim that “most advocates of sustainable development recognize the need for changes in human values, attitudes and behaviors in order to achieve a sustainability transition” [Leiserowitz, Kates, and Parris 2006, 414]). And the assumption has readily traveled to undergird the most influential activist strategy frameworks, heavily promoted by environmental NGOs and foundations. For example Yale’s “Global Warming’s Six Americas” (Leiserowitz et al. 2011); Earthjustice’s “RE: Green The Ecological Roadmap,” funded by the Nathan Cummings Foundation (Pike et al. 2008); and, in the United Kingdom, “Common Cause: The Case for Working with Our Cultural Values,” sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund, Friends of the Earth, and Oxfam (Crompton 2010) all promote strategic frameworks based on implausible values and attitude assumptions.

If these abstract consumerist values shaped consumption, we would expect to see coherent patterns of sustainable and unsustainable consumption. Instead, what we find is that the sustainability of individuals’ consumer actions varies wildly across categories: some people drive a Prius but routinely fly long-distance on vacations; some people buy local organic milk but also veggies grown in the dessert and shipped by air thousands of miles; some people are tireless recyclers but think nothing of tearing out their kitchen to install the latest designs.

What sort of theory of unsustainable consumption can explain these seeming paradoxes? The market construction paradigm demonstrates that consumer culture is not a general force structuring consumer actions but, rather, is better understood as a skeletal metacultural logic—centered on channeling desires and identities through consumer choices and actions (Holt 2002)—that gets articulated in very different ways across different markets.

Consider the sudden growth of the American SUV market in the 1990s. Americans switched in droves from sedans and minivans to SUVs, causing an extraordinary increase in greenhouse gas emissions. This devastating impact was not caused by consumerism in its generic form as a set of values. Rather, American consumer culture has evolved a distinctive set of ideologies with respect to autos and other means of transportation—constructing ideas about convenience, safety, pleasures of using the transport, functionality, economy, and perhaps environmental and other sustainability issues. As the minivan became pilloried in media discourse as a boring and emasculating vehicle to transport kids, Americans yearned for an alternative. Ronald Reagan’s revival of America’s historic masculine ideology based on the frontier myth provided a resonant channel for these desires. Upper-middle-class families began buying spartan rural working-class utility vehicles with names such as Bronco and Cherokee and turned them into suburban family transportation. Detroit auto manufacturers caught on to this emergent demand and jumped on board. Auto manufacturers, such as Ford, discovered early on in their research of this emerging market that prospective customers, particularly women, perceived that SUVs were especially safe due to their grand size and elevated drivers-side seat, and they reinforced this inference in their advertising. They quickly redesigned their utility vehicles to incorporate a plush ride, family functionality, and luxury car trappings and pushed even harder on the frontier ethos (the Ford Explorer became the best-selling SUV). Consumers flocked to the SUV. That these SUVs used nearly twice as much fuel as comparable minivans and sedans never entered their calculus, despite that SUV buyers (highly educated and upper-middle-class) were precisely those Americans most likely to proclaim their proenvironmental values. This market ideology held firm for more than a decade until environmental social movements created a great stir in the media, condemning SUVs as one of the most environmentally unconscionable consumer choices one could make. SUVS soon gained a stigma, making it much more difficult for self-professed environmentalists to drive them. By focusing our attention on the construction of consumer ideologies specific to a market, the market constructionist paradigm allows us to explain hugely significant patterns of unsustainable consumption, such as the exploding American SUV market, which are enigmatic from the vista of the ethical values paradigm.

From Consumerism to the Unintended Consequences of Market Construction

The theory of unsustainability implicit in the ethical values paradigm rests on the idea of consumerism. Leading academics, activists, and policy-makers—from Alan Durning and Bill McKibben to Gus Speth and Al Gore—routinely point the finger at consumerism as the prime culprit in creating unsustainable consumption. And so, calls for the ethical move of Western societies away from consumerism have been a staple since the 1960s. Tim Jackson’s (2011) formulation provides a typical example of this logic. He begins by recognizing the basic kinds of value that people, immersed in the logic of consumerism, perceive that their consumption provides. So the only way to move society toward sustainable consumption, he argues, is to “substitute” societal benefits that can serve as replacements for the benefits that consumption provides. Given the scale of the overshoot problems we face today, he concludes that the only possible solution is a complete move away from consumerism. A similar argument animates Bill McKibben’s influential books (e.g., McKibben 2008), among many others.

But there is a fundamental problem with the idea of ethical transformation: a culture unleashed by industrial capitalism and the mass media for more than a century, which is today sedimented across myriad discourses, institutions, and everyday practices—the firmament of social life for most people, so much so that George Soros, Joseph Stiglitz, and Tom Frank all refer to it in quasi-religious terms as market fundamentalism—is not easily or speedily transformed. Despite a cycling of movements calling for various forms of voluntary simplicity since the time of Thoreau, Americans and other Westerners living in the thrall of consumerism have chosen otherwise. Challenges to consumerism are absorbed by the market in dialectic market-focused fashion—Whole Foods and Ben & Jerry’s and Patagonia rather than the widespread support for local biodynamic agriculture or downshifted work hours or national health care or rationalized mass transit—leading to modest environmental impacts that play out over many decades (Belasco 1989; Holt and Cameron 2010). Theories of cultural change and the empirical track record both strongly suggest that environmental strategies based on the ethical transformation of consumerism cannot have the necessary impact in the time that we have remaining (estimates vary by expert and by problem but generally point to the years 2020 to 2050) to solve major overshoot problems. This is a utopian scheme that draws away resources from strategies that can have much more impact to address key environmental problems in the decades ahead.

Fortunately, consumerism is not the only cause of unsustainable consumption, perhaps not even the most important. While there is no denying the “main effect” of consumerism, its impact varies widely. Claims that unsustainable consumption is caused by consumerism hide huge heterogeneity. This variance within consumer societies exists primarily between different markets (or within a given market at different points in its development), not between consumers who are more or less environmentally conscious. Unsustainable consumption is often caused by the development of market ideologies that have become naturalized within specific market institutions and consumer practices. Contrast coal-based electricity and industrial agriculture and suburban sprawl and the depletion of ocean fish stocks. These different markets have unique variants of unsustainable consumption driven by their idiosyncratic development, not by consumers’ general disposition toward materialism or possessive individualism.

Environmental consequences do not march lockstep with consumerist values. Some of the most environmentally conscious consumers also desire organic fresh fruit and vegetables year-round, which, when combined with vastly improved global logistics and transportation, has led to an immensely unsustainable agricultural practice, draining scarce groundwater in the near-deserts of North Africa, Spain, and Mexico to grow products that are shipped by air thousands of miles. These effects result from the contingent and idiosyncratic pathways of market evolution in which companies (quite often entrepreneurs) exploit historical inflections of society, culture, and technology. Along the way, the dialectic interplay among companies, consumers, institutions, and technologies leads to profound environmental effects. This meso-level construction of unsustainable markets is far more malleable, and so much more susceptible to interventions, than is the overarching culture of consumerism that now dominates the modern world. With the appropriate strategies, these market-constructed unsustainabilities can be reversed, though such reversals must march forward one market at a time.

From Autonomous Ethics to Ethical Movement Ideologies

In the ethical values paradigm, ethical consumption is viewed as an orientation toward consumption that must be autonomous from the market. Markets are assumed to be corrupted by consumerism. And so fighting consumerism requires importing ethics from noncommercial spheres. As a result, the ethical values paradigm often invokes religious and philosophical traditions. Activists call on consumers to apply these imported ethical schemes as a lens to orient their consumption toward sustainability (and argue that ethical consumers will realize considerable identity value in so doing). If one’s ethical commitment is strong enough, one should be able to trade off the sacrifices required (in terms of higher cost or lower functionality) to enact these noncommercial ethics.

Ethical consumption certainly does exist, but only rarely in the “imported” form assumed by the ethical values paradigm. Rather, the market construction paradigm demonstrates that consumer ethics operates as a (potential) component of particular market ideologies. Whether a market has a potent ethical component depends largely on the efforts of social movements and subcultures, embedded within the market, that challenge the dominant market construction. These ethical challenges are tailored to the specific ethical “problems” of the marketplace. Consider the different ethical consumption frameworks that apply to livestock, coffee, cotton, diamonds, coal, and tropical forests (and often enough, there are multiple ethical consumption frameworks in play within a given market). Thompson and Coskuner-Balli’s (2007) study of community-supported agriculture (CSA) describes a consumption community dominated by ethics, but ethics of a very different stripe than the imported abstract ethical schemes of the ethical values paradigm. CSA ethics are conceived as contextualized narratives in which participants perceive locally grown produce, small organic farms, and community-building aspects of CSA as ethical challenges to the massively dysfunctional food system organized by global agribusiness. This ideology is particular to the anti-industrial-food movement, of which CSA has become one important expression with its own distinctive inflections (along with anti-GMO, anti-rGBH, Organic Consumers Association, local foodshed, fair trade, etc.). It is an ethics that emerged as a reaction to ethical problems that have been constructed in America’s produce market and, so, the countercultural rebuttal is indigenous to the market. Markets often repurpose and commercialize these ethical ideologies (consider successful efforts by Whole Foods, Starbucks, and Chipotle to act as fast followers branding ethical food supply chains promoted by social movements). And so we should understand the advance of ethical consumption as a dialectical evolution that unfolds as market-focused social movements make ethical challenges and the mass market acts to commercialize these challenges when they resonate with a critical mass of consumers.

Construction of the American Single-Serve Bottled Water Market

Informed by this market construction paradigm, I conduct a case study of one of America’s unsustainable consumption pariahs—bottled water. In the American market, bottled water sold in single-serve plastic containers has taken off in the past 20 years and has become a major environmental problem (Gleick [2010] and Royte [2008] provide useful overviews). Water bottled in ready-to-drink plastic containers is associated with environmental problems and health risks in all stages of its product lifecycle. The production of plastic releases toxic chemicals, such as benzene and vinyl chloride, which can cause cancer. And the incineration of plastic pollutes air, land, and water despite efforts to scrub emissions. Because plastic bottles slowly disintegrate into small particles rather than decompose, these plastic bits notoriously clutter not only dumps but also the oceans. As plastics decompose, they are eaten and move up the food chain, which has led to a crisis in human endocrine disruption (including pthalates and Bisphenol A as well as other hormonally active compounds). And finally, bottled water consumption is an intensive use of energy, a discretionary purchase that has materially increased the country’s carbon footprint. Bottled water consumes an energy equivalent of approximately 32 to 54 million barrels of oil per year (Gleick and Cooley 2009), equivalent to the gasoline used by more than 1 million autos in a year (about 0.3 percent of total annual U.S. oil consumption)—an environmental tally that many environmentalists deem particularly wasteful since it seems so easy to avoid.

I examine how this market was constructed and reproduced over time—a historical analysis that aims to reveal the key mechanisms that generated the explosive growth of single-serve bottled water in the United States and that have sustained this market despite widespread acknowledgement of its environmental consequences.

As a case study, bottled water is both theoretically and strategically important. It is an environmental problem that should be relatively easy to solve. While many of our most challenging environmental problems are hidden from citizens because they occur several steps removed from consumption in the value chain (what Thomas Princen [1997] calls “distancing”), bottled water is a front-stage problem. Plastic bottles create an aesthetic “eyesore” that most everyone experiences, and it is easy for most people to imagine these bottles filling up dumps and getting incinerated and letting off toxic fumes. It is also a problem with direct and easily understandable causes and consequences, unlike the technically complex labyrinth of environmental impacts and solutions that characterize most markets in the agriculture, transportation, and energy sectors. And the pathways to sustainability seem all too obvious and much less arduous than, say, giving up your car for a bicycle. After all, tap water is widely available and for a tiny fraction of the price. Finally, anti–bottled water campaigning has received extraordinary attention and resources from the environmental movement. So bottled water should have become a leading example for how the ethical values paradigm can be used to formulate interventions that generate sustainable consumption. Yet bottled water consumption has continued to expand, pausing briefly only for the severe recession of 2008–2009.

Before the late 1980s, the consumer market for bottled water in the United States was environmentally inconsequential. Perrier pioneered the idea that drinking bottled water in small single-serve glass bottles was an affordable way to grasp a bit of European sophistication, which resonated among so-called yuppies, as Reagan and Wall Street ignited America’s fondness for symbols of luxurious upper-class living in the 1980s. At the height of its market dominance, its environmental impact was miniscule: Perrier sold 300 million bottles at its zenith, which is far less than 1 percent of today’s American market.

An important barrier to the diffusion of a bottled water market lifted in 1989 when bottle manufacturers developed technology that allowed PET (polyethylene terephthalate) to be used in half-liter and smaller bottles, a significantly cheaper and much more aesthetically pleasing plastic than the prior PVC (polyvinyl chloride) bottles. Most bottled water companies soon offered their product in PET, even Perrier. This technological innovation was crucial: it allowed manufacturers to hit ever lower price points for water, and the low weight and durability allowed for new consumer uses for bottled water. However, while this new packaging technology was a necessary condition for the construction of an environmentally unsustainable market, it was by no means sufficient.

Cultural Construction of the Market for Healthy Portable Drinking Water

The takeoff of bottled water, from the late 1980s through the present, was driven by health considerations, launching a market very different from the original status-driven drinking. Three synergistic health constructs emerged beginning in the late 1980s and became ever more dominant over the following two decades. These new cultural constructs were advanced by the news media and environmental NGOs: the two most important actors in the launch of this new market segment.

Why Do Americans Still Drink Bottled Water?

This analysis of the construction of the American bottled water market details the mechanisms through which this unsustainable market was constructed and reproduced and reveals why major activist campaigning did not work. The central strategic weakness of the campaigning is that it did not address the market ideology—the sedimented value perceptions that sustain bottled water consumption. Appeals to drink tap water did not resolve American’s murky belief, driven by media reports of NGO findings, that public water is contaminated with carcinogens and that drinking a glass is playing Russian roulette with deadly pathogens such as E. coli. Americans drink bottled water because they believe that they are healthier for so doing, have developed routines around this belief, and circulate in a society that continually reinforces this ideology. This ideology is sustained by a decrepit and underfunded public water system that the public does not trust, environmental NGOs’ aggressive campaigning against tap water’s health risks, and the media’s continued fascination with this “scare” story. As long as these cultural mechanics are in place, the public’s perceptions of tap water are not going to change. This is what I call ideological lock-in.

Ideological lock-in is not static. The dialectical interplay among media discourse, market competition, and evolving consumer desires tends to ratchet up the cultural codes that serve as ideological benchmarks. The net effect of two decades of the tap water safety discourse dramatically shifted what consumers perceived as safe water. Water that comes out of a tap came to be understood as problematic, regardless of the quality of the municipal water system. It must be filtered, otherwise it is not safe. And healthy water should have no taste at all. So the typical off-taste of disinfectants, such as chlorine, in the water signals to consumers that the water is inferior. While the rehabilitation of the nation’s public water supply was a viable if hugely expensive solution two decades ago, today this is no longer true. “Healthy water” is now conveyed by new cultural codes—water must be filtered, water must have no taste. This is what I term cultural code inflation (Holt and Cameron 2010). Activists must grapple with the market construction of tap water risks that has become sedimented as a taken-for-granted ideology in today’s bottled water market and construct strategies that overcome this skepticism.

Likewise, as long as Americans continue to believe that they require continual hydration throughout the day for good health, they will continue to seek out a convenient source of safe water on the go, whatever the environmental consequence. The campaigners’ proposed alternative—carrying around refillable containers—never caught on beyond young cultural elites (who enjoyed the identity value they earned from their devotion to such a clunky solution) simply because it requires consumers to give up the convenience they wanted so that they can hydrate on the go all day long.

Because the campaigns ignored the structures that sustained unsustainable consumption, their foundational premise was faulty. They asked individuals to reject the market ideologies and practices that they had embraced for two decades and that they are surrounded by in everyday life. Moving markets toward sustainable consumption requires strategies that acknowledge and overcome the structures holding unsustainable consumption in place. Let me offer two speculative examples to demonstrate this logic.

Better than Bottled

An effective strategy must provide an alternative that is perceived to be at least as safe as bottled water. So I developed a campaign concept based on installing filtered water fountains, both for drinking and to refill bottles, which filter water to a higher standard than is required for bottled water. These public water sources are advertised as such and given a modern design, borrowing the communication codes that the bottled water industry has diffused for conveying the purity of water. The fountains are installed at a high enough density in public spaces that a fountain is always convenient. Consumers would always know where the closest fountain is via a consumer-friendly Smartphone app that shows the locations of all the fountains.

This concept could be extended into the household via a government program to facilitate the installation of inexpensive filter systems in homes and workplaces (perhaps $200 installed at scale), using a financing model that adds a small cost to the utility bill spread over a year. An institutional strategy could be layered on top of this concept, which would seek to ban the sale of bottled water in the geographies wherever public dispensers are installed.

Pepsi, Nestle, Coke, Close the Loop!

The analysis also reveals a prime opportunity to go after the major bottled water companies: not for tricking Americans into drinking bottled water (they did not, and convincing people that this is so would not change their behavior), but for their behind-the-scenes efforts to stall sustainability efforts via recycling. Recycling is the simplest solution to the bottled water problem. PET recycling captures more than 80 percent of the embedded energy and saves 70 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions compared to virgin PET. Yet only about 14 percent of water bottles get recycled (Royte 2008). However, in states with bottle deposits that include water bottles, the percentage rises to 70 percent or more. Recycling is one of the most robust and resonant environmental rituals in the United States, and so consumers will likely support regulations that require them to recycle more as long as they are not onerous. The fact that companies fight against recycling is not well known and, if it were, would certainly be hugely damaging from a public relations perspective. All three companies make strong claims about their commitment to sustainability at a corporate level, which leaves them very vulnerable if such a poignant example of their support for unsustainable practices were to emerge. A campaign that pursues plastic bottle deposits on a national basis has tremendous promise. Furthermore, all these companies have developed the ability to make bottles with high recycled content, or with a high percentage of sugarcane cellulose (what the Coca-Cola Company has trademarked and promoted as Plantbottle). But they have been very slow to push these products into the market because they are more expensive. A Close the Loop campaign could be premised on the idea that not only should these companies embrace deposit laws as if they are truly sustainable but should play a leadership role in ensuring that all plastic bottles are 100 percent recyclable and plant-based. This campaign idea could include sodas and noncarbonated beverages as well.

Ideological Lock-In: How Markets Reproduce Unsustainable Consumption

Many highly significant unsustainable consumption patterns accumulate as unintended consequences of market construction processes. Unsustainable consumption becomes sedimented in the structure of the market, resulting in a type of path dependence that differs from standard economic accounts. Adapting the economic concept of lock-in, I use the term ideological lock-in to describe these cultural underpinnings of unsustainable consumption. Ideological lock-in holds unsustainable consumption in place by shaping the taken-for-granted perceptions of the value that consumers receive from their current consumption patterns. And ideological lock-in is dynamic, influenced in unexpected ways through the process of cultural code inflation, such as I describe for the bottled water market. Ideological lock-in becomes institutionally “sticky,” through three mechanisms: the naturalization of the market ideology in the cultural discourse, the habituation of everyday consumption practices that embody the ideology, and the materialization of the ideology in backstage market institutions that structure the market according to ideological assumptions.

Sustainable Consumption through Movement-Led Market Transformations

While consumerism certainly impacts unsustainable consumption, it is a world-dominant meta-ideology that is impossible to overturn quickly enough to effectively manage the world’s overshoot problems. Instead, policy and activism should focus on the large percentage of unsustainable consumption that is created as unintended consequences of the development of specific markets. This pathway toward sustainable consumption requires either transforming or leapfrogging the ideological lock-in that reproduces unsustainable consumption across many markets.

This alternative sustainability strategy requires effective market-facing social movements. And since the transformation process must aim at specific market ideologies, institutions, and practices, effective strategies must proceed market by market, rather than pursue an overarching shift in consumer society. Sustainable consumption, then, requires a federation of market movements, each of which has a specific strategy that is tailored to take advantage of the market’s most vulnerable “lock in” features. This conclusion is no doubt discouraging news for many longtime environmentalists who have galvanized for decades around a single revolutionary environmental war. However, this constructionist model suggests that winning hundreds of specific marketplace battles is, paradoxically, the swiftest path to a societal transformation moving toward sustainable consumption.