Get rid of the eco-button! Design interventions to steer sustainable use of washing machines

To reduce energy consumption of households, many appliances contain eco-settings, which when used, reduce energy consumption. However, the effectivity of the eco-settings in reducing energy consumption is hardly tested. Other design for sustainable behaviour strategies like coercion and feedback might be more effective. To test the...

Comparing the Recommendations of Buyers of Energy-Efficient and Inefficient Vacuum Cleaners

Although environmental awareness is increasing every year, and most people say they prefer to buy more sustainable products, many still do not act on their promise at the cash counter. Sustainable products are often still perceived to have lower quality or reduced performance. Recom- mendations of sustainable buyers might reduce this perceived...

Consumer adoption of access-based product-service systems: The influence of duration of use and type of product

Access-based product-service systems (AB-PSS) are business models that can potentially decouple the satisfaction of consumer needs from environmental impacts. Hence, they have been promoted for the circular economy. Their sustainability potential has not yet been realised because consumer adoption is lagging. Although this challenge has been...

Measuring consumers’ product care tendency: Scale development and validation

Product care is defined as all activities initiated by consumers that encourage an extension of product lifetimes, such as repair, maintenance, and/or careful handling. A product care scale was developed and validated in a set of four related studies. In study 1, we asked experts to examine the face validity of a set of 35 items. In study 2,...

Business models for sustainable consumption in the circular economy: An expert study

Combining sustainable consumption with the circular economy concept could help tackle challenges, such as resource scarcity and climate change by reducing resource throughput and increasing cycling of products and materials within the economic system, thereby reducing emissions and virgin material use. To achieve sustainable consumption in a...

Consumer buying behaviour of sustainable vacuum cleaners: Consequences for design and marketing

Although most people claim to prefer a more sustainable product, only a limited number of ‘green buyers’ act on their words at the moment of purchase. To find out how to get mainstream buyers to buy more sustainable products, we used data on 950 Western European buyers of 32 different vacuum cleaner models. The issue was why three out of four...

Using proximity in sustainable product design

This research examines proximity as a new interesting strategy to include in the design of more sustainable products. Drawing from the construal level theory, we posit that the environmental sustainability of a product embedding a form of proximity to an environmental solution in its design will be perceived as more concrete and will trigger...