Green Consumption, Ecolabelling and Capitalism's Environmental Limits

Abstract

AbstractGreen consumption attempts to reduce capitalism's environmental impacts by influencing consumer behaviour. It is based on the premise that consumers can be provided with information about the environmental conditions of production through ‘eco’ labels and brands, enabling them to make choices about their consumptive patterns. In response to the growth in green consumerism, there has been a flourishing theoretical and empirical body of work in a wide range of social science disciplines critiquing green consumption from a broadly Marxian perspective and raising questions about capitalism's environmental limits. In this paper, I explore how recent scholarship has advanced Marxian and Green Marxian theory and consider its implications for green consumerism. I focus on the following three arguments: (i) that capitalism's emphasis on profit and a relentless pursuit of economic growth tends to create a ‘metabolic rift’ so that people are increasingly separated, spatially and socially, from the ecosystems that support them; (ii) whilst green consumerism plays up the ability of individual consumers to influence production, power tends to lie with large producers and retailers; and (iii) whilst in principle green consumption empowers consumers by providing with them greater information about the conditions of production, it tends to obscure more fundamental problems such as the intensity of resource consumption.