Sustainable consumption: at the cross-road of environmental and consumer policies

Abstract

Although the need for new systems of production and consumption is constantly stressed in policy discussions, the sustainable consumption concept has not been largely translated into practice. The efforts of environmental policy makers to pay more attention to the consumption side are still rather meagre, and there is little integration of environmental issues into consumer policy. This paper addresses these problems by providing an overview of consumption-related EU policies and by evaluating strategies of consumer and environmental organisations in this field. It is discussed how sustainable consumption can be better addressed by converging efforts of consumer and environmental organisations.