Unsustainable Consumption: A Systemic Exploration of Everyday Behaviours

Overwhelming evidence suggests that we need to consume less and/or differently. Academic research and the popular media provide recommendations on what consumers should or should not do to live more sustainably. However, for the majority of consumers, the uptake of sustainable behaviours is low. Sustainable consumption finds itself in constant tension with mainstream ‘normal’ (unsustainable) behaviours. We not only need to understand more about sustainable consumption behaviours already undertaken (often by only a few consumers), but we also need a clearer picture of unsustainable consumption—the current behaviour that needs to be changed. We take a systemic approach to unsustainable consumption and, after an extensive literature review, develop a hierarchy of 25 unsustainable consumption behaviours that span multiple categories of everyday life, including the ‘big three’ (household energy use, food consumption, and personal transportation), recycling, cosmetics, and clothing purchases. Our results support that—for a broad sample of average consumers (n = 850)—unsustainable behaviours are cumulative and follow the same patterns. In everyday life, unsustainable behaviours of different categories are interspersed, supporting the need to explore multiple behaviours at the same time if systematic changes away from unsustainable consumption behaviours are required. It follows that we know in which order to address unsustainable consumption choices to move society towards more sustainable consumption norms.