Cleaner and Responsible Consumption最新文献

The healthcare sector faces increasing challenges in managing the environmental impact of single-use masks and medical waste, prompting the exploration of innovative solutions for greener healthcare. This study investigates converting single-use mask waste into Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF) as a sustainable waste management approach. A quantitative analysis assessed the average waste generation of single-use masks in a healthcare facility over three months. The potential RDF production was estimated by calculating single-use masks' weight and calorific value. Additionally, Thermogravimetric Analysis was employed to evaluate the thermal behavior of RDF and its suitability as an alternative fuel source. The findings indicate an average monthly waste generation of 41,555 masks weighing 111.2 kg. RDF production from single-use mask waste yields a daily output of 3.706 kg, providing a promising solution to reduce medical waste. TGA analysis reveals a multi-step degradation process for RDF, with a significant mass loss between 300 and 500 °C, rendering it a viable renewable energy source. Converting single-use mask waste into RDF presents an opportunity for healthcare institutions to contribute to net-zero emission goals, reducing reliance on fossil fuels and embracing sustainable waste management practices.

The escalating global concerns regarding sustainable development issues have transformed the landscape of consumer behaviour, urging businesses to incorporate green practices and raise awareness among consumers. There is an ongoing debate concerning attitude-intention and product category gap. The study aims to bridge this gap by investigating the green cosmetic purchase behaviour of female consumers in South Africa by exploring factors such as awareness, product information, product availability, environmental concern, perceived barriers, perceived price, and attitude. The study employs the alphabet theory, previously utilised in qualitative research, to quantitatively examine the relationship between various factors and green cosmetic purchase intention. By applying this theory, the study contributes to its expansion and offers a unique framework for understanding consumer behaviour in the green cosmetic industry.

This study collected data by conducting an online and face-to-face survey with 295 South African consumers. The results revealed that perceived price and attitude significantly influence the purchase intention of green cosmetic products amongst females in South Africa. While awareness, product information, product availability, environmental concern and perceived barriers needed a mediating variable (attitude) to influence the purchasing intention of green cosmetic products of female consumers in South Africa. The study highlights the practical implications for marketers by providing insights into designing effective green marketing strategies. The study's findings can aid marketers in tailoring their communication and developing a targeted green marketing mix that resonates with female consumers in South Africa.

The circular economy is increasingly being considered as a potential model to replace the prevailing end-of-life approach by establishing a closed-loop flow. The importance of different supply chain (SC) actors in this process has been recognized as a critical aspect of the development of sustainable production-consumption models. Consumers play a crucial role in this context, as they have a dual function: ensuring the correct disposal of used products; and consuming products from circular sources. However, the different roles consumers play (refuse, rethink, reduce, reuse, repair, refurbish, remanufacture, repurpose, recycle, recover) in circular SCs are still unclear. Through a systematic literature review, this paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the influence of consumers on the adoption of circular supply chain (CSC) practices and to identify the main drivers and barriers regarding the adoption of circular practices. The results demonstrate that the topic is recent and has gained ground in the literature. An in-depth qualitative analysis was carried out with the 74 papers identified and shows that the most commonly addressed R-strategies are reuse, recycle and repair. The main motivations and challenges towards a greater adoption of circular practices are related to (or lack of) environmental beliefs and financial benefits.

The development of the healthcare system is an important task for every country, given that long-term economic and social development is absolutely impossible without a healthy nation. Therefore, improving public health and ensuring that the maximum number of people have access to quality healthcare services is one of the state's strategic priorities. In this regard, the authors of the paper set a goal to establish how the reform of the healthcare system in Ukraine has led to changes in the behavioural determinants of healthcare providers and recipients in the domestic healthcare market. The paper uses such research methods as comparison, visualization, graphical data visualization tools, and statistical methods of data analysis. The study revealed that Ukrainian citizens got a chance to freely choose their physicians by signing declarations with them, which led to increased competition among physicians and other doctors and healthcare facilities; at the same time, the number of declarations signed with private healthcare facilities increased significantly. Furthermore, the developed econometric model allows us to identify statistically significant relationships between the amount of state funding and lifestyle and environmental indicators, which will allow us to improve the mechanisms and amount of funding in the sector, improving the health of the nation in the new competitive environment.

Climatic extremes have caused immense harm around the world. Its harm in terms of the proportion of people and regions affected continues to increase every single day. Due to people's psychological distance from such climatic threats, active initiatives are not undertaken for mitigation of its source. Rather, localized short-term solutions are marking a new status-quo. This study examines if fear can be used as a motivator to nudge people away from the psychological distance and motivate them to adopt electric vehicles (EVs). While subsidies and tax rebates are popularly adopted means to boost demand and supply of EVs, monetary incentives are costly to sustain for developing nations, amidst their diverse priorities. Instead, use of motivators like ‘fear’ is cheap, yet not much explored. Using the protection motivation theory, the study interviews 1112 Indian individuals, to examine if fear can nudge EV adoption. Using structural equation modeling and mediation analysis, the study finds that the expectation of personal harm from climatic threats can nudge one to actively mitigate the source of threat. Various aspects of threat and the associated coping processes that need to be triggered sequentially to nudge the formation of a pro-environmental intention to adopt EVs are also outlined.

Food waste is currently acknowledged as a major societal challenge, including the food waste at the household level estimated to be responsible for the wastage of one third of the food produced for human consumption. Hence, tackling household food waste (HFW) is gaining a momentum in societal and policy agendas accompanied by an increasing effort of the scientific community to deliver evidence to address the research gaps on the causes and on the solutions to address this multidimensional societal problem. The proposed solutions by published literature to mitigate HFW can be unfolded into four major types, actions to raise people awareness, participatory actions, economic incentives, and collective actions. However, there is little evidence on the household's assessment of the different types of actions and its combination. This paper contributes to this research gap by adopting an innovative participatory approach, using deliberative focus groups (DFG), and analyzing the collected data through content analysis resorting to the software Maxqda. We had conducted six DGF in the Porto metropolitan area before and during the pandemic COVID-19 crisis. Our results highlight the citizen's option for more holistic actions in comparison to separate actions as a way to effectively fight food waste at household level. Another finding of our study is that citizen's growing urban gardens found it the more effective way to reduce household food waste. These results suggest that urban policies and underlying legal frameworks should favor holistic solutions to incentivise fighting HFW and account for the urban gardens as a relevant part of the solution. In addition, the study has shown that qualitative deliberative citizen-led approaches show insightful to understand how common people perceive as alternative or complementary the different types of actions to fight HFW proposed by the literature review.

The lifestyle and consumption habits of individuals are crucial in the question of ecological sustainability. Current consumption patterns need to be changed, requiring societies to shift cultural norms and create new consumer habits which are within planetary boundaries. In the practices of teaching sustainable consumption in higher education participatory and action-oriented research and teaching methods can facilitate the transition towards a more sustainable lifestyle for students. In this paper, we present a method operating at the boundary of education and research, the so-called ecoclubs, based on the characteristics of cooperative inquiry and transformative learning. Ecoclubs enable systematic and democratic knowledge creation to achieve concrete social change. In this paper, we explore how the method can promote transformation in the knowledge, attitude and everyday practices of the participating students regarding a sustainable lifestyle. To analyse the transformative potential of ecoclubs we used qualitative content analysis on 38 semi-structured interviews and reflection diaries of co-researchers of ecoclubs. The results show that according to the members of the ecoclubs, the most important characteristics of this non-formal education are the community, autonomy of decision-making, knowledge sharing and experience-based format. From the students' point of view, these characteristics can contribute to their higher level of engagement with sustainability and additional changes in their lifestyle.

Home cooking is considered an important activity which promotes healthier lives, sustenance, and binds families and people together. Despite the benefits of home cooking, it is the leading source of household air pollution and its associated health risks particularly for developing countries including Ghana. The role of financial inclusion in facilitating the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations is explored in this study for clean cooking technologies (i.e., SDG 7). The proposed study is based on three datasets from the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), comprising of Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS) round 6, round 7 and the pooled form. Using distance to the nearest financial institution as instrument, the study employed probit two-stage least squares to investigate the heterogenous impacts of financial inclusion on household cooking fuels in Ghana. The findings show that financial inclusion increases the consumption of clean cooking fuel but reduces dirty fuels such as firewood, charcoal, kerosene etc. Female-headed households were found to be more impacted by financial inclusion over time than their male counterparts. The results also showed that financially included rural households reduced their consumption of dirty cooking fuels than their urban counterparts. These findings have important policy implications.

People waste a lot of food, especially at the consumption stage in consumer households. Despite the urgency of this topic, little is known about how consumers use visual inspection to decide to throw away fruits and vegetables at different stages of ripening and spoilage. We presented 366 US consumers with images of a banana, mango, cucumber, and avocado in 5 stages of decay in an online study and we determined how signs of decay affected participants’ consumption, preparation and disposal behaviors. As expected, product attractiveness, freshness, healthiness, and nutritiousness decreased, while the degree of decay, overripeness, and disgust increased over time. The number of people willing to consume the product was linearly related to the perceived proportion of the product affected by decay, while the number of people wanting to cut off bad parts was highest when about 40% of the product was judged to be affected. As time went on, the banana was cooked and mashed more often, while the cucumber was peeled more often. As growing, ripening and decay differ considerably between agricultural products, it is important to take sensory and preparation differences into account when investigating consumption and disposal behaviors.

Creative territories are geographic spaces of collaboration between different social actors, driving innovations and requiring regulatory mechanisms for sustainability and growth. This paper aims to synthesize available evidence on creative territories through a systematic literature review to analyze the significant actors in creative territories, the type of partnerships between them, the kind of innovations in creative territories, and the regulatory mechanisms for supporting these territories. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines were followed to ensure a transparent and systematic approach. A comprehensive search in the Scopus database, employing predefined search terms and inclusion criteria, included 86 articles. The findings revealed several key topics within the existing academic literature on creative territories, including i) the individual social players in creative territories and partnerships and collaborations among them, ii) the various innovations in these territories and sectors, iii) the regulatory mechanisms applied by government and non-government actors. These topics or aspects were further analyzed and categorized to provide a comprehensive overview of the research landscape. The discussion section presents a critical analysis and synthesis of the findings, highlighting that the government supports creative territories through 16 regulatory mechanisms, while the literature highlights at least 5 levels of government intervention. Additionally, private social actors can positively impact creative territories through various regulatory mechanisms, including firm self-regulation, industry self-regulation, and civil regulation, with at least 21 social actors classified into 5 groups collaborating through six types/forms of collaboration. Furthermore, several circumstances and factors should be available to prosper in a particular partnership/collaboration like a clear definition of responsibilities, well-defined rules, mutual benefits, equal collaboration, and solid authority. The findings underscore the importance of creative territories and serve as a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, offering insights and directions for future research endeavors.