Extended Sustainable Supply Chain: Pathways to Sustainability through Consumer Behavior Change
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2020
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In today's growing economy, overconsumption and overproduction have accelerated environmental deterioration worldwide. Consumers, through unsustainable consumption patterns, and producers, through production based on traditional resource depleting practices, have contributed significantly to the socio-environmental problems. Consumers and producers are linked by supply chains, and as the idea of sustainable development has become seen as a way to reverse socio-environmental degradation, it has also started to sprout in research on supply chains. We look at the evolution of research on sustainable supply chains and show that it is still largely focused on the processes and networks that involve the producer and the consumer, hardly taking into account consumer behavior and its influence on the performance of the producer and the supply chain itself. We conclude that we cannot be talking about sustainability, without extending the supply chains to account for consumers' behavior and their influence on the overall system performance. In Chapter 2, a conceptual framework is proposed to explain how supply chains can become sustainable and how their economic and socio-environmental performance can be improved by motivating consumer behavior toward green consumption patterns, which, in turn, motivates producers and suppliers to change their operations.
In the thesis we focus on agro-food production-consumption, which is an important element of the sustainability agenda. The current intense food production-consumption is one of the main sources of environmental pollution and contributes up to 25-30% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Organic farming is a potential way to reduce environmental impacts by excluding synthetic pesticides and fertilizers from the process. Organic food has important environmental and health benefits, decreasing the toxicity of agricultural production, retaining carbon, and improving overall soil quality, and generally the resilience of farming. Despite the recorded 20% growth in organically managed farmland, its global land area is still far less than could be expected, only 1.4%. Increasing consumers’ demand for organic food reinforces the rate of organic farming adoption and the level of farmers' risk acceptance when transitioning to organic.
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