Environmental (non)Awareness via Consumer Purchases

Merging a loyalty card transactional dataset from a prominent UK retailer with environmental impacts associated with food production, this study aims to assess the environmental footprint attributable to food purchases across the UK.

  • Funder

    ESRC

  • Duration

    Jan 2024 – Dec 2025

  • Investigators

    Evgeniya Lukinova, Gavin Long, John Harvey, and James Goulding

  • Partners

    Co-op Food

Project Description

Climate change is one of the major challenges facing the global community that requires urgent attention and action. Despite the prevailing sentiment among UK citizens expressing a desire to address climate change, there remains a gap in understanding whether these intentions translate into actual behaviours, particularly in the context of sustainable purchasing practices. This study explores i) whether impacts of food on environment differ for consumers in rich vs poor areas and ii) whether public events connected to the key environmental awareness days (e.g., Earth Day) increase sustainable purchasing behaviours.

Given that the consumption of red meat, dairy, fish, and poultry constitutes a significant proportion of the environmental footprint associated with food production, this preliminary study directs its attention towards these food categories for a detailed exploration. Which of the impactful categories are consumed more by consumers in poor compared to rich deciles? Is there any seasonal variation? And to what extent do consumer behaviours shift during the key environmental days in a way indicative of heightened environmental consciousness?

Using an interdisciplinary approach and combining insights from environmental science, consumer behaviour, and data analytics, this research aims to assess the impact of food purchases on the environment, to understand the efficacy of public awareness initiatives, and to inform policy.

Method

Clark et al. (2022) estimated environmental impacts of 57000 food products in UK retail by merging previous databases and deriving a single environmental impact score per 100 g of product that ranges from 0 (no impact) to 100 (highest impact). This score does not include transportation or packaging, but includes environmental impact associated with food production combined across four indicators: greenhouse gas emissions (mainly CO2), land use, water stress, and eutrophication potential. The highest impact not surprisingly with estimated scores >10 goes to food that contains beef and lamb products. Preliminary exploration starts with the freely available data on environment impact across four indicators for 212 products from Clark et al’ s estimations and then averages the impact by food category. Having aggregated loyalty card data per month and food category, this study gets the total emissions per month for food purchased from Co-op Food, UK. In addition, using the location of the shop where the loyalty card transaction is happening, we group the purchases  within the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) decile and estimate the environmental footprint per decile. Finally, having in mind four key environmental awareness events: Earth Day in April, World Environmental Day in June, Plastic Bag Free Day in July, and World Animal Day in October – this study considers 3 weeks around each event in order to find whether consumer behaviours have been altered.

Results

Initial findings show that the total emissions associated with food purchases in stores located in the richest neighbourhoods are two times bigger than those in the poorest neighbourhoods. This is mostly driven by the total weight of red meat purchases, with not surprising spikes for all Decembers in the data. Considering that Co-op Food is a convenience supermarket and may not represent full food baskets across IMD deciles, the study also looked at per customer impact.

The exact opposite result was striking: whether in richer deciles’ stores customers buy more fish per customer, in poorer deciles’ stores red meat, dairy, and poultry were prevalent.

Following research on common but differentiated responsibilities (Kline et al., 2018) customers in the poorest decile do not have bandwidth to even think about ‘environmental impact’ they are only concerned with getting enough to eat, like early developers only concerned with developing by burning coal, for example. Should one expect consumers in richer deciles to be the drivers of the change to more sustainable products?! Considering the red meat category purchases this study does not find evidence of any change in consumer behaviours around the environmental awareness events. 

Associated Publications

Differentiated Responsibilities and Prosocial Behavior in Climate Change Mitigation: Behavioral Evidence from the United States and China.
A characteristic feature of the global climate change dilemma is interdependence between the underlying economic development that drives anthropogenic climate change—typically modelled as a common pool resource dilemma… [more]

Media, Blogs and News Stories