The Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester

The Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI) is a multidisciplinary centre of global excellence, based at The University of Manchester, researching major national and international issues associated with sustainability in the retail sector and encouraging consumers to adopt more sustainable lifestyles.

Established with support from Tesco, the SCI draws on expertise from across all of the university’s four faculties to:

• provide a hub, bringing together global expertise, with specific research programmes commissioned at Manchester and other leading world centres;

• address research topics ranging from influencing customer attitudes, technological innovations and carbon labelling, to under pinning work on climate change and environmental sustainability;

• provide a focal point for training the next generation of researchers, policymakers and advisors through an extensive training programme for postgraduate students in the SCI’s Doctoral Training Centre. Nine indicative, interrelated themes have been identified for the first phase of the SCI’s research activities:

1. Motivating customers towards greener lifestyles

Even with the best intentions, individual consumers can find themselves locked into environmentally damaging patterns of behaviour by societal and institutional constraints. To help individuals make appropriate choices, retailers need to have a deep understanding of consumers’ lives and patterns of consumption to determine the best pathways, and barriers, to attitudinal and behavioural change.

2. Carbon labelling

Carbon labelling has the potential to inform and influence consumer behaviour and the supply chain in ways that could mitigate climate change, but it poses enormous scientific, technical and social challenges. The achievement of a transparent, accessible, universal carbon estimation and labelling system depends upon the development of a consensus on objectives and processes.

3. Planning a greener future for retail

Should retailers be guiding customers towards energy-efficient out-of-town stores, the Internet or encouraging people to walk to smaller stores integrated within housing developments? Can retailers help consumers use their cars less when shopping? Retailers need to understand the trade-offs and get a deeper understanding of the shopping habits towards which they could be guiding customers – and their own businesses.

4. Investing in new technologies

Responsible businesses must examine the feasibility of all technological innovations that might help reduce emissions, being careful to negotiate political minefields and avoid wrong moves.

The development of new low-carbon technologies of relevance to the in-store, transport and wider operational needs of the retail sector will form a central element of the SCI, with a focus on biofuels, recycling and in-store technologies.

5. Understanding the skills and staffing challenge

There are not enough skilled people to meet the increased demand for advice on sustainability. There is a need to better understand the skills and staffing challenge of moving towards a low carbon society. In addition to the technical development agenda, effective education and training of all retail staff, especially those who regularly interact with the public, will be necessary to maximise impact on the understanding of the wider community.

6. Managing the implications of the rising cost of carbon

It is now widely accepted that failing to act to mitigate the impacts of climate change will cost more in the long-term. Research is needed into the economics of carbon to support long-term policy decisions, particularly the development of fully-costed scenarios for low carbon economies. Since all countries must act, it is necessary to take a global view on this issue.

7. Waste, recycling and packaging

Waste is an important ‘entry-point’ when talking to customers about sustainability and climate change. It is an area where customers are already engaged and where retailers have traditionally helped them. Customers want small, practical steps that complement their lifestyle, so retailers must find ways to maintain and further encourage behaviour change around this issue.

8. Underpinning climate change research

Aerosol particles and clouds are the most uncertain atmospheric agents affecting the solar radiation balance of the Earth. However, at present many properties of aerosol and clouds and aspects of their behaviour remain poorly understood and cannot be described correctly by computer models. This provides a major current limitation of climate models to deliver accurate global and regional climate predictions.

9. Environmental sustainability

It is now widely accepted that current demands on the planet’s resources are unsustainable. Rapid increases in the earth’s population, combined with – or driven by – improvements in technology, have meant that we are extracting resources from the ocean and earth’s crust faster than natural systems are able to replace them. If we continue to consume at the current rate, we will do irreparable damage to our ecosystems. Issues include the destruction of virgin rain forests, over-fishing, peak oil and palm oil.

As the SCI develops, these themes will be reviewed to take account of the changing interests of the researchers and funders. Themes will be dropped and/or merged and completely new themes proposed. At the time of publication the SCI has approved 12 major research projects, spanning most of the themes mentioned above.

W: www.manchester.ac.uk/sci