Tsinghua University established a nation-wide significant research center for ecological civilization, and I was honored to be invited to make a speech on the academic forum. I said while green production had already been profoundly discussed in the studies of ecological civilization, there was still no systematic understanding of green consumption. In the forum I talked about green consumption in the following three aspects, and now I’d like to write it down for further discussion and consideration.

Firstly, why should we delve into green consumption? A basic idea is that consumption is replacing production to become a problem that calls for more and more attention in the studies of Chinese ecological civilization. Three effects can help us to better understand it. The first one is the rebound effect. In the past 30 years the intensity of materials consumed and the pollution caused by Chinese development has been continuously being reduced, but the total amount of consumed materials keeps rising. This cannot be explained by green production. The reason is that the increase of non-green consumption has offset the improvement of productivity. If we don’t attach importance to green consumption, Chinese consumption, instead of Chinese production, will become the major factor of the resource and environment problems in the next decade, leading to the environmental problem of the rising Chinese middle class. The second one is the downstream effect. The resource productivity increased by green consumption can greatly surpass that increased by green production; if the material consumption can be reduced by 1% in the downstream consumption, the material consumption in the upstream production may be reduced by 10%, 100% or even more. The third one is behavioral effect. Generally, consumption behavior is mainly a social psychological problem, so we need to integrate technological development and social development to make a more careful research.

Secondly, what is a systematic understanding of green consumption? In our daily life, there are a lot of initiatives of green consumption, such as setting the air-conditioner at 26℃, attending meeting with no tie, turning off the light for one hour as part of the Earth Hour movement, etc. However, whether these behaviors are green enough is questionable, and they are also not theoretically profound enough. Doing research into green consumption is to provide a systematically scientific analysis to discriminate all kinds of seemingly green actions so as to enhance the initiative of green consumption. Consumption is composed of three basic forms: durable goods consumption, consumable goods consumption, service consumption. Among them durable goods consumption has the longest chain, helping to indicate how consumption efficiency is composed and how it can be improved. The overall efficiency of durable goods consumption consists of three aspects of efficiency: maintenance efficiency, measured by the service life, service efficiency, measured by the frequency of use, and satisfaction efficiency, measured by user satisfaction. Consumable goods consumption involves service efficiency and satisfaction efficiency, and service consumption mainly involves satisfaction efficiency. The so-called green consumption is to disconnect consumers’ utility bearing and material consumption and to increase resource productivity of consumption, that is, to fulfill or improve the effect and satisfaction with the material consumption not increasing or even decreasing. To be specific, we need to respectively improve the maintenance efficiency, the service efficiency and the satisfaction efficiency of consumption according to different features of durable goods consumption, consumable goods consumption and service consumption.

Thirdly, how should we make a green consumption? By studying the energy-saving and environment-friendly green development, we can find three major ways: increasing green supply, improving the efficiency of material production, and reducing the demand for material consumption. The first two ways are mainly related to green production and the third one is concerned with green consumption. The impetus of green consumption lies in social psychological changes. Green consumption has three basic principles. The first principle is preferring fine, durable and high-quality products instead of undurable and low-quality products, namely, the so-called Rolls-Royce Effect. The second one is pursuing utility instead of ownership, because sharing goods helps to improve service efficiency. For example, if a family has many things of the same kind, like TV sets, cars, houses, etc., they tend to be left unused and therefore it results in a low efficiency. The third one is turning self-service to service outsourcing. Specialized and large-scale outsourcers usually have a high resource-saving efficiency. Therefore, there are high, medium, and low levels of systematic green consumption behaviors. Take transportation as an example, choosing public transportation has a higher degree of green consumption than renting others’ cars, which, in turn, has a higher degree of green consumption than driving one’s own car.

Note: This article originally appeared in Xinmin Evening News on the following website: https://xmwb.xinmin.cn/html/2016-04/30/content_2_1.htm.