Sustainable Production And Consumption

Economic growth and increasing population impose long-term risks to the environment and society. Approaches to address the impact of consumption and production on bio-diversity loss, resource availability, climate change, and mounting waste problems on land and in seas have yet not proven to be successful. This calls for innovative approaches to address the complex environmental, social, and economic interrelationships that have to be addressed in transforming to sustainable development. Sustainable Consumption and Production, Volume I: Challenges and Development aims to explore critical global challenges and addresses how consumers, producers, the private sector, international organizations, and governments can play an active role in innovating businesses to support a transitioning towards sustainable consumption and production. The book explores different approaches and innovations to address sustainable consumption and production. It details multiple social and economic contexts to the challenges and developments towards a sustainable consumption and production. The book is of interest to economists, students, businesses, and policymakers. Chapter 14 and chapter 15 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. Ranjula Bali Swain is Visiting Professor at Mistra Center for Sustainalbe Markets (Misum), Stockholm School of Economics and Professor of Economics at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. Her research focusses on sustainable development, environmental economics and development economics. Susanne Sweet is an Associate Professor at Stockholm School of Economics. Sweet's research covers a broad range of topics on corporate sustainability and responsibility and she has for the past eight years been the research manager for a large cross disciplinary research program on circular fashion.

Circular economy principles are driving to overcome the challenges of today’s linear take-make-dispose production and consumption patterns through keeping the value of products, materials, and resources circulating in the economy as long as possible. Sustainable Consumption and Production, Volume II: Circular Economy and Beyond aims to explore the sustainable consumption and production transition to a circular economy, while addressing critical global challenges by innovating and transforming product and service markets towards sustainable development. This book explores how consumers, private sector, relevant international organizations, and governments can play an active role in innovating businesses to help companies, individuals (consumers and citizens), organizations, and sectors, to remain competitive, while transitioning towards sustainable markets and economies. It is of interest to economists, students, businesses, and policymakers.

Sustainable Production Consumption Systems brings together a set of designed case studies intended to provide a more in-depth understanding of challenges and opportunities in bringing knowledge and actions closer together for the sustainable management of specific production and consumption systems. The case study approach enabled researchers to engage directly with some of the actors involved in the production, consumption or regulation of specific goods or services and other stakeholders affected by those processes. Such engagement was particularly worthwhile when it helped mobilize actors to pursue linking knowledge with action in ways that improve the prospects for sustainability.

This book takes a wide-ranging and non-dogmatic view of SDG12, tackling various approaches as to how production and consumption can provide for human well-being while minimizing destructive effects on the biophysical environment.

This book opens up a critical dimension to the field of industrial ecology. The book discusses the post COVID-19 trends in the field of industrial ecology and evolving practices adopted by firms for betterment of environment and society. The authors identify valuable lessons to be learned and present conceptual frameworks to guide future industrial ecology applications. Transforming industrial systems into closed-loop industrial ecosystems dramatically reduces the negative impact of industrial activities on the environment. Therefore, this book is important not only for operation management scholars but also those who are interested in ensuring an environmentally sustainable future.

Responsible Consumption and Production, the twelfth UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 12), calls for significant change in how we view both production and consumption norms. It is predicted that, at the current rate of population growth and consumption, the natural resources needed to sustain current lifestyles would require the equivalent of almost three planets by 2050. It is clear that change is required, involving action from everyone from the producer to the final consumer. Since sustainable consumption aims for world citizens to ‘do better with less’, all aspects of this change must be carefully considered with regard to critical ecological and social models that transform all production and consumption practices that are recognised as negative. Transitioning to Responsible Consumption and Production focuses on the transition to responsible production and consumption, and models that aid that transition. It offers a multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder conversation on this issue, with a focus on the intersection between encouraging and enhancing sustainable production processes, and enacting behaviour change and socially oriented decision-making by consumers. Transitioning to Responsible Consumption and Production is part of MDPI's new Open Access book series Transitioning to Sustainability. With this series, MDPI pursues environmentally and socially relevant research which contributes to efforts toward a sustainable world. Transitioning to Sustainability aims to add to the conversation about regional and global sustainable development according to the 17 SDGs. Set to be published in 2020, the book series is intended to reach beyond disciplinary, even academic boundaries.

This incisive book integrates the academic fields of sustainable consumption and production (SCP) and sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) as a framework for challenging the current economic paradigm and addressing the significant ecological and environmental problems faced by the contemporary business world.

This book provides a broad understanding of whether law plays a role in influencing patterns of sustainable consumption and, if so, how. Bringing together legal scholars from the Global South and the Global North, it examines these questions in the context of national, transnational and international law, within single and plural legal systems, and across a range of sector-specific issue areas. The chapters identify how traditional legal disciplines (e.g. constitutional law, consumer law, public procurement, international public law), sector-related regulation (e.g. energy, water, waste), and legal rules in specific areas (e.g. eco-labelling and packing) engage with the concept of sustainable consumption. A number of the contributions describe this relationship by isolating a national legal system, while others approach it from the vantage point of legal pluralism, exploring the conflicts and convergences of rules between multiple international treaties (or guidelines) and those between the rules of international and transnational law (or both) vis-à-vis national legal systems. While sustainable consumption is recognised as an important field of interdisciplinary research linking virtually all social science disciplines, legal scholarship, in contrast, has neglected the importance of the field of sustainable consumption to the law. This book fills the gap.