For consumption activities in which the use of the product itself entails high environmental loads, such as transportation by motorcycle or car, considering life-cycle wide intervention on the sustainability aspects has relatively less importance.
However, many other consumption activities are related to products or service that can have more interventions in production or post-consumption treatment. Therefore, in general, communication of information prepared based on life cycle perspectives will be needed. The case study in this paper does not cover most of the life cycle wide impacts of commuting choices.
Extending the scope of this study to different life-cycle stages will complicate localization and customization of information, and more research is needed to work out communication strategies for such an extended scope. To this end, future work should be directed into communication of lifestyle choices that has variety in location and uses more specific characteristics for some group of consumers.
2.5 Conclusions
In this paper, a communication strategy for sustainable consumption, and a methodological framework to identify, choose, compile, and deliver the relevant information to the consumer is presented. A case study on university students’
commuting patterns in NCKU, Taiwan, is shown to demonstrate and discuss the proposed strategy and the methodological framework. The discussion elucidates the needs to make corrections to the endpoint models, and classifies the levels of localization and customization, which will enable the methodology in the case study to be applied to communication on motorcycle transportation in other locations and with other groups, with appropriate levels of localization and customization. A method to discover related consumption activities in a systematic way is needed to avoid overlooking important side-effects. Finally, further research is needed to extend the methodologies presented to communicate life-cycle wide intervention to wider-level (regional to global) sustainability.
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