Our consumer goods account for 10% of our total consumer emissions. In 2022, the Climate Gap report found that emissions from consumer goods are decreasing in some areas, but there's still scope for more reductions and changes.
If we are to continue to reduce emissions, the report highlights three key actions that all consumers must take:
- Increase repair and reuse
- Increase buying second hand
- Choose sustainable brands
In this page, we explore these actions: why they are necessary, how far we are from them, and the changes that businesses and governments can make to ensure we achieve these goals. We call on consumers to not only reduce their own emissions in the areas we have identified, but to also consider getting engaged with political campaigns trying to persuade the government and companies to take some of the actions identified too.
Consumer goods and climate change
The table below summarises what we think are the three most important opportunities for decarbonisation in the consumer goods impact area: carbon footprints of consumer goods; producer carbon disclosure; and repairing and buying second hand more, and buying from more sustainable brands.
The Climate Change Committee does not collect much data on the impact of consumer goods, because much of product manufacturing takes place overseas. This means that it doesn’t state a clear target for reduction in the same way as it does for other areas. The approach we are therefore taking is to apply its overall UK targets for carbon reduction – of 40% by 2030 – to the emissions from these product, including their manufacturing overseas.
Carbon footprints of consumer goods
Estimates of our consumption emissions are released annually by DEFRA using data from the University of Leeds. Partly because of its complexity, this information is released in May with a year lag. Because of this, the most recent available information looks at the impact of our purchases for 2019. The categories into which goods are broken down are slightly weird, but we have avoided those which we are covering in other areas of this report (like food) and chosen those which seem to have the most impact. These are clothing and footwear, furniture and household products and electrical goods.
Producer carbon disclosure
Another way of measuring the carbon impact of the consumer goods we buy in the UK would be to add up the reported carbon emissions of all the companies which manufacture them and apportion them to their UK sales.
Unfortunately, proper carbon reporting by companies, including their supply chain emissions, is still in its infancy. It is very important that companies start reporting on the emissions of their supply chain, or they will not be able to demonstrate to others that they are tackling them effectively.
Because of this, this dataset initially just looks at whether they are properly reporting emissions at all. We have set a target for 100% reporting by 2025. In the event this is reached, we can move to tracking the decline (if any) in the collective reported emissions between then and 2030.
For this report, we have performed this research for 40 companies, the biggest in each of the following sectors: clothing, furniture, electrical and white goods.
Rates of repair and buying second-hand
Because we do not know what companies are doing about their emissions (due to lack of reporting), the only action consumers can take which will currently guarantee emissions reductions is to reduce the number of new items they are purchasing.
We therefore thought that the third dataset in this action area might try to track whether any reduction might be occurring by looking at indicators like buying second hand or rates of repair. We decided to use a consumer survey to ask a representative sample of people to tell us how many of each type of item they had bought new that year and how many they had bought second hand or repaired.