No abstract

Ecolabels have emerged as one of the main tools of green marketing. Although a great deal of effort has been invested in making them more effective and efficient, the market share of ecolabelled products is still low, partly because they have been addressed mainly to 'green' consumers. In a theoretical exposition of marketing theory, we find that green marketing could learn from conventional marketing in discovering other means than labelling to promote green products. Examples include addressing a wider range of consumers, working with the positioning strategies of price, place and promotion and actively engaging in market creation.

Ten LCC-oriented environmental accounting tools suggested as useful in environmental decision-making have been identiÿed. However, their implementation in the building industry seems to be limited, which opens up for a conceptual discussion. The purpose of this article is to discuss theoretical assumptions and the practical usefulness of the LCC approach in making environmentally responsible investment decisions. LCC's monetary unit and extended scope may speak in favour of using LCC but LCC fails to handle irreversible decisions, neglects items that have no owner and does not consider costs to future generations. Moreover, LCC does not take into account the decision makers' limited ability to make rational decisions under uncertainty. LCC's practical usefulness is constrained by its oversimpliÿcation to a monetary unit, the lack of reliable data, complexity of the building process and conceptual confusions. To handle these inconsistencies in future development of environmental decision support tools three research solutions are proposed.

No abstract

Summary Social life cycle assessment (S‐LCA) has been discussed for some years in the LCA community. We raise two points of criticism against current S‐LCA approaches. First, the development of S‐LCA methodology has not, to date, been based on experience with actual case studies. Second, for social impacts to be meaningfully assessed in a life cycle perspective, social indicators need to be unambiguously interpreted in all social contexts along the life cycle. We here discuss an empirically based approach to S‐LCA, illustrated by a case study of an automobile airbag system. The aim of the case study is to compare the injuries and lives lost during the product life cycle of the airbag system (excluding waste handling impacts) with the injuries prevented and lives saved during its use. The indicator used for assessing social impacts in this study is disability‐adjusted life years (DALY). The results from this study indicate that the purpose of an airbag system, which is to save lives and prevent injuries, is justified also in a life cycle perspective.