Safeguarding the legal balance between competitive entrepreneurship (business) and sustainable consumption

Abstract

In this article it is argued that traditional consumer policy increasingly requires transformation towards sustainability. For this purpose, consumer protection regulation must be reshaped into taking environmental needs into account rather than focusing solely on the realization of the European Union internal market, and the satisfaction of endless consumer demands. In order to bring benefits to both the economy and the environment, sustainable consumption choices have to be fostered. The authors focus on the pre-contractual stage of business-to-consumer legal relations, and argue that businesses rethink their marketing strategies and try to emphasize environment friendly aspects. Competitive advantage usually gained by offering consumers greater value by means of lower prices gradually loses its impact, and other methods such as environmental claims become more important in this sense. As advertising can be a powerful force for promoting sustainable consumption by highlighting the sustainable dimensions of goods and convincing consumers to purchase these products, the issue is raised of assuring the truth of advertising as a tool for basic consumer protection in the pre-contractual stage of business-to-consumer legal relations. The authors emphasize that consumer protection against unfair commercial practices should play a significant role in the assessment of environmental claims. The aim of this article is to examine the legal regulation on unfair commercial practices in order to find a balance between the efforts of sustainability-driven entrepreneurs to succeed in a competitive market and the protection of the interests of consumers supporting greener goals.

Willingness to share information for energy efficiency: exploring differences and drivers across the Nordic countries

“…Connelly [63]; García-Muñiz and Vicente [66]; Novikovienė and Navickaitė-Sakalauskienė [75] Reyes Energy, Sustainability and Society (2022) 12 :38 efficiency studies which utilized the adopted methods and variables [18,20,35,54,68] for the analysis and also to those that had items similar to the recent Eurobarometer dataset, with model R 2 values ranging from 0.075 to 0.263 [10,61]. It should be noted that given the modest sizes of the statistically significant coefficients in Table 3, it is not surprising that, taken together the entire set of 16 predictor variables entered for the model does not account for much variance.…”

Pro-Environmental and Pro-Social Engagement in Sustainable Consumption: Exploratory Study

“…Sustainable consumption is a practical process that involves the economy, society, and environment in reaching for sustainable development goals [1][2][3][4]. Geiger et al [5] define sustainable consumption as a behavior associated with long-term understanding of the consequences of individual consumption.…”

Revisión bibliométrica del consumo sostenible: una mirada histórica de la producción científica global

“…Una clara tendencia de este modelo es la amplia gama de estrategias que se han desarrollado en el mundo para modificar los hábitos de consumo y alentar el consumo de alimentos sostenibles (Duchin, 2005;Moll et al, 2005;Fuchs et al, 2016;Nosi et al, 2020). Hay que decir también, como bien lo propuso Thøgersen (2010), que el consumo total de productos sostenibles, para el caso particular de los alimentos orgánicos, depende sustancialmente de la regulación política que se haga de los mismos y de la protección al consumidor (Novikovienė & Navickaitė-Sakalauskienė, 2020), incluidas una serie de variables que apoyan significativamente su producción y consumo.…”