The impact of carbon footprint label marking to purchase intention of bottled drinks

• Main Authors: Tung-sheng Hsieh, 謝東昇
• Other Authors: San-Pui Lam
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/23599302296017382444

碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 公共事務管理研究所 === 99 === Since the Industrial Revolution, human beings have emitted huge amounts of greenhouse gases for economic growth, and greenhouse gases may influence climate. To slow down climate change, everyone has to take action. Recently, the carbon footprint (CF) labeling on products offers consumers an opportunity to do so in daily shopping. However, so far a CF label reveals only the amount of CO2 emitted during the product''s life cycle, but not the product''s relative CO2 emission level (i.e., whether the product emitted more or less CO2 than similar products). This study thus hypothesized that the mere presentation of a CF label would not affect consumers'' buying intent. To test this and other related hypotheses, this study ran an experiment with 3 independent variables. The variables are amount of CO2 emitted (400gm or 750gm), CO2-saving signal (given or not given) and price (20 NTD or 30 NTD) of the product, which was a tetra-packed tea. In the CO2-saving signal given condition, the experimenter told the participants either that a green CF label denoted low CO2 emissions (in the 400gm condition) or that a green CF label denoted high CO2 emissions (in the 750gm condition). The label shown, in fact, was always green. In the CO2-saving signal not given condition, the experimenter did not explain the meaning of the label color.A convenient sample of 240 adults joined the experiment. They were randomly assigned to the experiment conditions. Each participant saw a picture of a tetra-packed tea with a CF label and listed price. Results showed that when CO2-saving signal was given, the low-CO2-high-price tea could induce higher buying intent than the high-CO2-low-price tea. When CO2-saving signal was not given, the two conditions did not differ in buying intent. Furthermore, participants'' environmental attitude—as measured a scale adapted from Dunlap and van Liere''s (1978) New Environmental Paradigm Scale—did not qualify the above results. These findings suggest that CF label can neither help nor encourage people to choose low-CO2 products, unless it is complemented with a clear CO2-saving signal.