Making a greener choice – The potential of life cycle assessment for Globetrotter Ausrüstung GmbH as the foundation for customer communication fostering sustainable purchasingChristina Freise

26 November 2018

This qualitative study conducted in cooperation with Globetrotter Ausrüstung GmbH aimed to research how a tool for life cycle assessment (LCA) needs to be designed in order to meet a retailer’s demands. It furthermore evaluated how the thereby generated assessment of a product’s sustainability performance can be integrated into the retailer’s customer communication to promote sustainable purchasing.

In the first part, an extensive analysis of relevant literature was conducted. Theoretical findings were subsequently transformed into a framework of requirements for customer communication promoting sustainable purchasing and the preferred underlying product evaluation LCA. The consideration of scientific requirements and practical feasibility led to a variety of partially contradicting requirements of a label on the one hand and the practical implementation on the other hand, which must be brought into balance. To this end, the second section applied the theoretical foundation to the case of Globetrotter, a retailer in the outdoor industry that recently introduced its communication tool A Greener Choice with which product alternatives are labelled that were identified to be more sustainable. Subsequently, an iterative feasibility study of the two different labelling software products Higg Product Module by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) and Umberto LCA+ by the ifu Hamburg was conducted. To successfully promote sustainable purchasing, recommendations were made to align A Greener Choice more closely with the theoretically defined framework.

The thesis extended scientific research by examining the unique positioning of retailers as a ‘neutral’ link between a variety of brands and consumers for promoting sustainability in customer communication. In addition, it added insights into the practical constraints and limitations of theoretical requirements when conducting LCAs as the foundation for broad product reviewing.