ALBERT

Description: Sustainability, Vol. 10, Pages 2133: Does Access Trump Ownership? Exploring Consumer Acceptance of Access-Based Consumption in the Case of Smartphones Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su10072133 Authors: Flora Poppelaars Conny Bakker Jo van Engelen Value creation in a circular economy is based on products being returned after use. In the case of smartphones, most are never returned and tend to be kept in drawers. Smartphone access services (e.g., leasing or upgrade) have been experimented with in the Netherlands but have been largely unsuccessful. This study explores the reasons why consumers rejected these access-based smartphone services and is one of the very few to address this topic. The findings are compared with the case of car access services, which are socially better accepted, to identify potential areas for improvement. The qualitative study consists of in-depth interviews with consumers (n = 18) who either adopted and used a smartphone or car access service, or had considered a new smartphone or car but did not choose access-based consumption. The findings of this small-scale study suggest that the main reasons for the rejection of smartphone access services are a lack of awareness, misunderstanding of terms and conditions, and unsatisfactory compensation for their sacrifice of not owning. Smartphone access providers could thus clearly communicate customers’ rights and responsibilities, offer an excellent service experience (especially during repair) by taking over the burdens of ownership, and stimulate the societal logic shift from ownership to access.

Description: Millions of people worldwide die prematurely or suffer from severe health ailments due to cooking equipment that causes unhealthy doses of (household) air pollution. Many attempts to address this have fallen short because technology was not improved sufficiently or the way it was introduced constituted an ill fit with the broader “cooking eco-system”. In terms of technology, (biomass) gasifier stoves look promising on all three sustainability dimensions (people, planet, profit) but have not been adopted on a substantial scale across cultures and regions either. We therefore used a design approach that takes multiple contexts (target groups) into account and compared the performance of a gasifier stove that was developed following this multi-context approach with four previous gasifier versions. With the comparative assessment using criteria well beyond mere technological performance we found that it performed better than these versions as well as than what could be expected based on historical learning, while providing additional systemic advantages. These results encourage verification of the value of the multi-context approach in more settings while providing clues for refinement of the assessment method.