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This study enriches the existing literature by linking the concepts of greenwashing, environmental concerns, sustainable information seeking, and circular consumption. This paper makes four main contributions. First, the results advance the theoretical understanding of how consumers adjust their information-seeking behaviors and practices in response to corporate actions such as greenwashing. These results theoretically fit into the normactivation theory, since when consumers detect a problem, as in the case of greenwashing, it activates personal norms, such as environmental concerns, that influence their behavior, namely, in the search for pro-sustainable information. In addition, according to the planned behavior theory, greenwashing can be identified as an external influence with a significant impact that can transform consumer attitudes (environmental concerns) and subjective norms through the collection of pro-sustainable information influencing intentions of circular consumption that are nothing more than the perception of behavioral control. Second, the study sheds light on consumers’ responses to greenwashing behavior and its impact on circular consumption intentions. Third, the results further reveal the paradox that consumers adopt more sustainable behaviors when faced with misleading environmental claims. Finally, it is emphasized that consumers respond to perceived greenwashing by seeking more reliable information about sustainability. Thus, for companies/managers, this study demonstrates the importance of effective and sincere customer engagement with sustainable practices promoted by companies. To this end, companies must communicate these sustainable practices transparently, precisely, authentically, and generally understandably and adjust their offer to genuinely sustainable products and services. In addition, the government must impose norms for communicating pro-sustainable information on products and services, forcing companies to transmit the information consumers want to collect.

Additionally, the research highlights that consumers respond to perceived greenwashing by seeking more credible information about sustainability. This behavior positively influences their intention to engage in circular consumption, reinforcing the idea that information seeking is a powerful tool consumers can utilize to make more sustainable decisions. In fact, the research reinforces the well-established theory in environmental psychology that environmental concern is a strong driver of sustainable consumption behavior, underscoring the importance of information accessibility and credibility in sustainable decision-making [56].

Our analysis paints a complex picture of the relationship between greenwashing environmental concerns, sustainable information collecting, and circular consumption intention. Our findings indicate that consumers’ perception of prevalent greenwashing behavior among companies is positively associated with their circular consumption intention (H1: = 0.081, p = 0.023), which may appear counterintuitive considering the conventional wisdom that greenwashing has a negative impact on consumer attitudes and behaviors [27,51,52]. Although our findings suggest that greenwashing paradoxically stimulates environmental concerns and pro-environmental behaviors, some critics may argue that greenwashing should be exclusively seen as a deceitful business practice that only misleads consumers. The core purpose of greenwashing is to create a falsely positive image about a company’s environmental impact, which essentially is a manipulation of consumer perception. Yet, our empirical findings indicate that consumers, in response to such practices, may increase their environmental awareness and adjust their consumption patterns towards more sustainable options.

Furthermore, the study introduces sustainable information collection as an intermediary between greenwashing and circular consumption intention. This presents a valuable addition to the discourse on sustainable consumption, as it highlights the importance of information accessibility in sustainable decision-making. Our results lend support to the hypothesis that consumers who are aware of greenwashing tactics are not passively influenced by them but instead respond by actively seeking more reliable information about the products or services. The more they engage in sustainable information collection, the more likely they are to intend to participate in circular consumption behaviors. This reinforces the idea that information seeking is a powerful tool consumers can utilize to make more sustainable decisions [54,55]. Therefore, understanding the mediating role of sustainable information collection provides valuable insights into how consumers process and respond to greenwashing. It indicates that consumer empowerment, through the provision and active seeking of reliable sustainability information, could be a potent mechanism to mitigate the negative effects of greenwashing and promote circular consumption.

This study makes valuable contributions to the existing literature by establishing connections among the conceptual frameworks of greenwashing, environmental concerns, sustainable information collection, and circular consumption. The results augment our theoretical comprehension of how consumers adjust their behaviors and information-seeking habits in response to corporate actions such as greenwashing. These findings resonate with the norm activation theory, suggesting that when consumers perceive a problem, such as greenwashing, it activates personal norms (like environmental concerns), leading to a change in behaviors, such as the collection of sustainable information.

Simultaneously, the study sheds light on the role of consumers’ reactions to greenwashing and their implications for circular consumption intentions. This examination provides a richer understanding of consumer behavior in the context of a circular economy. This relationship can be interpreted through the lens of the Theory of Planned Behavior, which highlights greenwashing as a significant external influence capable of shaping attitudes—in this case, environmental concerns; molding subjective norms, exhibited as sustainable information collecting; and influencing perceived behavioral control, represented as circular consumption intentions. The study’s findings offer a deeper understanding of the paradoxical scenario where consumers confronted with deceptive environmental claims respond by adopting more sustainable behaviors. The findings illustrate that consumers’ exposure to greenwashing stimulates their awareness and concern about environmental issues and that environmental concerns mediate the effect of greenwashing on circular consumption intention.

//DH

Despite increasing awareness of e-waste and the implementation of recycling initiatives in many countries, the electronic waste problem continues to persist. According to the Global E-waste Monitor 2020 report, only 17.4% of the 53.6 million metric tons of electronic waste generated worldwide in 2019 was recycled.

//DH

The effective management of e-waste will contribute critically to the goal of realizing sustainability, circularity, and resource efficiency. Ultimately, the aim is to continue advancing toward a circular economy and to close the loop so that products placed on the market are designed to 1) retain value and 2) return to the market as a new material or product through recovery, remanufacturing, refurbishing, and recycling processes.

MacAskill’s analysis is also riddled with problems. Like Ord, he suffers from definitional problems. He defines ‘civilisational collapse’ as society losing the ability to create most industrial and post-industrial technologies.62 This has little relation to more common definitions of societal collapse. It also assumes that we know the full range of potential industrial and post-industrial technologies. Worse still, like with Ord’s analysis, it replaces the question of whether climate change will cause civilisational collapse with an easier one: will climate change make large-scale agriculture on Earth impossible? MacAskill concludes no. Once again, this is a different question. In short, the coverage of climate change by the most prominent existential risk scholars has been simplistic and disappointing.

The assessments by existential risk scholars—Ord and MacAskill— have been the least convincing thus far. Ord uses an unworkable, ambiguous definition of existential risk.60 He defines an existential risk as one that “threatens the destruction of humanity’s longterm potential”. However, what our potential is depends on one’s values. Ord suggests that we minimise existential risks first and then determine “our potential” through a “Long Reflection”. This would essentially be a centuries-long worldwide philosophical conversation. This strategy creates a paradox: we are supposed to minimise risks to a concept that we cannot define until after we have reduced those risks. It is difficult—if not impossible— to assess climate change using this definition, as Ord doesn’t explicitly state his values, nor what “our potential” is. His analysis misses much of the most recent science and does not sufficiently consider ‘indirect’ impacts. Moreover, the chapter does not cogently answer the question of whether climate change will result in human extinction. Instead, after roughly estimating the direct impacts, Ord concludes that they will not make the entirety of Earth uninhabitable. This is an entirely different question to the likelihood of climate change causing human extinction. Ord’s use of a precise numerical figure is also largely baseless. As noted earlier, even groups of the best super-forecasters making predictions on clearly defined questions have little accuracy after 12 months.61

As all signs point to this year making history as the hottest ever recorded, a raft of new reports paint a stark picture of how the world’s top industrial nations are responding. There are limited signs of progress in the effort to phase out the greenhouse gas emissions from human activity driving the climate crisis, and many scientists affirm there is still time for governments and corporations to act. But time is quickly running out.

The studies confirm what many climate scientists have been assessing for months: that despite impressive advances in the adoption of renewable energy sources, the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters are lagging far behind their stated climate goals; warming temperatures are accelerating with impacts felt around the globe; and the planet is on track to breach average temperatures at or above 1.5°C, or 2.7°F, annually for the first time.

Hausfather = Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist and energy systems analyst at Berkeley Earth

But Hausfather noted that time is running out. “We have a vanishingly small remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5°C,” he said. “There’s a growing consensus in the scientific community that we’ve waited too long to reduce emissions and passing 1.5°C for at least a period of time is pretty much inevitable at this point. What we want to do now is make sure we don’t make the same mistake and come back 15 years from now saying, well it’s too late to avoid 2° because we didn’t limit emissions in the meantime. We should learn from our mistakes here and not waste any more time.”

NDCs = Nationally Determined Contributions, a metric used in the Paris Agreement

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) finds that global emissions must fall by at least 43% from 2019 levels by 2030 to align with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree-C goal. However, current NDCs will only reduce global emissions by about 8% from 2019 levels.

Researchers are sounding the alarm, predicting that the world is on a trajectory toward a tipping point marked by extinctions and unpredictable changes on a scale unprecedented since the retreat of the glaciers 12,000 years ago (Pappas, 2012). Professor Anthony Barnosky et al. (2012) from the University of California, Berkeley, along with 17 other scientists, caution that planet Earth may transform into a less hospitable abode for life. As per Barnosky et al. (2012), "There is a very high possibility that by the end of the century, the Earth is going to be a very different place. You can envision these changes as a fast period of adjustment where we get pushed through the eye of the needle. As we are going through the eye of the needle, that is when we see political strife, economic strife, war, and famine." The smooth curve in blue shows northern hemisphere temperatures over a period of 1000 years. Its uncertainty range is in light blue, which is overlaid with green dots showing a 30-year global average. The red curve shows the measured global mean temperature since the Industrial Revolution.

For decades, climate change deniers have vigorously attempted to discredit the hockey stick graph (Graph 7.2) developed by Michael Mann and his colleagues. However, in a remarkable turn of events, more than 25 years later, numerous independent reconstructions of past temperature changes have emerged, all validating Mann and his colleagues' original findings. Recently, during his acceptance inaugural speech for the Humanist of the Year award by the American Humanist Association (AHA), Michael Mann had eloquently articulated the significance of these validations. He had highlighted that the latest studies suggest that the warming of our planet in recent decades is unparalleled in tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of years (Mann, 2023).

//DH

Today, it is clear that the current linear economic model of electronics production, consumption, and disposal is no longer fit for purpose. It is challenged by consumer preference and a greater focus on sustainability and the circular economy — an economy that seeks to eliminate waste and pollution, keep materials at their highest economic value, recirculate products and materials through the value chain, reduce the draw on nonrenewable minerals, fuels, and feedstocks, and create regenerative systems.[14]

If we contemplate the most extreme possible outcome for Earth's climate future, and given the seeming indifference of political and global corporate elites to heed scientific advice or public sentiment toward decarbonizing the economy, then we are potentially looking at an increase of global temperatures by 5.4 °F (3 °C) by 2050. Scientists predict that at this threshold, the world's ice sheets would disappear, severe droughts would decimate vast sections of the Amazon forest (eradicating one of the world's largest carbon offsets), and Earth would enter a feedback loop of increasingly intense and deadly conditions (Carleton et al., 2021; Hansen et al., 2011; Hsiang et al., 2019; Mulholland, 2019). In this bleak scenario, 35% of the global land area and 55% of the global population would be exposed to lethal heat conditions for more than 20 days a year, pushing the limits of human survivability. Concurrently, droughts, floods, and wildfires would regularly devastate the landscape. About one-third of the world's land surface would transform into deserts. Complete ecosystems, starting with the planet's coral reefs, rainforests, Arctic ice sheets, and the total deglaciation of the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, would collapse. The agricultural productivity of the tropics would be devastated, displacing more than one billion people. This mass migration, coupled with diminishing coastlines and acute shortages of food and water, would strain the societal fabric of the world's most populous nations. Conflicts over resources could escalate, potentially even culminating in nuclear war. If not urgently addressed with comprehensive mitigation strategies and restoration efforts, this scenario could mark the end of global human civilization as we currently know it. It is like sailing in a leaky boat on a stormy sea.

Nearly half the emissions that cause climate change come from the production and use of everyday items, from cars to clothes to food and much more. This excludes the emissions from freight transport and energy use in non-residential buildings — when including these materials, the number rises to 70% of global emissions.

As the population and consumerism increases, so does the demand for materials. Emissions are likely to grow fast without changes to current production and consumption. For steel, cement, aluminium and plastics, emissions are predicted to rise by a factor of two to four by 2050. Emissions arising from producing these materials — which are integral to the economy — are particularly hard to abate due to energy-intensive processes that cannot currently be catered to by clean energy sources. At the same time, global food demand is set to rise by 42%. Under current practices in the food sector, the emissions necessary to meet this demand alone will greatly exceed the global carbon budget.

The planetary boundaries framework (1, 2) draws upon Earth system science (3). It identifies nine processes that are critical for maintaining the stability and resilience of Earth system as a whole. All are presently heavily perturbed by human activities. The framework aims to delineate and quantify levels of anthropogenic perturbation that, if respected, would allow Earth to remain in a “Holocene-like” interglacial state. In such a state, global environmental functions and life-support systems remain similar to those experienced over the past ~10,000 years rather than changing into a state without analog in human history. This Holocene period, which began with the end of the last ice age and during which agriculture and modern civilizations evolved, was characterized by relatively stable and warm planetary conditions. Human activities have now brought Earth outside of the Holocene’s window of environmental variability, giving rise to the proposed Anthropocene epoch (4, 5).

Planetary-scale environmental forcing by humans continues and individual Earth system components are, to an increasing extent, in disequilibrium in relation to the changing conditions. As a consequence, the post-Holocene Earth is still evolving, and ultimate global environmental conditions remain uncertain. Paleoclimate research, however, documents that Earth has previously experienced largely ice-free conditions during warm periods (6, 7) with correspondingly different states of the biosphere. It is clearly in humanity’s interest to avoid perturbing Earth system to a degree that risks changing global environmental conditions so markedly. Ice cover is only one indicator of substantial system-wide change in numerous other Earth system dimensions. The planetary boundaries framework delineates the biophysical and biochemical systems and processes known to regulate the state of the planet within ranges that are historically known and scientifically likely to maintain Earth system stability and life-support systems conducive to the human welfare and societal development experienced during the Holocene.

The scientific updates and analyses presented here confirm that humanity is today placing unprecedented pressure on Earth system. Perhaps most worrying in terms of maintaining Earth system in a Holocene-like interglacial state is that all the biosphere-related planetary boundary processes providing the resilience (capacity to dampen disturbance) of Earth system are at or close to a high-risk level of transgression. In a recent study (18), it was shown that several regional climate tipping points, relevant for stabilizing the global system, have already been or are close to being transgressed, thus weakening global resilience capacity. This implies low/falling resilience precisely when planetary resilience is needed more than ever to cope with increasing anthropogenic disturbances. There is an urgent need for more powerful scientific and policy tools for analyzing the whole of the integrated Earth system with reliability and regularity and guiding political processes to prevent altering the state of Earth system beyond levels tolerable for today’s societies. In addition to more consistent collection and collation of relevant global environmental data, this will require the development of Earth system models that more completely capture geosphere-biosphere-anthroposphere interactions than is the case today. The known interdependence of planetary boundaries is confirmed by Earth system science understanding (14, 22) of the planet as an integrated, partially self-regulating, system. To better understand the risk to this system and the critical boundaries that humankind should consider in its economic and social activities, Earth system analysis now has to continue advancing a planetary boundaries framework. In addition, it must substantially increase the ecological realism of simulation and analyses of the biosphere as an adaptive core entity of Earth system. These initiatives are underway but have to be further developed into a coherent process of integrated Earth system analysis across the physical, chemical, and biological domains not focused just on climate.

The SHOP SAFE Act had a laudable goal (to reduce or eradicate the use of counterfeit marks in connection with the sale and distribution of goods that implicate health and safety on e-commerce platforms), but the Act simply went too far. Rather than addressing the real question-the level of knowledge required for any third party accused of contributory infringement-SHOP SAFE was limited to e-commerce platforms, and it attempted to impose on the platform the burden of demonstrating that it took twelve separate steps to verify the identity of the listing party and the authenticity of marks used in connection with the sale of goods, in order to avoid liability. The processes to be implemented were not gauged to any perceived risk that the items offered for sale might be counterfeit or could potentially cause a level of harm to purchasers or end users. Further, many of the terms in the act were ill-defined, and there was much ambiguity about precisely what was required from the ecommerce platforms in order for them to avoid contributory liability. For example, the proposed act required "reasonable proactive technological measures for screening goods before displaying the goods to the public" in order to prevent use of a counterfeit mark,416 but it was unclear whether this was intended to require screening of the actual goods themselves, images depicting the goods, descriptions of the goods, or something else entirely. "Reasonable technological measures for screening third-party sellers" were also required, in order to ensure that terminated sellers do not later rejoin the platform under an alias,417 but again no further details were provided.

In 2023, global retail e-commerce sales reached an estimated 5.8 trillion U.S. dollars. Projections indicate a 39 percent growth in this figure over the coming years, with expectations to surpass eight trillion dollars by 2027.

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