Using Data Mining To Assess Environmental Impacts of Household Consumption Behaviors

Household consumption is a main driver of economy and might be regarded as ultimately responsible for environmental impacts occurring over the life cycle of products and services. Given that purchase decisions are made on household levels and are highly behavior-driven, the derivation of targeted environmental measures requires an understanding of household behavior patterns and the resulting environmental impacts. To provide an appropriate basis in support of effective environmental policymaking, we propose a new approach to capture the variability of lifestyle-induced environmental impacts. Lifestyle-archetypes representing prevailing consumption patterns are derived in a two-tiered clustering that applies a Ward-clustering on top of a preconditioning self-organizing map. The environmental impacts associated with specific archetypical behavior are then assessed in a hybrid life cycle assessment framework. The application of this approach to the Swiss Household Budget Survey reveals a global picture of consumption that is in line with previous studies, but also demonstrates that different archetypes can be found within similar socio-economic household types. The appearance of archetypes diverging from general macro-trends indicates that the proposed approach might be useful for an enhanced understanding of consumption patterns and for the future support of policymakers in devising effective environmental measures targeting specific consumer groups.