2.4 SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION
Box 2.4.3: Gendered decision making in household consumption • •
Broadly speaking, evidence from South Asia suggests that, within the family purchases of food and other items for household consumption (as well as decisions about children’s health) fall within women’s area of decision-making (Kabeer 1999);
Data from several rural regions in Pakistan reveal that the only area of decision-making in which women reported playing a major decision-making role was in relation to the purchase of food: 71% of women reported having a say in the purchase of food, but only 17% report having a say in major household purchases (Sathar and Kazi 2000);
• Estimates of consumer spending that women “control” (without this term being defined in the original research) are as follows: Canada, 75%; United States, 73%; Germany, 70%; United Kingdom, 66%; Japan, 62%; Italy, 57%; China, 50% (Silverstein and Sayer 2009);
• In the United States there are higher rates of consumption and spending in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) households than in non-gay households, and higher rates in gay male households than in lesbian ones: male same-sex partnered households make 22% more “shopping trips” (term not defined) per year than the average non-gay household, and female same-sex households 9% more. Average annual spending on consumer packaged goods is 30% higher in male same-sex partnered households and 21% higher in female same-sex households compared with average spending in households in the United States (Catalyst 2015; Nielsen Reports 2013).
children, women tend to spend more on children’s needs, and households where women own assets have better child survival, nutrition, and education outcomes (UNICEF 2011; World Bank 2011).
Shining the environmental spotlight on unsustainable consumption in developed countries is an important and necessary strategy for directing attention to the major drivers of global environmental degradation. But identifying the “household” as a primary site of unsustainability has the distortive effect of placing global responsibility on feminized sites (households and individual consumer choices) while deflecting attention from masculinized constellations of unsustainable consumption such as militaries and extractive industries.
Consumption of plastics and chemicals
The types of materials being consumed globally have changed dramatically in recent decades. Plastics and synthetic chemicals have become globally ubiquitous. Between 1950 and 2012, world plastics production grew by an average 8.7% per year, rising from 1.7 million tons to the nearly 300 million tons of 2015 (Globalist 2015; PlasticsEurope 2015). Virtually everyone in the world is continually exposed in daily life to potentially hazardous chemicals; once these chemicals are in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat, they will end up in our bodies. That harmful chemicals enter the human body can be shown by measuring the body burden (the total amount of a chemical present in the body). In the average person, even in people who
live in isolated regions, dozens of hazardous chemicals have been identified in samples of blood, the umbilical cord, the placenta, breast milk, urine, hair, sperm and fatty tissue (CDC 2015; CDC 2009; COPHES 2012; Schuiling and van der Naald 2005).
In a 2011 World Health Organization (WHO) review, the global burden of disease from exposure to the small number of chemicals on which data were available was calculated. The authors concluded that, in 2004, 4.9 million deaths (8.3% of the total) were attributable to exposures to those chemicals (Prüss-Ustün et al. 2011). Some chemicals with known health effects, such as dioxins, cadmium, and mercury, as well as chronic exposure to pesticides, could not be included in the study due to incomplete data and information. The conclusions highlight that while the global disease burden due to exposures to hazardous chemicals is known to be considerable, it is underestimated due to very limited data. “Non-communicable diseases”, a broad category that includes deaths due to exposures to chemical and other environmental contaminants, were responsible for 68% of the 56 million deaths in the world in 2012 (WHO 2014). There is an emerging scientific consensus that previous estimates of the share of non- communicable diseases attributable to environmental contaminants significantly underestimated the actual contribution of these contaminants; this is largely because direct connections between early life exposures to chemical contaminants, although clearly associated with an elevated risk of disease later in life, are difficult to establish (Norman et al. 2013).
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