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Journal of Cleaner Production 19 (2011) 1901e1905

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Journal of Cleaner Production

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/ jc lepro

Perspectives on Finland’s sustainable consumption and production policy

Antero Honkasalo*

Ministry of the Environment, Kasarminkatu 25, Helsinki, PO Box 35, Government, Finland

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 28 June 2010Received in revised form9 December 2010Accepted 23 December 2010Available online 31 December 2010

Keywords:Material and energy efficiencyEnvironmental economic instrumentsFactor targets

* Tel.: þ358 0505250892.E-mail address: antero.honkasalo@ymparisto.fi.

0959-6526/$ e see front matter � 2010 Elsevier Ltd.doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2010.12.017

a b s t r a c t

The Finnish approach that is starting from the basic human needs of food, housing, mobility and relatedlifestyles enables us to address the social dimension of sustainable development alongside the ecologicaland economic dimensions. In this context environmental problems cannot be resolved in isolation frompeople’s everyday lives, as can happen if environmental policies are based purely on emissions.

But it is also worth questioning the potential for national SCP programmes in today’s global markets.Over the last ten years, domestic material flows within the Finnish economy have remained fairlyconstant, with gains in material efficiency cancelled out by increasing levels of material consumption.However, external material flows and the consequent environmental impacts have steadily increased,and the magnitude and environmental impacts of both imports and exports are approximately the sameas for domestic flows. This means that the role of external material flows can no longer be ignored innational SCP policies.

It is also important to integrate SCP with climate policies. Finland’s national climate and energystrategy is mainly based on the need to reduce CO2 emissions from energy production and industrialinstallations, but there is also a need for complementary actions to reduce the carbon footprints causedby private and public consumption.

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1. Introduction

Proposals for Finland’s first national programme to promotesustainable consumption and production were finalised in June2005 by a committee representing a wide range of stakeholders.The programme was created in response to the decision made atthe UN Sustainable Development Summit in 2002 to create ten-year framework programmes to promote sustainable forms ofproduction and consumption.

I will briefly outline Finland’s SCP programme, explain how it isbeing implemented, describe the challenges we are facing whilerenewing the programme, and suggest what conclusions can bedrawn from Finland’s experiences.

I have personally been involved in the planning and imple-mentation of Finland’s SCP programme, heading the groupresponsible for the programme within the ministry’s environ-mental protection department, and serving as a deputy chairmanon the programme’s own committee. This has allowed me toinfluence its content and implementation from the start. Thisundoubtedly colours my assessment of the programme, but my

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inside view can also give some new insights to those problems thatwe face while building up an SCP-process.

2. Getting more from less e Finland’s approach to sustainableconsumption and production

When the EU started preparations for the Johannesburgsummit, Finland offered to take responsibility for the theme of eco-efficiency. Sweden, Denmark and the UK also got involved. An EUinitiative then shifted the focus from eco-efficiency to sustainableconsumption and productione a concept that had often featured inUNEP and CSD documents, but with no concrete content or policygoals. After a complex process, the Johannesburg summit approveda decision stating that to promote sustainable consumption andproduction a “Framework of Programmes will be elaborated andadopted by governments at the Commission of Sustainable Devel-opment in 2010e2011”.

Since Finland had taken the initiative on this theme, we resolvedto act promptly at national level to implement the summit decisionand set an example. A national SCP committee was set up by theMinistry of the Environment and the Ministry of Trade andIndustry. The subsequent preparation of a national programmeattracted great interest, with all stakeholders wanting representa-tion in the committee, which became exceptionally large with 32

A. Honkasalo / Journal of Cleaner Production 19 (2011) 1901e19051902

members. The Chancellor of Helsinki University Kari Raivio waschosen to chair the committee, which started work in November2003 and published its report on 31.5.2005 (Commission forSustainable Consumption and Production (KULTU), 2005).

2.1. Starting from basic human needs

The committee’s starting point was the search for means tomeet society’s basic needs in sustainable ways. These needs includehousing, food, transportation, welfare and leisure. This approachdiffered from earlier integrated product policies (Honkasalo, 2001)and from the EU’s SCP Action Plan (European Commission, 2008),which largely focused on providing consumers with reliable andcomprehensible information, and on bringing all product policiesunder one umbrella emphasising life cycle thinking. These issueswere part of Finland’s programme named “Getting more and betterfrom less”, but not the starting point.

Until the early 2000s Finnish environmental policies largelyaimed to reduce the harmful environmental impacts of theproduction phase. This was largely because the pollution of Fin-land’s rivers and lakes by the pulp and paper industry dominatedenvironmental policy thinking from the 1970s to the 1990s. Theneed to curb acidifying emissions was also a major issue ina country of forests, since they threatened the future supply of rawmaterials.

But in the early 2000s this emphasis changed, since it hadbecome possible to decouple emissions of almost all other pollut-ants than carbon dioxide from production sites. Finland’s currentenvironmental problems are more and more connected toincreasing material consumption and changes in the spatial struc-ture of communities caused by suburbanization.

Finland is relatively rich in natural resources. The metallurgicaland paper industries still contribute greatly to the nationaleconomy, even though the electronics industry has become thecountry’s most important exporter. The energy and materialintensiveness of the Finnish economy is increased by the country’slow population density and cold climate, as well as its reliance onindustries processing raw materials. Per capita levels of energy andmaterial consumption are high by international standards. Thisincreases the political pressure to enhance the energy and materialefficiency of consumption.

According to Finland’s SCP programme new innovations, tech-nologies and businesses can still be built up on the basis of naturalresources, as long as they fulfill the criteria for sustainable devel-opment. The programme also proposed that a new national centrefor material efficiency should be established, to provide materialefficiency audits and other services for businesses, the public sectorand citizens, and to coordinate related advisory and consultingservices.

Finland’s programme proposed that far-sighted policy outlinesshould be drawn up concerning the reshaping of the taxationsystem. Such revisions should be based on the sparing use ofnatural resources, reductions in harmful environmental impacts,and support for eco-efficient innovations and services. Thecommittee specifically stressed that motor vehicle taxation shouldbe staggered according to vehicles’ carbon dioxide emissions, andthat services should be less heavily taxed.

To promote material efficiency, economic incentives were alsoproposed to encourage the environmentally favourable renovationof buildings, and the restoration of architecturally or historicallysignificant buildings. In the construction sector it is also importantto promote new product-service concepts and improvements inenvironmental management systems, in order to encourage theadoption of environmentally favourable waste management,wastewater treatment and energy solutions.

The public sector can be highly influential in this context, sinceas much as 15% of Finland’s gross national product is used for publicsector procurements. The committee proposed that the publicauthorities should draw up suitable purchasing strategies by 2010,defining environmental criteria for all purchases.

The crucial role of the spatial structure of communities is alsohighlighted in the context of sustainable consumption. Toencourage the use of public transport, environmentally favourableservices and product sharing, it is important to ensure that growthcentres are developed intensively, and that a wide range of elec-tronic services are available across the country. Municipalities playa vital role in shaping the spatial structure of local communities.Information technologies can also be exploited to reduce the needfor people to travel.

The committee additionally stressed the need for informationsharing and wide-ranging collaboration to create a suitable basisfor the emergence of sustainable consumption and productionpatterns. The programme itself includes many proposals forintensified co-operation between different actors, notably inenvironmental education and the promotion of eco-innovations.The need for various kinds of research and assessments is alsoassessed.

One special feature of Finland’s consensus-based system is theinvolvement of stakeholder groups in shaping environmentalpolicies right from the start. This is both a strength and aweakness.It means that decisions and programmes like the SCP programmecan be created through open participatory processes involving allparties, including NGOs as well as industrial associations. Thisapproach builds up mutual trust and facilitates commitment. Oncedecisions are made, they are usually adhered to. But one drawbackis that targets are defined according to common denominators. Insome worst cases, important but contentious issues may be simplyset aside to avoid conflict.

The SCP committee discussed the possibility of setting targetsfor material efficiency, including the absolute decoupling of energyand material consumption from economic growth, and factor goalsfor eco-efficiency. But it was not ultimately possible to agree onquantitative targets, even on a non-binding basis.

Material efficiency targets were considered problematic byindustry. It was feared that they could present barriers to theexpansion of operations in the metallurgical and pulp and papersectors. There were also different opinions within the committeeon the suitability of describing environmental loads in terms ofpurely quantitative material flows, since there are considerablequalitative differences between different material streams. Ulti-mately the programme only recommended that the environmentalimpacts of the material flows in the Finnish economy should beexamined.

Where industry is concerned, the programme’s focus is on lifecycle thinking. For exported products Finnish policies can onlyaddress the impacts of the manufacturing phase and transportationwithin Finland. Other measures to improve the eco-efficiency ofindustry can mainly be based on voluntary schemes or Finland’sinfluence in shaping EU legislation and international agreements.

2.2. The story so far

The Finnish Government examined the proposed SCP pro-gramme in spring 2006, and highlighted issues related to economicmechanisms, material efficiency and public sector procurements. Itwas also resolved at this stage that a working group should be setup to monitor the implementation of the proposals. The officialprogramme of the new government formed in spring 2007included a specific commitment to implement the proposals of theSCP committee.

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The following actions within the programme have already beeninitiated or realised:

- The new material efficiency service centre has been set up.- Vehicle taxation has been revamped, and graded according tovehicles’ CO2 emissions.

- Taxation has been eased on domestic services performed forhouseholds.

- A new scheme enables employers to provide commutingemployees with public transport tickets.

- A new programme for sustainable public sector procurementsincludes targets for the public authorities, and proposedmeasures to encourage public sector purchasers to makeenvironmentally favourable choices.

- The harmful environmental impacts of Finland’s material flowshave been analysed.

- Discussions have commenced towards the development ofmaterial efficiency agreements.

- Energy efficiency agreements have been renewed.- New sources of funding for building renovations have been setup.

- An action plan has been drafted to promote environmentalinnovations.

Some of above mentioned national actions would have beentaken evenwithout the SCP programme, but for somemeasures theexistence of the programme has been decisive. The programme hasproven to bewell-timed to promote thewider discussion in Finlandof the environmental impacts of consumption, since these issuesare becoming increasingly topical.

During the drafting of the programme it was difficult to achieveunanimity on proposed economic policies, but the proposals in thisarea have been fairly well realised e primarily because of the highpolitical priority subsequently given to climate policies.

Monitoring of the programme has mainly focused on theprogress made in implementing its measures, and means topromote implementation. There has been no attempt to evaluatethe SCP programme’s influence on emissions and other environ-mental impacts.

The scattered and broad scope of the programme’s measures hasclearly hindered decision-making and implementation. Proposedmeasures were assigned to all ministries, municipalities and theprivate sector, covering the whole of Finnish society. Even thoughresponsibility for each measure was assigned to specific actors,there has been no effective way to ensure actions are duly initiated.The government’s processing of the programmewas largely limitedto providing political support.

3. What next?

Finland’s SCP programme will be reviewed during 2011e2012.At the time of writing only preliminary discussions on the pro-gramme’s future direction had been held.

Since the programme was first drafted there have been greatchanges. Mitigating climate change has become a central factor inboth economic and environmental policies. Finland’s new climateand energy strategy, launched in autumn 2008, largely addressesenergy production and related targets (Ministry of Employmentand the Economy, 2008). In autumn 2009 the government pre-sented Parliament with a longer-term climate policy review (PrimeMinister’s Office, 2009).

The financial crisis has also changed the situation. The sustain-ability of the public sector is becoming a key economic problem inthe post-recovery phase. The financial crisis has also dramatically

shaken industry, with Finland’s paper industry particularlysuffering.

Growth in China and India caused steep rises in raw materialprices before the economic crisis, but oil prices have not yet fallenback to their previous levels in spite of the slump.

Our knowledge base on the environmental impacts of theFinnish economy has expanded. As proposed in the SCP pro-gramme, a new research programme was launched to examine theenvironmental impacts of material flows caused by the Finnisheconomy. This ENVIMAT Programme combined an input-outputanalysis of the national economy with life cycle analyses (Seppäläet al., 2009, see also Seppälä et al., in this issue).

I will now give some ideas how to go forward by addressing thefollowing four key questions:

1) How can the lifestyles be influenced?2) How change the product systems?3) How set objectives for material efficiency?4) How significant are the national and international levels in the

context of sustainable consumption?

These issues already arose when the SCP programme wasdrafted, but it proved difficult to achieve unanimity or find suitablesolutions. They still remain vital questions at a time when theprogramme is being renewed, and the wider political processrelated to SCP is unfolding.

3.1. Lifestyles

Ehrenfeld (2008) compares today’s consumer culture to addic-tion. We consume material goods as if they were intoxicatingliquor. Meeting each need with a new purchase only leads toa desire to acquire even better, newer and technically moreadvanced products. Ehrenfeld claims that this creates a viciouscircle leading to ever greater material consumption and everincreasing environmental risks. Meeting needs in this way does notultimately lead to the satisfaction consumers crave, however, sinceit only returns them to their starting point.

In many studies the genuine progress indicator (GPI) shows noclear improvement in well-being any more in line with the growthin material consumption during the 1990s and 2000s (VonWeizsäcker et al., 2010). In Finland, this indicator reached a lowin 2004, before rising slightly. One reason for this is that the growthin private consumption has been faster than consequent rises inharmful environmental impacts and social inequality. The rise inGPI since 2004 has been considerably slower than growth in grossnational income (GNI), and GPI has not yet climbed back to thehigher levels reached earlier (Rättö, 2009).

If economic growth no longer leads to improved well-being orhappiness after a certain point, then why is everyone so desperateto strive for growth in material consumption instead of beingcontent with sufficiency? This can no longer be due to ignorance.People in industrialised countries are well aware that we will haveto change our consumer behaviour and lifestyles sooner or later.

Our basicmaterial needse food, housing and transportatione liebehind most environmental problems (Seppälä et al., 2009, andSeppälä et al., in this issue). Freedom of choice on meeting theseneeds is nevertheless important, since these aspects of lifestyles arecentral to every culture. If we try to shape theway peoplemeet theirbasic needs, we seek to shape how they live, or should live. TheWorldwatch Institute (2010) rightly stresses the importance ofculture for sustainable consumption.

The authorities can make it economically unfavourable to buyunhealthy or environmentally harmful foods, but they cannot forcepeople to eat vegetables insteadofmeat. The idea ofmeasures to limit

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unnecessary journeys, for instance, does not fit inwell with the needto safeguard citizens’ basic rights. However, we cannot any moreavoid inSCP-process thedifficultquestionsof sufficiencyand fairness.

In this context it is important to understandwhich problems andrisk levels are seen as acceptable by thepublic, and toensure that therisk management measures are also acceptable. In his book onclimate policies, Giddens (2009) points out that people mustsimultaneously address their own everyday problems while alsoworrying about the much longer-term threat of climate change.When these interests conflict,more immediate needs easilywin out,especially since many of the actions required from citizens involvefeelings of guilt, or personal sacrifices. Giddens calls for climatepolicies that encourage citizens to take positive and acceptableactions, admitting thatmodels for such actions are not yet available.

3.2. Markets

The financial crisis has created new opportunities to applyeconomic policies in promoting sustainable consumption andproduction. OECD has a “Green Growth Strategy” as a key part of itsworking programme. UNEP is meanwhile promoting a “GreenEconomy”(OECD, 2010) The OECD is keen to discover howconventional economic policies can be applied to facilitateeconomic growth by promoting environmental business andstructural economic changes that mitigate climate change. TheOECD’s green growth programme notably incorporates environ-mental protection into all of the organisation’s work, rather thantreating it as a separate sector.

In spite of wide political support for innovative economicmechanisms such as environmental taxation, such moves alsoalways attract intense opposition. Such policies change pricedifferentials and affect the competitiveness of different products,creating winners and losers. Energy taxes, for instance, burdenlower-income groups more that wealthier classes, since energycosts make up more of their spending and it is not progressive. It istherefore important when creating a sustainable consumption andconsumption programme to focus more than previously on impli-cations for income distribution and employment.

To decrease the material scale of economy it is important to taxthe troughtput flow from the point of “severance” from the ground.Such a tax includes more efficient resource use in both productionand consumption and is relatively easy tomonitor and collect (Daly,2008).

Energy taxes and waste taxes are already used in Finland, but sofar not material natural resource taxes. Actually, the governmenthas conversely tended to encourage the exploitation of naturalresources. Finland has a tax cut-off system that sets a energy taxceiling for energy-intensive industries utilising natural resources.

The Finnish parliamentarian Sanna Perkiö (2009) has made aninteresting new proposal for taxing the heat losses in wastewaterreleases from facilities such as nuclear power stations, to compelfacilities to seek useful ways to exploit waste heat. It is invariablyprudent in thermodynamic terms to exploit free energy optimally.Applied to all industrial installations waste heat taxation couldform an essential part of ecological tax reform.

3.3. Product systems

The products of the two cornerstones of Finnish industry, paperand electronics, are both used to disseminate information. Butwhereas the electronics industry is still on the rise, the productionof paper may already have peaked. We now have a fully developedelectronics product system that can cope with all transmissions ofinformation, but such products have as yet only partially replacedprinted publications. Paper is basically an optional extra in

information technology systems, albeit one which wewill still needas long as paper publications remain more reader-friendly thanmonitor screens. Printers, printing houses and the relatedproduction chains are technically superfluous, since we could stillget all information to everyone without them.

Although electronic communications require increasingamounts of energy and their ownmaterial infrastructure, as well astheir own environmental footprints and problems, transmittingeach bit of information electronically is almost always more envi-ronmentally friendly than using paper. Electronic information isalso easier to reproduce, distribute and destroy. Whenever a bit ofinformation is transmitted instead of a person, a service ora material object, this reduces environmental impacts.

The removal of paper from communications systems createsnew opportunities for sustainable consumption and production.There are many alternative uses for the biomass in Finland’s forests,and climate policies will increase their importance. There is alreadyheated political debate about how much biomass should bereserved for use in paper products, as raw material for the chem-icals industry, for timber construction, for biofuels, or for natureconservation and as a carbon sink.

Time factors related to product systems have important impli-cations for the effectiveness of policy mechanisms. The goals ofFinland’s energy and climate strategy should be reached by 2020,which gives us just ten years. The life-spans of the most importantproducts with regard to people’s basic needs are much longer:about 50e100 years for buildings and 15e25 years for cars, not tomention the timescale of traffic product systems. Investments inenergy production have a timescale of at least 30e40 years.

However, consumers may also generate rapid changes throughtheir own choices. Buying energy efficient heat pumps and fluo-rescent lamps, going vegetarian, or skipping a foreign holiday, allresult in immediate savings in environmental terms. Thus, Finland’sSCP programme should be integrated with other climate policyprogrammes and strategies, to make it focus effectively on reducingthe carbon footprint of public and private consumption.

In recent years government economic policies have striven tocreate favourable operating environments for businesses, withoutseriously striving to change industrial structures. Giddens (2009),however, believes that climate policy goals cannot be reached byany othermeans than increased planning. He talks about a return tosocial planning. Structural changes play also important role inOECD’s Green Growth strategy (OECD, 2010).

The long-term strategies require not only strategies for gettinginto the sustainable line, but also for dealing with changingperspectives andwith leaving room to unexpected shocks and eventsand that phenomena with different time-scales are nested withineach other (Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, 2009).

3.4. Global dimension

Finland’s experiences clearly show that the national SCP pro-gramme should account for global markets and internationalindustrial specialisation patterns. Over the last ten years, thematerial flows associated with the Finnish economy had remainedfairly constant, with any gains in material efficiency cancelled outby increasing levels of consumption. However, it is also importantto consider the harmful environmental impacts generated in othercountries by Finland’s increasing material consumption andproduction. These material flows were steadily increasing.Sustainable consumption and production can no longer be definedat the national level alone, if the material flows behind imports andexports and their environmental impacts are of the same order asdomestic consumption (Seppälä et al., 2009, and Seppälä et al., inthis issue).

A. Honkasalo / Journal of Cleaner Production 19 (2011) 1901e1905 1905

Improvements in eco-efficiency might only be achieved in onecountry because other countries are left bearing the environmentalburdens of the material flows behind imports and exports. Inevaluating the sustainability of material consumption at nationallevel the global level is also crucial.

Where consumption is concerned, it could inprinciplebeassumedthat levels of natural resource use per capita should be similar, or atleast that emission allowances linked to consumption should becomparable. But it can also be reasonably stated that the impacts ofnatural conditions on the ways people’s basic needs are met must beconsidered in setting country-specific targets for consumption.Factors such as climatic conditions, country sizes and populationdensities must be considered in addition to personal quotas.

Equitable burden-sharing is harder to achieve when it comes toproduction. Countries with raw material reserves inevitablyconsume more energy and have greater material flows thancountries whose role in the global economy specialises more onrefining finished products. The emissions generated duringproduction should therefore not be examined within nationalboundaries, but globally, with emission allowances shared out inaccordance with environmental capacities throughout the life cycleof production. This should minimise pressures on the environmentmore effectively than country-specific allocation systems.

But it can also be claimed that such a national allocation systemis fair in that income from exports is mainly used to enhance well-being in the country in question, and to acquire products notmanufactured domestically.

In the context of equitable burden-sharing it is no longerpossible to avoid the subject of factor objectives(Von Weizsäckeret al., 2010). Climate policies invariably boil down to the questionof how much industrialised countries need to reduce their emis-sions to enable developing economies to grow enough to give theircitizens good living standards. The idea behind factor objectives isderived from the question of how much energy and material effi-ciency must be improved in industrialised countries to ensure thatsufficient natural resources remain to meet the growing needs ofdeveloping countries.

Factor objectives were first proposed more than 15 years ago.Initially they attracted great interest, but subsequently they havevirtually vanished from international environmental policy docu-ments. Raw material producing developing countries have fearedthat radical resource efficiency targets will reduce raw materialprices, while industries have worried about rising costs.

Factor targets alone cannot lead to the sustainable scale ofeconomy, because rebound effects seem to partly consume thoseenvironmental benefits that have been achieved by improvingmaterial and energy efficiency. Thus far this has happened to theFinnish national economy. However, quantitative efficiency targetsare important, since theygiveat least a rough ideaofwhereweshouldbe aiming. They also enable us to follow trends. Challenging and pro-active targets encourage imaginative thinking and risk financing.

4. Conclusions

SCP cannot be achieved unless society’s governance and infra-structure encourage, facilitate and support sustainable choices at

all levels. In democratic societies citizens must have a right tochoose their own lifestyles and consumption patterns. It is vital toprovide reliable and easily comprehensible information on envi-ronmental impacts, but this alone will not be enough. Environ-mental issues usually account for only a few of the factorsconsidered during decision-making, and often they are not givena high priority. Cost is almost always the overriding factor. Thismakes economic mechanisms essential for SCP. However, evenmore important is that SCP can give people positive perspectives tothe actions of their everyday life.

Global approach is needed also in national SCP programmes.The greatest challenge globally is to eliminate poverty in devel-oping countries in ways that enable global environmental prob-lems to be simultaneously resolved, while also allowingeconomies to be scaled in line with the capacities of ecosystemservices. This highlights the need for resource efficiency and thesignificance of clear quantitative targets in the SCP policy processincluding export and import. However, in shaping such targets it isimportant to consider countries’ specialisations in the context ofthe global economy, their levels of development, and naturalconditions.

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