ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain.
Sec. Sustainable Consumption
Buy, Use, Make – A Taxonomy of Sustainable Consumption Practices
Provisionally accepted
- Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
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In policy debates around sustainable consumption, the term is often associated with buying products or services that have lower environmental impact when compared with mainstream options. This paper contributes to the growing body of research that seeks to nuance understandings of sustainable consumption by providing a taxonomy structured into three 'types' of sustainable consumption practices: 1) buying, 2) using and 3) making. The taxonomy highlights that sustainable consumption concerns not only the decisions made around the acquisition of a product or service, but also how products and resources are maintained, reused, repaired, shared and enabled – while also considering wider socio-environmental aspects such as community empowerment. The relevance for policy lies in the argument that sustainable consumption goes beyond the buying type – enacted through, for example, public procurement or promotion of eco-labelling – to also include the using and making types, i.e. public policy that facilitates sharing, making and repairing beyond market-relations.
Keywords: sustainable consumption, Taxonomy, Strong sustainable consumption, Prosumption, Social practices
Received: 03 Jul 2025; Accepted: 20 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bradley, Hilliard and Parekh. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Vishal Parekh, parekh@kth.se
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