Quantity or quality? A Blind Spot for Carbon Footprint analysis and Demand-Side Policy

Research Project, 2026 – 2031

Meeting climate targets requires deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across all sectors. Demand-side changes are indispensable, and a promising but underexplored pathway is to target product quality rather than consumption volume. Policies could discourage short-lived, low-quality goods and incentivize more durable, repairable, and higher-quality alternatives. France’s proposed restrictions on ultra-fast fashion, or the EU’s new Right-to-Repair directive, illustrate that such measures may attract broad political backing in otherwise polarized contexts.Current tools for consumption-based carbon footprint analysis primarily rely on the “spending method” that assume proportionality between spending and emissions for specific product categories, failing to distinguish between larger quantities and higher-priced, higher-quality goods.  This produces systematic biases. Consumption of high-quality products that will last longer, seem more emission-intensive than they are, and the same blind spot hampers evaluation of policies targeting material efficiency and circularity and how they would affect different household groups.This project has three objectives:To develop new carbon footprint methodology that separates quantity and quality effects using a unique “double variation” approach. We combine transaction level household consumption data with micro-level business and trade statistics to capture variation both in consumer purchasing patterns and in producer emission intensities.To establish corrected baseline estimates of how emissions and resource use vary with income and expenditure for the Swedish population, providing a more robust foundation for analyzing carbon inequality and the distributional effects of climate policy.To evaluate the effectiveness and acceptability of quality-oriented policies such as restrictions on low-quality goods or incentives for repair and durability, by quantifying their potential to reduce emissions and material use, assessing their impacts across sectors and household groups, and testing levels of public support.The results will correct a longstanding methodological weakness, provide a more accurate picture of carbon footprint variation across income groups, and deliver robust policy analyses of the impact of quality-oriented measures.