Tamar Makov

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev | bgu · Department of Management

Significance Livestock-based food production is an important and pervasive way humans impact the environment. It causes about one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, and is the key land user and source of water pollution by nutrient overabundance. It also competes with biodiversity, and promotes species extinctions. Empowering consumers to ma...

In recent years, many organizations have sought to align their financial goals with environmental ones by identifying strategies that maximize profits while minimizing environmental impacts. Examples of this 'win-win' approach can be found across a wide range of industries, from encouraging the reuse of hotel towels, to the construction of energy e...

Reuse via secondhand markets can extend the use phase of products, thereby reducing environmental impacts. Analyzing 500,000 listings of used Apple and Samsung smartphones sold in 2015 and 2016 via eBay, we examine which product properties affect how long smartphones retain market value and facilitate market‐based reuse. Our results suggest that al...

Reducing food waste is widely recognized as critical for improving resource efficiency and meeting the nutritional demand of a growing human population. Here we explore whether the sharing economy can provide meaningful assistance to reducing food waste in a relatively low-impact and environmentally-sound way. Analyzing 170,000 postings on a popula...

Significance Local environmental conditions, such as air and water quality, are shaped, in part, by how societies allocate environmental harms and benefits. Since environmental conditions have long-lasting impacts on people’s lives, understanding the psychology behind such allocation decisions is critical. Across studies, we demonstrate that people...

Sugar is the largest agricultural crop by mass and has seen a rapid increase in consumption around the world. There are widespread public health efforts to curb sugar intake through targeted policies given its association with noncommunicable diseases. Although curbing sugar intake aligns with sustainable diets that meet essential environmental and...

This pre-print is now published here, with the final title: "Demand-side strategies key for mitigating material impacts of energy transitions" --> https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02016-z As societies abandon fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy, electric cars and other low-carbon technologies, environmental pressures shift from atmospheric...

As fossil fuels are phased out in favour of renewable energy, electric cars and other low-carbon technologies, the future clean energy system is likely to require less overall mining than the current fossil-fuelled system. However, material extraction and waste flows, new infrastructure development, land-use change, and the provision of new types o...

Material efficiency (ME), making products with less material or substituting with less carbon‐intensive material without a loss of functionality, can reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and complement other strategies to mitigate climate change. Seven ME strategies for cars and homes in the G7 countries were recently modeled in a study by the Int...

The digital sharing economy is commonly seen as a promising circular consumption model that could potentially deliver environmental benefits through more efficient use of existing product stocks. Yet whether sharing is indeed more environmentally benign than prevalent consumption models and what features shape platforms’ sustainability remains uncl...

In this research, we document knowledge gaps between consumers and experts about what consumer actions most effectively help mitigate climate change. We then identify three sources for lack of consumer knowledge on greenhouse gas emissions associated with consumption: carbon emissions labeling, awareness of indirect versus direct emissions, and ord...

Each year, consumers return billions of new products to sellers. Despite reports that once returned products are often discarded without ever being used, surprisingly little research has examined the environmental impacts of returns from a full lifecycle perspective. Building on a unique dataset covering over 630k returned apparel items, we map the...

Sharing food surplus via the digital sharing economy is often discussed as a promising strategy to reduce food waste and mitigate food insecurity at the same time. Yet if and how the global pandemic has affected digital food sharing are not yet well understood. Leveraging a comprehensive dataset covering over 1.8 million food exchanges facilitated...

The digital sharing economy is commonly thought to promote sustainable consumption and improve material efficiency through better utilization of existing product stocks. However, the cost savings and convenience of using digital sharing platforms can ultimately stimulate additional demand for products and services. As a result, some or even all of...

Social distancing reduces the transmission of COVID-19 and other airborne diseases. To test different ways to increase social distancing, we conducted a field experiment at a major US airport using a system that presented color-coded visual indicators on crowdedness. We complemented those visual indicators with nudges commonly used to increase COVI...

Rebound effects have been historically studied through narrow framings which may overlook the complexity of sustainability challenges, sometimes leading to badly informed conclusions and policy recommendations. Here we present a critical literature review of rebound effects in the context of sustainability science in order to (1) map existing rebou...

Despite the proliferation of multifunctional products, survey data suggests that instead of relying on one multifunctional product, consumers now rely on a community of multifunctional products, using them interchangeably to perform similar tasks. Such consumption patterns stand in stark contrast to consumers’ well-documented aversion towards waste...

Omega-3 EPA and DHA fatty acids are vital for human health, but current human nutritional requirements are greater than supply. This nutrient gap is poised to increase as demand increases and the abundance of aquatic foods and the amount of omega-3 they contain may dwindle due to climate change and overfishing. Identifying and mitigating loss and i...

A dominant narrative surrounding smartphone lifespans suggests that their objective functional capabilities deteriorate rapidly and that if only devices were more repairable consumers would use them longer thereby reducing demand for new production and e-waste generation. Here we use a big-data approach to help unpack this narrative and examine two...

The sustainable development goal (SDG) framework lacks a systems approach and addresses specific goals as separate elements, typically in isolation from each other. In doing so, the framework overlooks the fact that many of the goals are inherently linked such that progress toward one goal could either hinder or reinforce progress toward other goal...

In 2015, the United Nations General assembly adopted a set of 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), including goals to further reduce poverty, hunger and inequality and to improve education, health, cities, economic wellbeing, environmental conditions and access to water and energy. Science, technology and innovation (STI) will play critical rol...

The emergence of increasingly complex data in industrial ecology (IE) has caused scholarly interest in interactive visualization (IV). IV allows users to interact with data, aiding in processing and interpreting complex datasets, processes, and simulations. Consequently, IV can help IE practitioners communicate the complexities of their methods and...

The environmental benefits of the circular economy (CE) are often taken for granted. There are, however, reasons to believe that rebound effects may counteract such benefits by increasing overall consumption or “growing the pie.” In this study, we focus on two main rebound mechanisms: (1) imperfect substitution between “re-circulated” (recycled, re...

“Local food” is gaining in popularity, particularly within a rising alternative food movement, yet it remains an ambiguous term. We use an illustrative example—the case of “local milk” in Hawai‘i—to demonstrate this point. We evaluate "localness" by measuring the origins of production inputs by economic value and physical mass–an approach that is a...

Growing consumption of single-use bottled water has received criticism due to potentially adverse environmental outcomes. Networks of public-sphere water delivery stations have been proposed as a sustainable alternative for water consumption on-the-go, yet the life-cycle impacts of such stations are poorly understood. Here we evaluate the potential...

We thank Tichenor (1) for the attention to our paper (2). In it, we repeatedly stress the need for augmented and more refined data, and it is in this spirit we welcome Tichenor's letter. However, as shown in Fig. 1, Tichenor's approach, based on ana-lyzing a single farm in Sweden (3), yields beef greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that are within 9% of...

We thank Metson et al. (1) for their addition to our paper (2). These authors raise an important point, and are definitely right in pointing out the global importance of phosphorous and the dominant role of the livestock industry in its use. Our omission of phosphorous from our calculations, which Metson et al. point out, joins several other import...

The high environmental costs of raising livestock are now widely appreciated, yet consumption of animal-based food items continues and is expanding throughout the world. Consumers' ability to distinguish among, and rank, various interchangeable animal-based items is crucial to reducing environmental costs of diets. However, the individual environme...