Abstract
Objective. Recently, “sustainable production and consumption” has been advocated. It is an approach from not only the perspective of “sustainable production”, which has already been employed, but also from the perspective of consumption with a view to achieving sustainability. The “rebound effect” is discussed from the perspective of “sustainable consumption”. In General, rebound effect means secondary environmental load derived from efficiency improvement. Several types of rebound effect have been reported. For instance, when a new goods or service generate surplus time and cost, they might be spent on the other action that brings about large environmental load. According to Greening (2000), such type of rebound effect is called “indirect rebound effect”. In this paper, we propose a new method of estimating the indirect rebound effect that utilizes a consumer behavior model and embodied intensity data of behavior. This mathematical model is based on the entropy principle from the field of information theory. The model calculates the every day life pattern of a target group on the basis of statistical data on behavior when an event brings about the rebound effect under time and budget constraints. The environmental load resulting from change in behavior can be estimated.
Results and Discussion. The subject of our case study is teleworking and the rebound effect for the time generated by telecommuting was presumed. The case study reflects the fact that the change in life behavior pattern attributable to telecommuting leads to a reduction in CO2 emissions as a result of the estimation even if the rebound effect attributable to telework is taken into account. There is an advantage in that the behavior of the target group can be represented on the basis of statistical data, although the proposed model has a limitation in that only the rebound effect under constraints of time and cost is considered.
Conclusions. This paper proposed a new method of estimating the rebound effect and its usefulness was shown by the results of the case study of telework. By using this method, the rebound effect caused by life behavior pattern change of the target group can be estimated without questionnaire or utility function. We intend to extend this method so as to evaluate various situations in the future.
