Project Start – ProMoNa: Prosumption Models for Sustainable Food and Clothing

Are you a prosumer? That depends. If you have ever assembled furniture for your own home you are a prosumer. If you have knitted your own socks, engaged in an urban gardening project or used the self-checkout at the supermarket, that counts too. If done right, prosumption can hold great sustainability potential.

According to Alvin Toffler’s “Third Wave” (1980), prosumerism is “the production for self-use” and today is gaining more and more attention with regards to its possible sustainability benefits. Prosumerism can take many forms, all of which have one thing in common: individuals or communities – in service of their own consumption – take over activities within the supply chain that conventionally are undertaken by businesses.

We recently kicked off our 15-month long research project “ProMoNa”, which is tasked with finding those prosumption alternatives that hold the most sustainability potentials. We will first map prosumerism and cluster the different prosumption activities to get an overview of the different business and/or value creation models that emerge. We will perform a trend analysis, combined with expert interviews and workshops. Secondly, we will select some of the most promising prosumerism models from the fields of food and clothing and apply our holistic assessment tool handprint to assess their sustainability potentials.

The project will deliver a practitioner guideline targeted at consumer policy, consumer organisations, businesses, and prosumers themselves promoting prosumer models that support sustainability.

It is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection and implemented in collaboration with the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy.

For more information, please contact Imke Schmidt.

Photo by Lewis Wilson on Unsplash