Search

Sustainable business models can help us move beyond the current consumer society and integrate sustainability into our lifestyles. The COVID-19 crisis was a strong test of sustainability for these models. In our study, we assessed which business models are highly dependent on the economic cycle and are highly embedded in consumer society. We conducted our research at the height of the second wave of the pandemic and asked university students about changes in their consumption patterns and their expectations for the future. We carried out cluster analysis on our sample of 622 respondents. We were interested in the extent to which participation in certain business models could be associated with the rebound effect that could be predicted after the epidemic. The stronger this effect, the more embedded a sustainable business model is in consumer society and the less able it is to reduce its environmental impacts in the long term. We found that resource efficiency, the sharing economy, and digitalization fall into this category. Participation in sufficiency and stewardship-based business models predicted much less rebound impact. These models showed more clearly the sustainability characteristics of sustainable business models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A huge set of sustainable business models have emerged during recent decades to promote decarbonization, but the drivers of their consumer adoption remain somewhat unclear. This paper examines these drivers based on a sample of 622 university students during the second wave of COVID-19 at the end of 2020. Our research links business models to the theory of planned behavior and discusses their adoption from a consumer perspective. Using exploratory factor analysis, we identified five major and nine minor components of SBM adoption. Findings suggest that functional benefits, general attitudes, and habits may play a more important role in these factors than sustainability values during the second wave of pandemic. Still, sustainability values have neither lost nor gained momentum during hard times. Thrift, localization, and digitalization have become more dominant. We find that some SBM models are very strongly embedded in consumer culture, so the spread of SBM models does not necessarily lead to a reduction in environmental impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]