As an old saying goes: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. This – unfortunately – also applies to solutions that have been thought up as sustainability alternatives to existing solutions, but end up having unintended, negative effects on our planet.
"Never has there been such a strong focus on the development of sustainability solutions, such as car sharing schemes, resource efficient products, renewable energy sources, organic agriculture, and take-back systems. Nevertheless, society's most well-intended efforts to solve sustainability challenges have yet to achieve the expected gains," says Associate Professor at DTU, Daniela Pigosso.
This is in large part due to rebound effects, which are unintended negative consequences of interventions that offset potential sustainability gains. In fact, rebound effects, she says, undermine a staggering 47 per cent of potential sustainability gains on average, according to published data.
Plummeting car life spans
Take car sharing systems for example, Daniela Pigosso says:
"From a sustainability point of view, they seem like a great idea, because private cars are parked ca. 98 per cent of the time. With car sharing systems you provide people with access to a car without them having to buy one themselves. This in turn increases the car use so they are now on the road up to 30 per cent of the time."
However, according to a representative from a European car sharing scheme with whom the Associate Professor has spoken, figures from their scheme show that the lifetime of a car goes from about 10 years and 200.000 km on the clock when used by just the owner and their household to only six months and 60.000 km when it is used by multiple users in a sharing scheme.
The explanation is simple, she says: Cars weren't designed to be used by multiple people and the right incentives are not in place to ensure that occasional drivers take proper care when driving a car that isn't theirs. This results in more cars instead of fewer being needed to fulfill these people's mobility needs—a clear rebound effect, according to Daniela Pigosso. And this could be even worse, she says, if car sharing is substituting cycling or public transport.
