Nudging Sustainable Consumption: A Large-Scale Data Analysis of Sustainability Labels for Fashion in German Online Retail.

A transition toward a sustainable way of living is more pressing than ever. How do online retailers provide information on the sustainability of products to consumers? This article by Maike Gossen, Tilman Santarius and further team members in the journal Frontiers in Sustainability is based on a large-scale dataset we built by using AI methods, and which contains sustainability information of nearly 17,000 fashion products of leading online retailers in Germany. We find that only 14% of the tagged products present credible third-party verified sustainability labels. Hence, we strongly recommend political initiatives that tackle the risk of greenwashing resulting from uncertified and weak sustainability information in e-commerce.