Adding Green Products Can Backfire: The Consumer Bias That Rewards More and Punishes Less

When a hotel swaps rows of tiny plastic toiletry bottles for a single refillable dispenser, or when a company quietly strips unnecessary items from a product bundle to cut packaging waste, the environmentally responsible move would seem obvious to any observer. Yet new research from the University of Bath suggests that consumers often punish exactly these kinds of reductions, rewarding businesses instead for piling on more eco-friendly products, even when adding those items increases the overall environmental footprint. The study, published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, identifies what the authors call the sustainable additive bias: a deep-seated tendency to judge a company as more sustainable when it adds green items rather than when it removes them, regardless of which action actually delivers the greater environmental benefit.

The finding strikes at one of the most intuitive assumptions in modern marketing, namely that more eco-friendly products must equal more sustainability. Dr Diletta Acuti of the University of Bath School of Management, who led the work, argues that this equation is fundamentally flawed. Sustainability, she explains, is frequently about subtraction rather than addition: reducing what is produced, conserving resources, and avoiding goods that people do not genuinely need. An extra product does not become sustainable simply because it carries an eco-friendly label. Every item, however virtuous its materials or messaging, still requires raw inputs, manufacturing energy, transport and, eventually, disposal. The bias matters because it means the market may systematically reward the companies that produce more, not fewer, things.

The scale of the evidence behind the claim is considerable. The research, conducted by teams from the University of Bath, Audencia Business School, emlyon business school, the University of Portsmouth, ISM University of Management and Economics and the University of the Aosta Valley, drew on nine separate studies spanning hotels, consumer products, conferences, festivals and trade shows, together with a field study involving real hotel guests. Across these contexts the pattern held with striking consistency. People rewarded visible eco-friendly additions such as reusable bottles, organic toiletries and sustainable gift items, but gave almost no credit to businesses that reduced or removed products, even when the reduction was the more effective environmental intervention.

One of the most telling experiments involved 302 hotel guests. Participants evaluated rooms stocked with different selections of amenities. Rooms containing a larger array of eco-friendly amenities were rated as more sustainable than rooms with a minimal set, even though the pared-down room represented the lower-waste option. The result captures the paradox at the heart of the study: the room that looked greener was, in material terms, the less sustainable one. Guests were responding to what they could see, and what they could see was abundance, albeit abundance dressed in sustainable packaging. The absence of items, however deliberate and however beneficial, left no visual trace to be rewarded.

That visibility gap, the researchers argue, is the psychological engine of the bias. Adding something is inherently observable; removing something is not. Consumers can see the bamboo accessory, the reusable bottle or the eco-labelled hotel toiletry, and they interpret these objects as evidence of corporate effort. When a business removes unnecessary products to save resources, customers cannot see what is no longer there, so the action attracts little recognition and may even be read as a decline in service quality or generosity. In effect, the perceptual system that consumers use to judge sustainability is calibrated to detect additions, leaving subtraction invisible and unrewarded. Companies that genuinely minimise their footprint may therefore be outcompeted, in reputation terms, by rivals that simply add more green-looking products.

The implications extend well beyond hotel bathrooms. Dr Acuti points to the proliferation of reusable items as a case study in good intentions curdling into overconsumption. Reusable cups, water bottles and tote bags are all sound alternatives to disposable products, but many people now own cupboards full of them. She admits to having accumulated around twenty tote bags herself, many handed out free at conferences and events. One reusable bag is useful; producing and distributing far more than people need risks turning a sustainable idea into another form of overconsumption. Each additional tote, bottle or cup carries its own production and distribution footprint, and once the reuse threshold is passed, the cumulative environmental cost of these duplicates begins to rival the disposables they were meant to replace.

There is, however, an encouraging note in the findings. The studies showed that the sustainable additive bias can be reduced, and the remedies are practical. Clearly communicating the environmental effort behind removing products helps consumers understand that subtraction is a deliberate sustainability measure rather than a cut in service. Retaining highly recognisable sustainability signals, such as refillable bottles or other reusable products, also preserves the visible cues that consumers rely on when forming judgements. A hotel, for example, could replace several miniature toiletry bottles with one clearly labelled refillable dispenser, combining genuine waste reduction with a visible marker of environmental intent. The key insight is that reduction does not have to remain invisible; it can be made legible to customers through communication and design.

The authors argue that businesses, policymakers and environmental organisations all need to rethink the assumption that sustainability always means adding more environmentally friendly products. Companies should explain when items have been removed to save resources or prevent waste, and hotels in particular should tell guests when amenities have been withdrawn for environmental reasons, so that fewer products on the shelf is understood as a deliberate sustainability measure rather than a reduction in quality. Policymakers and environmental groups, meanwhile, should place greater emphasis on waste prevention, reduction and what the researchers describe as less but better approaches. Without clearer communication, organisations may continue to receive more recognition for handing out another green product than for avoiding the need to produce it in the first place, a perverse incentive that undermines the very goals the green products are meant to serve.

The study’s central message is deceptively simple: less can be better. People are accustomed to treating addition as improvement, but removing an unnecessary product does not mean reducing quality, and can in fact create a more efficient service and a genuinely better environmental outcome. Companies can and should produce individual items more sustainably, and that matters. Yet if overall consumption continues to grow, more resources will still be consumed, however green each unit of production becomes. Sustainable production alone cannot solve the problem of overconsumption. The deeper question, the researchers conclude, is whether another product is useful or necessary at all, and until consumers, companies and policymakers learn to reward restraint as visibly as they reward green abundance, well-meaning sustainability efforts risk feeding the very excess they aim to cure.

Subject of Research: Consumer perception of corporate sustainability actions, specifically the tendency to reward added eco-friendly products over product removal that reduces waste

Article Title: University of Bath study identifies harmful paradox behind well-meaning green efforts

Article References: University of Bath study identifies harmful paradox behind well-meaning green efforts. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: sustainable additive bias, overconsumption, consumer behaviour, sustainability, green marketing, waste reduction, hotel amenities, reusable products, University of Bath, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, eco-friendly products, environmental psychology