Currently, there is a trend in consumer policy towards assigning increased responsibility to private consumers for the environmental side-effects of their consumption activities. This trend is spurred by the observation that environmental side-effects are increasingly generated in the consumption and disposal phases, and to a decreasing extent in the production phase, of the life-cycles of goods and services. As this means that consumer choices and activities at least potentially contribute more to the overall environmental impacts of the production-and-consumption system, it seems natural to assign increasing responsibility to consumers.