Where Do U.S. Consumers Stand on Ethical Consumption?

A survey conducted by Statista Consumer Insights between June 2-19, 2023 asked adults in the United States whether or not they consider themselves to be ethical and sustainable consumers. Of the 1,035 respondents, only 45 percent said that they would consider themselves as such, while 26 percent said they did not and 30 percent said they didn’t know.

Respondents were then asked to select which aspects of sustainable consumption were important to them out of a list. As the following chart shows, the most popular responses were whether a product used environmentally friendly packaging (selected by 46 percent of respondents) and whether the producers had taken animal welfare into consideration (also 46 percent).

Statista asked a number of other countries the same questions. In Brazil, consumers were far more likely to be sustainably conscious, with 62 percent of respondents saying that they consider themselves an ethical consumer (versus 19 percent who did not and 20 percent who answered that they did not know). In China, the contrast was even starker at 84 percent saying they were sustainably conscious shoppers (versus 6 percent who were not and 10 percent who selected that they did not know). Countries that were more closely aligned to U.S. consumer perceptions were the United Kingdom, France and Germany, which had a response rate between 45-48 percent for those saying that they were ecological consumers.