Swedish Upper Secondary School Students’ Conceptions of Negative Environmental Impact and Pricing

This study explores relationships between upper secondary school students’ understanding of prices and environmental impacts. The study uses responses from 110 students to problems in which they were asked to explain differences in prices and also to express and justify opinions on what should be the difference in prices. Very few students expressed an environmental dimension in their understanding of price. A few students suggested that environmental impact influenced price by raising demand for “Environmentally friendly products”. A few students suggested that ‘environmentally friendly products’ had higher prices because they were more costly to produce. We found no examples of students combining both lines of explanation. However, nearly half of the students believed that prices should reflect environmental effects, and this reasoning was divided between cases where the point was justified by a broad environmental motivation and cases where the point was justified in relation to incentives–to get consumers to act in a more environmentally friendly way