Matching Items (194)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Sustainability
- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
- Member of: ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
- Resource Type: Text
Description
Demand for specialty coffee worldwide is increasing, yet producers primarily located in developing countries struggle to cover their production costs and sustain their livelihood. Coffee producers are globally seeking higher profits by adapting their conventional production practices to be more socially and environmentally responsible. This dissertation aims to analyze the U.S. import demand for coffee and investigate consumer preferences and willingness to pay for coffee labels representing sustainability efforts. Chapter one introduces the coffee industry and the three chapters of this research. In the second chapter, I analyze the influence of consumers' values and the warm glow effect of giving on their willingness to pay for sustainable coffee using a non-hypothetical auction mechanism. I use an information treatment to test the effect of information on consumers' willingness to pay. Providing information increases the premium consumers are willing to pay for sustainable coffee. Regarding values, consumers that like coffee and experience the warm glow of giving are willing to pay a premium for coffee with a sustainability label. Using a hypothetical online choice experiment, in the third chapter, I investigate coffee consumers' preferences and willingness to pay for Fair Trade, Direct Trade, Rainforest Alliance and USDA Organic coffee. I find that consumers value sustainability labels that aim to solve social issues more than those whose primary goal is to solve environmental problems. I find that when two labels are together on a coffee bag, there is no effect on consumers’ utility. However, there is a positive effect on consumers' willingness to pay for coffee labeled simultaneously for Fair Trade and Organic, and simultaneously for Direct Trade and Organic. In the fourth chapter, I estimate coffee price elasticities between major coffee exporters to the U.S. and calculate pass-through import cost using a system-wide differential demand system. I compare imports of arabica and robusta green coffee and estimate the degree to which they complement each other or substitute one another. I find that arabica and robusta from Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico are substitutes but some exceptions show a complementary relationship. The inclusion of the exchange rate into the demand system has a significant effect on U.S. coffee demand. I find an incomplete pass-through cost of the exchange rate to U.S. import prices.
Chapter six concludes by summarizing the results of this dissertation and discussing the future challenges for the coffee industry.
ContributorsFuller, Katherine (Author) / Grebitus, Carola (Thesis advisor) / Schmitz, Troy (Committee member) / Hughner, Renee (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Amidst mounting global crises spanning environmental, social, and economic domains, sustainability education has emerged as a vital pathway toward a thriving future. However, despite its promise, the concept of sustainability often remains superficial, leaving educators ill-equipped to address its complexities. While efforts to integrate sustainability into education are underway, critical pedagogy, a crucial tool for fostering social change, is notably absent from instructional practices. This action research project utilized critical pedagogy to design and implement a critical professional development (CPD) workshop within a larger fellowship program to center justice within sustainability in both content and pedagogical approach. As a result, participants’ definitions and understandings of sustainability increased across all measurements of extent, breadth, and depth. Specifically, participants redefined collaborative relationships and more prominently included notions of justice and equity in their conceptualizations of sustainability and sustainability education. The use of critical pedagogy encouraged teachers to analyze intersectional oppressive systems and fostered a new, critical perspective on sustainability. In their own educational designs, participants demonstrated an intention to model elements of critical pedagogy, such as dialogic action and permeable content. Finally, in alignment with the intended outcomes of CPD, participants developed cooperative space for co-learning, built unity, shared leadership, and felt confident implementing their own professional development to address context-specific concerns. By using critical pedagogy in sustainability education, the workshop participants prioritized deep and caring relationships which fostered empathic engagement with the intersectional and often dehumanizing systems that have led to interconnected global crises. The results indicated that using CPD as a framework could be effective in teacher professional development for sustainability as a design and implementation tool to center critical work that examines systemic issues of injustice and exploitation against both humans and our planet.
ContributorsCashion, Molly Elise (Author) / Judson, Eugene (Thesis advisor) / Casanova, Carlos (Committee member) / Goebel, Janna (Committee member) / Boyce, Ayesha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
Engineering polymers are critical for contemporary high-performance applications where toughness, thermal stability, and density are at a premium. These materials often demand high-energy processing conditions or highly reactive monomers that hold negative impacts on human and environmental health. Thus, this work serves to remediate the negative impacts of engineering polymer synthesis by addressing toxicity and processing at the monomer level, while maintaining or exceeding previous thermomechanical and stimuli-responsive performance. Polyurethanes (PUs) represent a class of engineering polymers that possess highly modular properties due to the diverse monomer selection available for their synthesis. The efficient reaction between isocyanates and hydroxyls impart stellar properties and flexible processing modalities, however recent scrutiny regarding the toxicity of the isocyanate precursors has driven the search for non-isocyanate polyurethane (NIPU) pathways. The advancement of bis-carbonylimidazolide (BCI) monomers for the synthesis of NIPU thermoplastics and foams is thoroughly investigated in this work. Remarkably, a novel decarboxylation pathway for BCI monomers controlled by catalyst loading enabled in-situ CO2 generation during crosslinking with trifunctional amines, and resulted in a facile synthetic route for NIPU foams. Further explorations into catalyst considerations revealed Dabco® 33-LV as a suitable mechanism for controlling reaction times and careful selection of surfactant concentration provided control over pore size and geometry. This led to a library of flexible and rigid NIPU foams that displayed a wide range of thermomechanical properties. Furthermore, sequestration of the imidazole byproduct through an efficient Michael reaction identified maleimide and acrylate additives as a viable pathway to eliminate post-processing steps resulting in NIPU foam synthesis that is amenable to current industrial standards. This route held advantages over the isocyanate route, as condensate removal drove molecular weight increase and ultimately achieved the first reported phase separation behavior of a NIPU thermoplastic containing a poly(ethylene glycol) soft segment. Furthermore, sustainable considerations for engineering polymers were explored with the introduction of a novel cyclobutane bisimide monomer that readily installs into various polymeric systems. Direct installation of this monomer, CBDA-AP-I, into a polysulfone backbone enabled controlled photo-cleavage, while further hydroxy ethyl functionalization allowed for incorporation into PU systems for photo-cleavable high-performance adhesive applications.
ContributorsSintas, Jose Ignacio (Author) / Long, Timothy E (Thesis advisor) / Sample, Caitlin S. (Committee member) / Jin, Kailong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
Words wield immense power. They help to shape realities, tell stories, and encompass deeper values and intentions on behalf of their users. Buzzwords are imprecise, trendy – and often-frustrating – words that are encountered in daily life. They frame problems, evoke emotional responses, and signal moral values. In this dissertation, I study buzzword use within the field of environmental conservation to better untangle the inherent tension they have long produced: do buzzwords help or hurt collective conservation efforts? Using a mixed methods approach, this dissertation provides descriptive and causal empirical evidence on many of the untested assumptions regarding the behavior, use, and impacts of buzzwords on conservation decision making. First, through a series of expert interviews with conservation professionals, I develop an empirically informed definition and understanding of buzzwords that builds upon the scholarly literature. It identifies eight defining characteristics, elaborates on the nuances of their use, life cycle, and context dependence, and sets forth a series of testable hypotheses on the relationship between buzzwords, trust, and perceptions. Second, I take this empirically informed understanding and employ a large-scale text analysis to interrogate the mainstream conservation discourse. I produce a list of buzzwords used across institutions (e.g., academia, NGOs) in the past five years and link them to predominant conservation frames, comparing the ways in which different institutions relate to and discuss conservation concepts. This analysis validates many long-held paradigms and ubiquitous buzzwords found in conservation such as sustainability and biodiversity, while identifying a more recently emerging framing of inclusive conservation. Third, I experimentally test a set of hypotheses on the effects that buzzwords have on decision making, as moderated through trust. This study finds evidence of a greenwashing effect, whereby buzzwords may produce marginal benefits to less trustworthy organizations through increases in credibility and group identity alignment, but do not outweigh the benefits of being trustworthy in the first place. In the face of many current global challenges requiring cooperation and collective action – such as climate change and environmental degradation – it is imperative to better understand the ways in which communication and framing (including buzzwords) influence decision making.
ContributorsClaborn, Kelly (Author) / Drummond Otten, Caitlin (Thesis advisor) / Janssen, Marcus A. (Thesis advisor) / Anderies, John M. (Committee member) / Carley, Kathleen M. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024