Trading Engagement for Sustainability: Carbon-Aware Re-ranking for E-commerce Recommendations
arXiv:2606.04550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: E-commerce recommender systems strongly influence which products users consider and purchase, yet sustainability signals such as Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) are almost never available at catalog scale. We study carbon-aware product recommendation in the realistic setting where PCF labels are missing for most items and must be inferred. We first estimate product-level carbon footprints via a retrieval-augmented PCF estimation pipeline that transfers supervision from the Carbon Catalogue, a small set of life-cycle-assessed products, to a large
The increasing public and regulatory pressure on corporate ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) performance, combined with advancements in AI for data inference, makes carbon-aware recommendations a timely development.
This development indicates a growing integration of sustainability metrics into core business algorithms, potentially shifting consumer behavior and product development towards lower-carbon options, even when data is incomplete.
E-commerce recommender systems will begin to factor in environmental impact alongside traditional engagement metrics, fundamentally altering how products are presented and prioritized to consumers.
- · E-commerce platforms first to implement carbon-aware re-ranking
- · Manufacturers with lower product carbon footprints
- · Consumers seeking sustainable products
- · ESG data and inference providers
- · Manufacturers with high product carbon footprints (PCC)
- · E-commerce platforms that fail to adapt
- · Traditional recommendation systems solely focused on engagement
Recommendations will explicitly or implicitly deprioritize high-carbon products in user feeds.
Companies will face increased pressure to measure and reduce product carbon footprints (PCFs) to remain competitive on e-commerce platforms.
This could lead to a 'green premium' for products with certified low PCF, or conversely, a 'carbon penalty' for high-PCF items, influencing supply chain design and material science.
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Read at arXiv cs.AI