These challenges raise the questions of how to determine who is environmentally friendly, i.e. who is potentially part of this group acknowledging the range and diversity in environmental behaviours and their uptake.

An alternative approach to determine the degree of environmental friendliness among persons has been proposed by Kaiser (1998). Based on established scales measuring general environmental behaviour, he developed the General Ecological Behaviour (GEB) scale to determine the level of environmental friendliness of consumers. The GEB scale has been applied as a differentiating measure of environmental engagement to compare groups of respondents (Kaiser and Byrka 2011) and has also been used as a behaviour based attitude scale (Byrka 2009) and been compared to more popular scales such as the NEP scale (Dunlap, Van Liere et al. 2000), which it outperformed in predicting the uptake of a specific difficult environmental behaviour. The scale has been tested for social desirability and been applied to different populations including different cultures and has shown acceptable results in regards to different types of validity measures and reliability (summary in Kaiser, Doka et al. 2003, Kaiser, Byrka et al. 2010).