Simple wisdom comes out on top, no matter who you are: The most sustainable product is the one you never bought in the first place.
Whenever making a new purchase, try to picture where the item will end up after you discard it. Can it be composted, reused, or responsibly recycled? Or would it probably end up in a landfill or body of water? Visualizing the full lifecycle of an item can help sway your decisions to be as sustainable as possible.
Over-consumption is built into our institutions—and the low price tag of a new gadget or stay at an all-inclusive resort hardly represents its true environmental impact.
When wealth and purchasing power grows, overconsumption habits (and disastrous environmental outcomes) can certainly follow. But why do we continue to crave the latest technology, the newest clothing, and the flashiest fashions even when we know what they cost the planet? “I don’t think consumers are behaving in a weird way,” Garcia says. “The system allows and enhances that behavior to make it seem not only acceptable, but desirable for many people to achieve certain levels of high consumption.” Frick also points out that even well-intentioned buyers are often pushed to seek out new stuff. While some people salivate over trendy gadgets, for example, others are simply dealing with software that’s bound to go obsolete and devices that are made to break easily and difficult to repair.
Many people in the global north tend to think that it is their right and that it is normal to consume the amount that we consume today,” says Vivian Frick, sustainability researcher at the Institute for Ecological Economy Research in Germany. “They often completely forget that the consumption level that we have depends on exploiting other countries, having cheap resources from other countries, and having cheap labor. Prices would actually be very different if they were fair.”