What Is It?
This goal addresses directly the issue that Greenome, and every one of you sustainability-conscious individuals is faced with. How can we integrate environmental sustainability with economic growth? They seem to be completely opposed objectives, but prioritizing one over the other has historically not worked (with the economic growth prioritization).
This goal promotes sustainable consumption and production practices, which requires respecting the biophysical boundaries of our planet and reducing consumption individually and industrially.
There are several indicators to understand how well counted are adapting to this goal. After all, it’s not easy to wake up one day and change your consumer habits, let alone an entire industry or country’s production! Material and carbon footprint (with a range of corresponding factors, like GDP or population size) are a large indicator to understand production. To understand consumption, things like Domestic Material Consumption (DMC) indicators are used.
This is definitely one of the easiest goals to understand. After all, it’s why we’re all here - we can’t stop our lives entirely to reduce consumption, but we want to be sustainable. We can’t stop buying everything, but we can’t figure out how else the production of these things will reduce.
How Does this Relate to Sustainability?
Honestly, this is really self-explanatory! This entire goal is directly tied to sustainability. We cannot sustain ourselves as a world by only prioritizing environmental sustainability - our economies would crumble, and we wouldn’t even be able to sustain ourselves at that point! So this goal directly addresses the crux of the issue - I’d even go so far as to say it is one of the most important goals when it comes to environmental sustainability!
There’s a real push for economies to become more sustainable, what with the perusal of circular economies (in which products and materials are designed to be reused, remanufactured, recycled, or recovered, so the same materials are circled within the economy for as long as possible, which also reduces waste) in many countries (particularly in Europe). On the consumer side, there has been a multi-decade-long push to reduce consumption, especially with non-sustainable goods. Fast fashion, however, is an ongoing trend that directly opposes this, so efforts are being made to reduce the scale of these. Additionally, legislature and such have made it mandatory for manufacturers to be more sustainable, though the effectiveness of these is debatable.
What can You Do?
As mentioned, this is a very equally split consumer and producer issue. In fact, it’s much more likely that reducing consumption will reduce the production of a good, rather than the opposite way around (ie. A producer stopping production is unlikely to stop consumers from consuming the good, given that there are likely to be substituted for the majority of goods and services). So, the biggest thing you can do is… change your consumption habits!
Where?
Greenome aims to do this very thing with its restaurant reviews here.Additionally, to figure out which businesses are sustainable and which aren’t, as a general rule of thumb, small businesses tend to be quite sustainable. Corporations, despite their bad reputation, are also moderately sustainable due to the current legislature requiring it (for the most part). However, here, proceeding with caution is the best idea. Middle-sized businesses are likely to be the most difficult to understand - they don’t have comparatively significant regulations requiring sustainable practices, and small-business sustainability (coming from smaller-scale production) doesn’t apply. So, reading up on those specific medium-sized businesses that you want to buy from is the way to go for those.
What?
Producer-side
Remember to shop sustainably - support local, small businesses, use Greenome’s restaurant review services here to find the most sustainable eateries near you, and always be on the lookout for sustainable options to impact the producer side as well!
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