Is There Sustainable Life Beyond The Recession?

This seems to us to be a critical question. There's no doubt that tough times have a welcome side effect of creating more sustainable consumer behaviours as people cut back.

The $64m question- or rather, the 350ppm question - is whether these habits will hold post-recession. Will we settle into a more sustainable, frugal pattern of living when the good times return, as they inevitably will? Or will we snap back to the resource-hungry life of production, consumption, waste and pollution we know so well?

(For instance, the average person in the US consumes twice as much as they did 50 years ago and creates 4.5 lbs of waste a day, twice as much as 30 years ago).

So Green Thing was delighted to be invited to take part in a seminar on exactly this issue a couple of weeks ago, called "Greening the post-crunch consumer" hosted by the always impressive Forum for the Future.

Questions addressed included

•    "What changes to consumer behaviour are we currently seeing that will be really important in the long-term?"

•    "Are post-crunch consumers likely to be more sustainable consumers?" and

•    "Will current thriftier, greener patterns of consumption continue as we come out of the recession or will there be a ‘rebound’ back to more unsustainable behaviours?"

Members of the panel included David North – Community and Government Director, Tesco, Jessica Sansom – Head of Sustainability, Innocent Drinks, Joel Levy - European MD of Penn, Schoen & Berland, who do Tesco's market research, and yours truly.  The discussion was chaired by Forum's Deputy Chief Executive, Sally Uren.

You can read the full write-up here >>

Some points of note for me:

•    Research shows price still huge barrier - consumers think green is more expensive. However, green "values" have held up well during the crunch - it's becoming fashionable (55% of uk consumers see green lifestyle as "cool") and will increase in importance post-recession.

•    Everyone agreed that sustainability needed to be made easy and desirable for consumers.

•    David North says Tesco thinks the answer has to include giving consumers as much choice as possible rather than edit on their behalfs. This prompted a discussion on what "choice editing" actually means and whether it's a good/bad thing (for me, it's necessary and all businesses do it anyway so why not nudge towards sustainability?)

•    Jessica said Innocent is concentrating on what consumers "need" vs. "want" - in other words, balancing nutritional value with carbon impact so new Innocent products can replace parts of existing diet more sustainably rather than simply add to it.

•    Jessica also made the great point that carbon pricing is catching up withwith companies regardless of official market mechanisms e.g. Indian mango costs rising as climate wrecks harvests

ps. Jonathon Porritt wasn't actually there, which is a shame as he's a bit of a hero, but that was the most relevant image I could find at short notice ;-)

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