It’s hard to be a conscious consumer!
We all know that higher prices prohibit us from consuming sustainably. But the barriers facing the conscious
consumer go well beyond costs and need to be considered from the perspective of
a highly resilient system of interconnected forces that collectively make
consumer responsibility analogous to climbing the proverbial waterfall.
Aside from
higher costs, here is a list of some of the barriers I’ve faced on a regular
basis:
1) Transferability: being able to consume responsibly depends on
whether the product in
question can be used in other contexts.
Consider the use of
non-disposable diapers that have important benefits for the health of children
not to mention environmental benefits if washed properly. While a conscious consumer may decide to use
these at home, they may not be permitted at a daycare where children spend a
majority of their waking hours. Although
my daycare does change our reusable diapers, no matter how much we try to
educate them, they continue to send the diapers home to us in layers and layers
of plastic bags with the diaper covers mixed in with the soiled diapers. So not only are we disposing of the bags but
we’re having to soak and wash the diaper covers in hot water; nullifying a good portion of the
environmental benefits originally gained. Also, traveling with reusable diapers is a
huge hassle as baby change rooms and stations are equipped to make the change
process as smooth as possible only if you’re using disposable diapers. The
broader point here is that the responsible consumer is a bit of an outcast
where any effort to extend their behaviour to other contexts is often met with
resistance from those more comfortable with the existing system of
behaviour.
2) Standard
Differentials: Sticking with the daycare
theme, there is no doubt that the diet served at daycares is an important
criterion for parents when choosing which daycare to leave their children
at. However, interpretations of what is
healthy or environmental vary substantially, meaning that highly progressive
consumers will likely have to accept the fact that their daycare’s version of
healthy and sustainable food options is of a much lower standard at best or misinformed
at worst. It drives me nuts that my son has two arrowroot
cookies, caked with sugar, on a daily basis.
Do I prohibit them from feeding him these cookies at the expense of isolating
him from his friends, making him a target for bullying down the road?
3) Peer
Pressure to be Irresponsible: this brings me to my next point. While still on children, no matter how
environmental we want to be as parents, we have to respect the importance of
our son feeling accepted by his peers.
Kids will be judged on what brand names they have in their lunches or on
the clothes they’re wearing and thus a target of bullying for being different. Despite how much we might teach our kids to
be responsible, what do we do when they need to decide between responsible and
bullied? Even as adults, this peer pressure
exists. We are often perceived as
stubborn environmentalists because we supposedly impose inconveniences on our
peers and colleagues to the point where we often find it easier to temporarily
do away with our principles. It’s so
much easier to join the fun and stuff our faces with bacon and balk at those
picky eaters with their pesky principles.
4) Gifts: We all enjoy getting gifts. But oftentimes
the gifts we receive are from people who might not be aware of one’s
environmental and social standards. We
regularly receive articles of clothing for our kids with messages pushing
inappropriate stereotypes that we would prefer to avoid. These gestures are not at all insincere, they
are instead a product of a perverse and highly complicated system of misinformation
or lack thereof that even the most environmentally aware of us struggles to decipher. My mother has worked so hard to find the
products for our little guy that conform to certain standards but no doubt it’s
a lot of effort because this information is not readily available. You really have to dig and then once you’ve
dug to identify the products' chemical ingredients, for example, you then have
to dig further to figure out what they are and whether they have been tested
for safety. So the gift receiver faces a
dilemma. Do we insult our gift givers by giving
away these gifts or telling them that we would prefer that they do more
research before buying us anything. Or do we lower our standards and suck it up?
5) Living
Arrangements: I live in an apartment that
doesn’t yet have the composting infrastructure necessary to avoid throwing food
waste in the trash unnecessarily. We
tried a number of ways to conveniently dispose of our compost. I first trucked our weekly bag of compost up
to my place of employment, which has compost bins scattered around the
property. But they are not set up for such large disposals. I then set out to get my hands on a Toronto
Green bin only to learn that you need to provide explicit proof that you
live in a residence (not an apartment).
As another example, today’s modern residential development
is designed around the operation of a motor vehicle. Unlike decades ago when neighbourhoods were
designed along a grid formation with small retail villages nearby at walking
distance, today’s subdivisions are massive plots of land with an intricate
network of circular roads all leading to a common exit to the main road. This oasis of houses means that catching
public transit requires a 20-25 minute walk to this main road while finding
basic sustenance requires a 30-40 minute walk to get to one of a dozen box
stores at the corner of a major intersection.
These massive complexes require an additional 10 minutes just to walk
across the massive parking lot and another 20 minutes to get to the other side
of the complex. Can you picture your
neighbour passing you in her car wondering why you’re walking like a homeless
person to the store while she’s moving her car down the parking lot as she
makes her way from store to store?
6) Lack of Availability: I’ve found it difficult on many occasions to
simply find retail locations that have sustainable products, leaving us at the
mercy of what products exist on the shelves.
Although there are many green brands out there, many of them
purposefully choose not to have bulk containers, forcing you to purchase their
smaller plastic equivalent on a regular basis.
In a previous blog post, I’ve discussed the challenges of finding
something healthy to eat walking down most streets. Try stopping at any of the major service
stations on major highways and you’re locked in a bubble of toxic processed
fast food with the healthiest option being Subway’s sugar infused bread that
smells like, as Jon Stewart once said, like a loaf of bread vomited. Or you've likely found yourself at the mercy of the choices available at the mall food court. Imagine a single parent with very little time and two or three starving kids. He's staring at the options in the food court trying to figure out which represents the best of all unhealthy evils contributing to his children's level of obesity. It's either let them starve or have them eat toxic food.
7) Information
Asymmetry: Consider how hard it is to
find information about a product or service to learn about its social and
environmental consequences. Consider
cosmetics where companies hide behind the veil of their rights to protect intellectual property to
avoid displaying the ingredients of their products. What is more, because entire industries adopt
this practice, the above issue of availability emerges again as consumers are
left without other options. What’s worse
is when companies attempt to improve their products yet create more problems
than it resolves. I’ve heard countless
stories from consumers who talk about the fact that they thought they were
buying the responsible product or service yet only learned later that it was
worse than the original. In their
efforts to respond to growing demand for more sustainable products, companies
use a reductionist approach by isolating and replacing the toxic chemical of
the day and replacing it with something else.
Yet the something else is likely understudied and/or it produces
unintended consequences as it reacts with other ingredients.
8) Poor Infrastructure: Don’t you find it so tempting to toss
recycled waste or compost into the trash bin? We build kitchens with the trash
bin conveniently located under the sink most often with the recycle bin in the
garage or outside. On top of that, we
need to sort out the recycle and deal with rinsing out the containers. Why bother?
This is a major hindrance in apartment buildings where walking your
recycle bin all the way downstairs and disposing it in a large bin in your
underwear at -30 degrees is killer next to throwing it all down the garbage
chute 10 steps down the hall. Perhaps this one is similar to added cost but the
point is that our infrastructure today was mostly built at a time of waste,
waste, waste.
Many conscious consumers are at the mercy of the substandard
building code of decades past as they literally feel the warm air in the winter
and the cooler air in the summer escape outside. It drives me absolutely bonkers that my son’s
bedroom is 28 degrees in the middle of winter, requiring that I turn on the air
conditioner. Can you believe that? Air conditioner in February? Opening the window isn’t an option because it
invites immense amounts of condensation and moisture resulting in mold.
Leaving aside those consumes who prefer to be irresponsible,
people often wonder why well-intended consumers don’t more actively vote with
their dollars. The problem is that shifting disposable income to more
sustainable products is only one piece of the puzzle. Consumers need to take on a system that has
multiple highly interconnected parts that reinforce each other to produce a
pattern of unsustainable behaviour. Consider
for instance the amount of time, effort, and inconvenience it would take for a
consumer to overcome the above challenges?
Add to this a highly competitive workplace environment where a
responsible consumer is competing against people who are completely fine with being
irresponsible.
The good news is that once enough consumers climb the
proverbial waterfall, a tipping point will ensue where the system shifts in a
way that fosters supportive infrastructure, the availability of information,
the availability of sustainable products and services and an increase in
general standards. We’re just not there yet.
