Approaching the end of the term, I realized that my view of sustainability has changed tremendously. I gained more in-depth understanding on the feasibility, crucial factors, and numerous challenges that our society will face in our journey to become more sustainable. While the beginning theme of the course focused on driving businesses to become sustainable, I believe as consumers our expectations could trigger something bigger, which is the normalization of sustainability.
Deriving from class concepts, personal research and experiences, blog comments, I will share three accessible steps that could act as a guideline to help anyone that wants to understand and to change their behaviour to become more sustainable.
- Find What Sustainability Means to You
The term ‘sustainable’ may seem to be word that is thrown around to give people some sense of picture about being environmentally conscious. Popularized in 1960, the dictionary meaning of sustainability is “the avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance”. The actual meaning of the term is not fixed and can be interpreted in several ways. For example, I feel the word sustainability gives the connotation of being stagnant and staying the same, but for me it means living as well as possible with others and future generation in consideration.
- List your essentials
With the increase of consumer awareness, almost every industry in the market trying to have a piece of the ‘green’ pie. With this, companies increase their promotional initiatives on ‘sustainable’ product, bombarding consumers overflowing amount of seemingly sustainable products and services. However, to really make an impact is to use sustainable products as the essentials as you will be dependent and continually repurchase it. For instance, as a university student, I believe things such as books, transportation, and convenient food are things that directly affect my everyday lives. By listing the things that are important and changing those choices into more sustainable ones, we can make a greater impact.
- Try to think about your purpose.
Last but not least, sustainability includes many different operations and concepts, thus finding your purpose will give you guidance as were to look. Trying to find a purpose that resonates with your values will ease your transition. This can start but trying out different things that catch your attention. However, it’s important to remember that changing your purpose is completely fine and don’t feel guilty when you need to.
I’m not a sustainability specialist by all means, but these are the 3 steps that I derived from my experience from this course and my also my personal research.
