Finding Sustainability from Starbucks to SpaceX
In today’s' world, Climate change, Global warming, and Sustainability have become part of a big marketing strategy for businesses to thrive. This may all sound cliche' to boomers, millennials including Gen Z, but those buzzwords are here to stay long term hereby leaving a meteoric impact from Cafe Starbucks to the most hyped Elon Musk's SpaceX.
In the previous blog series, key discussions steered around pharmaceutical drug companies and their strategies to stay on track with the UN’s Sustainable development goals (SDG ). This section throws insights into reforming trends in consumerism, its impact on industries and the rise of social enterprises that are ready to tap a big sustainability opportunity.
Responsibility takes over Affordability: With growing household incomes and an influx of phone apps, the consumer is king with a plethora of options to buy any conceivable product in the market. Numerous campaigns by environmental activists have generated enough awareness among masses to reduce, reuse and recycle, which is no longer limited to toy and clothing drives. Ultimately, all this hue and cry about the planetary crisis has started to show some results in the form of making an informed decision to buy reusables and ditch disposables.
In the past few decades, consumer industries thrived on the ease of convenience selling ideology to their customers with free flowing access to single-use plastics, foam (polystyrene ) coffee cups, PET bottled water, and other personal hygiene products. Nobody really seemed to care about packaging and plastics unless it stacked up on seashores and choked birds and animal species to the brink of extinction. The damage control strategy would not work as the situation goes beyond repair that leaves the world in a state of despair.
Hope must sustain life and sustainability is all that seems to return everything back to normal.
Food, agriculture, and beverage industry have a bigger role to play and above all, consumers need to rethink and reevaluate their shopping impulse with an added responsibility of reducing waste in their lives. All this planetary crisis is a result of cheap affordable, use and throw obsolete practices. This may even require abandoning or refurbishing age-old festive traditions for a sustainable future.
Reusability on the rise:
Mainstream enterprises like Starbucks, Dunkin' donuts are reforming their product and marketing strategies to target environmentally-conscious consumers. These companies face a big challenge from rapidly growing startup social enterprises and to stay in competition with the social impact space. Starbucks have plans to completely eliminate plastic straws globally by 2020. Dunkin' Donuts follows the suit by eliminating foam cups worldwide in 2020.
Leading automakers like Tesla pioneered in the field of emission-free electric vehicles are now forcing the conventional auto industry to reimagine their presence for eco-conscious global markets. The concept of reusability has skyrocketed to the space with SpaceX that promotes the reusability of the space rockets and will be a major breakthrough in sustainability to reduce the cost of space access, according to Space Engineers.
Initially, sustainable solutions may come with additional price tags and consumers would perhaps bear an extra cost to leave a sustainable legacy for generations to come. But who knows if this is going to be one time investment or a recurring expense for the world to pay for taking its environment for granted, without giving due consideration to consequences of extreme consumerism.
While established businesses and public or private funded social enterprises will continue strategizing to provide viable alternatives to a sustainable living, but local and global communities must think before they consume. This should be irrespective of the fact, whether sustainability is headed to space or facing a gravitational pull of the Earth.
Does it sound like a quid pro quo between humans and the environment?
P.S: This write up is intended for informational purposes only. All views and opinions are personal and should not be used for business purposes. Please send us your suggestions and feedback.