Sustainability Has Never Been Easy

            Climate change has driven a huge leap forward in the journey of sustainability, even though it is still far from enough. During the past decade, we see more and more actions have been taken by people to help slow down the speed of environmental degradation. In the age of the internet, individuals utilize different social media to spread the knowledge of sustainability that educates the community and promotes a wider action. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and many other social media are great platforms for sustainability influencers to raise their voices. When you search “sustainability”, “sustainable living”, or any other related keywords on social media, you can easily find accounts that influencers mainly focus on educating people how to live sustainably in daily life by sharing their practices and tips. 

            How effective is influencers’ online education approach? For example, we are told that instead of buying paper towels all the time for drying hands, cleaning counters, or wiping anything else, keeping a few small towels to wash and reuse them over time can help save trees and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, there are always reasons not to do it, such as “reusing towels are not as clean as single-use paper towels”, “I don’t want to spend extra time to clean reusable towels”, “Paper towels are much more convenient”, etc. For carrying reusable shopping bags instead of getting single-use plastic bags from the grocery store every time, excuses can be “stores always offer plastic bags and pack for you which is so convenient” and “stores do not allow customers to carry their bags into a store”. You can always ask cashiers to use your bags to pack or just take a few seconds to pack by yourself; for stores do not allow people to carry bags, you can keep reusable bags in the car and pack items when you get to the car. Many things are easy to start within sustainability practice, but most people only do it when they remember or have not even started yet. Sustainable practice is not hard to do, but one thing that makes it challenging is doing it consistently.

            The fact is that persistence is the key to sustainable transformation, not to mention the trivial and inconsistent individual behaviors, the world’s powerful leading organizations and companies have been continuously making efforts on climate action, but, overall, there has not been a significant achievement and still far from enough. I am not to deny the importance of sustainability influencers who have been putting their efforts to educate the community and make the world better because I am also trying to do the same, and every piece of power counts even though it is tiny. However, with the rapid economic development, people’s reliance on convenience and high-quality life keeps increasing. Convenience is one of the biggest factors which leads the direction of people’s decisions, and people always do things that are most convenient to them. Actions like using reusable towels and reusable shopping bags are some easiest things that we can do to help the environment, but it is not easy to do it consistently, especially as part of our daily habit, due to the reliance on the “easy-life” that we have made so far. Even I, a person who is passionate about sustainability and environmental protection, feel hard to follow every sustainable practice.   

            There are lots of things that we cannot control according to making the sustainable move. Plastic manufacturing continuously produces single-use products that provide convenience to our life, vehicle manufacturers keep generating fossil-fuel-based cars into the market, pesticides and insecticides are produced repeatedly to “help” agriculture, and many other supplies coming into the market that becomes our inevitable purchases. And of course, nowadays we have many sustainable options such as electric cars, organic food, natural skincare products, solar panel, sustainable clothing, but it requires money to be able to consider most of these green options. Therefore, the financial situation is also a key factor that is stopping people from sustainable practice. 

            Educating people to change individual behaviors can take forever because it is difficult to control how everyone behaves in their daily life. Social media education, of course, can be effective in the long run. When people keep seeing the same thing every day, the brain will gradually process this information and remember it eventually. However, to improve the earth's environment, do we have long enough time to wait for the result coming from this long-term “online education”? The answer is quite negative.

            My perspective has always been while changing individual behaviors is important, greater gains can come from big communities like governments, international organizations, or world influential companies. When the government or a company announces new laws or policies, people within the jurisdiction need to follow the rule to avoid penalties. One example can be the state plastic bag legislation in the United States that discourages the use of plastic bags by imposing bans and fees and having recycling programs. Cities in eight states now have banned single-use plastic bags including California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon, and Vermont. Following up the Plastic Import Ban, China has announced a ban on single-use plastics that non-degradable bags will be banned in major cities by the end of 2020 and all other cities by 2022. Comparing this governmental regulation, educating individuals through social media seems much less efficient.

            Now, maybe you are wondering if regulations from entities, such as the government, can make a significant impact, then why many of them are still hesitating to execute. In sustainability development, three pillars have to be considered: environment, society, economy. Making actions without any of them does not meet the requirement of sustainability. Take the plastic ban as an example, even the goal is clear which is to reduce or stop plastic production, the process is much more complicated to achieve. There are many questions needed to be clarified: Is it possible to ban all plastic use? Is it possible to stop plastic manufacturing? What will happen if we stop the plastic supply? Do we have solid substitution? How cost-effective this substitution will be compared with plastic? How the demand and supply chain will look like? How do we solve the unemployment issue caused by the plastic ban?

            Entities that are developing sustainable strategies are mostly developed countries that have the ability to make an actual change. Nevertheless, the rest of the world in developing countries that many of them have limited financial resources which stops them from investing in those costly sustainable options. When a technique becomes mature, the corresponding price becomes low; this is why people choose to produce and purchase plastic items, fossil fuels base products, polyester-made clothing rather than other environmentally friendly products which are more expensive. Besides different economic situations, social realities like populations, the proportion of scientific and technological personnel, and the development focus of a country can also affect how they make the decision. Countries like China, Vietnam, India, Indonesia have some world's biggest manufactories, and they have been playing a key role in the world supply market. A high-density population allows them to offer cheap labor work that helps with unemployment. A drastic increase in unemployment will occur if plastic manufacturing stops because it occupies a large proportion of manufactories. On the other hand, a lack of advanced technology in many of the developing countries blocks their way to explore more high-tech sustainable innovations. Thinking about countries where people are facing hunger, water shortage, wars, etc., they cannot even take into account the basic life and their own safety, how are they able to think about sustainability? There is no right for them to think this deeply. 

            Hence, sustainability development is facing many obstacles in various aspects. Today, we have been aware of the challenge and taking actions to create a better future, but there is still a lot we must do. The combination of individual and entity efforts is going to be the only way that shortens the process of sustainability achievement. It is a long journey; it requires not only individual effort but also the effort from entities; it is a transformation of social structure that is never easy to achieve; it is a teamwork of maintaining human civilization.