Sustainable product? Until purchase, or the end?
Where does your sustainable purchase end up? Who cares if you bought a sustainable product from a sustainable company? What happens after doesn’t matter.
Wrong.
For centuries industry has been assembling logistic, manufacturing and distribution routes across the world to deliver products to the consumers door. During this period aspects of the system have become more mature, allowing for more detail and definition. Details of workers rights, chemical usage, organic quality and many more terms can be defined and captured. It is a sophisticated system with high levels of control and surveying. For some items consumers can even be told the name of the person who completed the product. Which brings a warm glow to the bonding between brand and consumer.
All of this is funded by the transaction. Which also migrates ownership and responsibility to the consumer. Who looks after the product, manages it until they have no use for it.
The off-boarding route to the waste stream removes product definition and breaks the connection to the consumer and producer. What was a clearly defined product, with details, features, sourcing, ownership, branding, now becomes a faceless entity in a mass of waste. It becomes a meaningless item in a sum of parts without a source. This is where defining a product as ‘sustainable’ stops.
Waste streams are managed by regional and national governments. The most considerate regions will try to recycle and reclaim what they can. The worst will landfill lots of products, and ship waste across boarders to countries that have minimal standards of safety. In the worst cases sorted by workers without rights, sometimes children, who are exposed to incredibly hazardous materials. This ugly part of your products journey is hard to monitor. It has changed definition and ownership. No one calls this bit sustainable.
Businesses will argue that “We can’t manage the end of product lifecycle. Globalisation has meant products end up in regions with vastly different disposal methods, laws and expectations.”
But, I would argue that if we go back 70 years the beginning of the consumer lifecycle was like that too. We can achieve better sustainability if we have ambition to take it to the end.
So when you see a product that says “sustainable”, ask yourself to what point? To purchase or the end?
