National | Globalnews.ca: “It’s hard to find out what the environmental impact of a product is because there’s so many dimensions to it,” said John Sterman, a professor of system dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sterman said the complexity of global supply chains is one of the main reasons why it’s so difficult to understand the environmental impact of a finished product.
3 comments:
This article focuses on Canada, but this is absolutely an issue with products made and distributed in the United States as well. Without any regulated way of reporting the “green-ness” of a product, there will be no way to truly know if a product is environmentally friendly or not. Despite this, I still try to actively avoid companies I know to be poor in this regard even though I can’t guarantee my alternative choices are significantly better. I think becoming complacent since there is no way to truly know if sadly common. I hope that in the near future there is some legislation requiring that this information be readily available and accurate. As mentioned in the article, one of the key issues is that companies that attempt to report this data often do not report emissions of the entire lifecycle of the product, making the information from different companies inconsistent and inaccurate. I don’t think anything other than a regulatory standard for reporting emissions could fix this issue.
As someone who believes it is important to incorporate sustainable practices to all daily life practices, I resonated with this article as it really explains how important it is to know the “value chain” of the products you are using and remind us that it is actually very difficult to truly know where every part of a product you buy comes from and if it was made sustainably. These practices of being aware of purchases is so important when it comes to massive industries like entertainment where certain practices have been carried on through generations without thinking about the consequences. For example, at most concerts, it is typical for the venue to use the cheapest disposable cups possible, which sets the standard for other venues as they also don’t want to spend money on disposable goods. However, if these venues set a new standard and decided to find an alternative solution, others may follow suit, which can cause a massive change in how sustainable concerts will become.
Sustainability is something that has really become the forefront of many businesses and industries over the last couple of years. This article does a really good job at describing how difficult it is to truly know how sustainable something is. Currently, there are dozens of ships parked off of the coast of Los Angeles waiting to get into the port. While these ships are stuck due to supply chain shortages in the United States, they are using more fuel, food, and producing more waste than normal just to get the containers unloaded. This effectively increases the carbon footprint of every single thing on that ship, making the products less and less sustainable. The supply chain crisis that the United States is going through right now is directly affecting sustainability, and for the consumer, there really is nothing we can do about that. I hope that one day it will be easier to account for sustainably produced products, but for now, there really is no sustainable consumption under capitalism.
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