3 minute read
RESPONSIBLE RETAILING
Sustainability is becoming more important for consumers, retailers and suppliers alike. How is the tech industry rising to the challenge and will Covid-19 mean environmental and ethical concerns are put on the backburner as we adjust to the new normal?
Until the Covid-19 pandemic, sustainability was one of the big issues dominating the headlines. We’ve seen everything from the climate change group Extinction Rebellion protesting on the streets of London, to teen environmental activist Greta Thunberg and US president Donald Trump engaging in a Twitter spat, and national treasure Sir David Attenborough urging us to wake up to the ever-increasing problem of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans.
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In the light of the coronavirus, sustainability should be more important than ever. It has demonstrated how dependent we are on a safe and healthy environment, thus making us more worried about the future of our planet. But, ironically, could the Covid-19 crisis actually mean sustainability takes a backseat, as manufacturers and retailers deal with more pressing issues?
Emily Salter, analyst at GlobalData, believes this could be the case. “Making changes to materials, logistics and production processes to improve the sustainability of products and operations will slow, as sustainability is no longer top of retailers’ and consumers’ agendas,” she says.
With “long-term adjustments being costly”, Salter explains, “many non-food retailers will be financially unstable as they emerge from this crisis after a significant period of low or no sales.”
In the short term, according to Salter, the issues of single-use plastic and sustainability will become less important to many consumers, as hygiene and cleanliness become more of a priority to help stop the transmission of the virus. However, she believes sustainability will slowly become more significant again once the spread of Covid-19 slows, though it isn’t likely to return to being the primary focus for shoppers for quite some time.
SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY In 2018, a study by Accenture on corporate sustainability found that in the UK, 62% of consumers prefer to buy from companies that are reducing their use of plastics, while two thirds would like greater transparency in how companies source their materials.
Market research carried out by consumer data experts GlobalWebIndex, highlighted that as many of half of Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) in Europe and America do not look positively on the future of the environment – sustainability is extremely important to this age group.
Some retail sectors, such as fashion, have already taken big steps to address issues around sustainability. There are more ethical fashion brands around than ever, while a number of other areas, like consumer tech, are under pressure to tackle environmental issues, such as the use of raw materials and plastics in manufacturing, plastic packaging, and the throw-away society. For example, some products are believed to have ‘planned obsolescence’ built into them, meaning their lifespan is purposefully designed to be shorter than it might otherwise have been.
NOT A PLASTIC BAG Some of these issues are, however, already being addressed. Earlier in the year, Sega Europe announced that it was abandoning plastic packaging for its physical PC games. The move came after Sports Interactive, in partnership with Sega, aimed to save up to 20 tonnes of plastic by using recyclable and more environmentally friendly materials, like cardboard, in the packaging of its Football Manager 2020. How’s that for a goal? Tech giant Microsoft has gone even further by pledging to be carbon negative by 2030 and removing from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted since it was founded in 1975, either directly or via electrical consumption, by 2050.
The consumer tech industry clearly has a lot of work to do to be more sustainable, but it’s reassuring to know things are moving in the right direction. At this year’s CES in Las Vegas, sustainability was a key theme, with the show’s Innovation Awards recognising the category for the first time.
We’re living in an era of uncertainty. Covid-19 makes it likely there will be a global recession, and the UK’s high streets will be under more pressure than before. But there is one thing we can be sure of in the long term – sustainability will continue to play an important role in retail and consumer tech. The future, as uncertain as it looks right now, will be greener.
