How can you overcome barriers to sustainable production and consumption?

1 What are sustainable production and consumption?

Sustainable production and consumption (SPC) are the ways of using resources and creating goods and services that minimize environmental impacts, enhance human well-being and promote social justice. SPC involves reducing waste, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, conserving natural resources, improving efficiency and innovation, and ensuring fair distribution and access to goods and services.

2 What are the barriers to SPC?

There are several barriers to SPC, such as a lack of awareness and information about the benefits and opportunities of SPC, inadequate incentives and regulations to encourage its implementation, a lack of skills and capacity to adopt SPC, and a lack of collaboration and participation from stakeholders. Many people and businesses are unaware of how to implement SPC, do not have the necessary skills or capacity to do so, or face technical, financial or institutional constraints. Additionally, many markets and policies do not reflect the true environmental and social costs and benefits of production and consumption, or provide adequate incentives for adoption. Finally, stakeholders may not cooperate or participate in SPC initiatives due to conflicts of interest, power imbalances or communication gaps.

3 How can you overcome the barriers to SPC?

To overcome the barriers to SPC, you can educate yourself and others on the impacts and benefits of SPC practices, use your consumer power to demand and support SPC products and services, acquire and apply SPC skills and capacity, and engage and cooperate with SPC stakeholders. Additionally, you can advocate for SPC policies and regulations, hold yourself and others accountable for SPC performance, access and offer SPC resources, participate in SPC initiatives, and contribute to campaigns, projects, standards, and partnerships.

4 What are the benefits of SPC?

By overcoming the barriers to SPC, you can save money and resources, enhance your reputation and competitiveness, improve your well-being and satisfaction, and contribute to sustainable development. This can be accomplished by improving efficiency and productivity, avoiding waste and pollution, optimizing the value chain, meeting customer expectations, differentiating yourself from competitors, enhancing health and safety, aligning values with SPC principles, reducing environmental impacts, increasing social impacts, and supporting the Sustainable Development Goals.

5 How can you get started with SPC?

To get started with SPC, you can begin by measuring and evaluating your production and consumption patterns, impacts and performance. This will help to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Additionally, you can define your vision, mission and objectives for SPC, as well as select the most relevant and feasible areas and actions for improvement. It's also important to design and execute your SPC strategies, plans and projects, while applying the best practices, standards and tools for SPC. Finally, it's essential to collect and analyze your SPC data, indicators and feedback in order to report and communicate your results, achievements and challenges.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?