Sustainable Consumption: Understanding the Impact of Consumers' Choices in

a Shared Environment"

Theme:

The world is continuously changing with the fast pacing time. Everything comes in

a glimpse of an eye and vanishes just like the wind that no one can notice.

To the panel of the board of judges, my fellow brilliant students of their respective

schools, coaches, friends, ladies and gentlemen, a pleasant morning to each of us.

Sustainable consumption is an ideal way of securing the needs of this generation

without hampering the ability of the next generations to meet their own needs. But, in

these days, where everything can just be thrown when not in use and neglected when not

useful makes sustainable consumption just a dream. We are being bombarded with the

worsening cases of poverty, ill health and illiteracy, disparities between and within

nations, and the most alarming, the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which

we depend ourselves for our survival. But who guess? Now is the time for us to take

action, because the future is uncertain, and the only thing that we have is NOW.

Understanding ourselves in choosing the products that we need and we want,

enables us to understand the impacts that we create to our society, community and to our

environment. However, we usually put the blame for everything that happens in our

environment and in our economy to the government, business sectors and people in

authority. We kept on pointing fingers to each other, not knowing that the rest of our

fingers point on us. A research conducted by Diana Ivanova revealed that we, consumers

are responsible for more than 60 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and

up to 80 percent of the world' water use. And between 60-80 per cent of the impacts on

our planet come from household consumption. Thus, if we change our consumption

habits, this would definitely have a drastic effect on our environmental footprint as well.

Intelligent consumers can positively influence the quality of our life and our environment.

This awareness can eventually lead to changed consumer habits and products that will

better allow for a sustainable consumption.

A report on a journal written by the researchers states that households have a

relatively large degree of control over their own consumption, but most of them often lack

accurate ad actionable information on how to improve their own environmental

performance. When we bought something, we rarely thinks about the different series of

events that the item undergoes before it was made. It undergoes different processes

before reaching the hands of the consumers. The consumers play a vital role in the

economy as its choices drives the market. With this, resource alocation has been

determine in the market through the services that we usually avail and products that we

usually buy as consumers. The advantage of being able to identify the choice of individual

consumer on the different environmental measures is that it pinpoints where consumers

in different countries can cut back on their impacts.

Any activity where we have a choice of buying a product or using a service, the service

will have much less impact.

No one can achieve this on his/her own; but together we can- in a global partnership for

a more sustainable development.