Consumer Responsibility In Sustainability
Written by Isabella Castro
Edited by Moka Higashino
“Ugh, did you really need that new shirt?” - How sustainability is being pushed as a consumer responsibility and the way this limits real impactful change.
In 2021, single-use plastic bags were banned in the state of Washington (Oceana, 2019), and considering the issues associated with any single-use plastic, the legislative choice was inarguably for a good cause.
A little over three years later, though, the US announced they would be exiting the Paris agreement, an international treaty dedicated to regulating climate change (Harvard Edu, 2026).
This issue of cognitive dissonance, coming from contradictory messages and actions, is global. It goes far beyond just any one country. Even disregarding laws, it starts at the social level, where moral hierarchies are created in the world of social media as certain people frame themselves as superior, disregarding larger issues while emphasizing on small individual actions. They praise themselves for making choices like never buying plastic water bottles, or always remembering to turn off the lights, buying from sustainable, slow-fashion brands and using eco-friendly alternatives like ecosia or eco-gpt. All of these may seem like environmentally conscious options, and they can be when undertaken responsibly. However, do they justify condemning people who do not make these choices as if they were the primary cause of environmental degradation?
Sustainability has become a trend. That’s not necessarily an issue, and can even be immensely beneficial as we gradually make the shift away from a culture so focused on pushing consumerism which leads to waste. The issue doesn't come from supporting sustainability, but rather from the trendiness of the concept empowering people to speak on it without taking the time to consider multiple perspectives. There's countless comment sections on posts of girls trying to simply share where their outfit could be from,while the comments judge them for buying from brands such as H&M, Zara, Stradivarius, and more. For not spending much larger sums of money, and longer amounts of time (both of which are often not an option) to find and buy from sustainable brands rather than those which are so readily available, and moreover constantly pushed onto the public. And besides, so many of these influencers who buy from those supposedly admirable, sustainable, slow fashion brands, could end up wearing these clothes for far shorter times than someone who buys from a fast fashion brand, but their choice is still somehow framed as better to the public.
Someone buys a drink and uses a plastic straw; once again, the comments call them ignorant, stupid, problematic and all sorts of words to criticize such a simple choice. Someone decides to drive around at night and posts a video; people ask why they didn’t just walk to save the fuel. Someone dumps out a glass of water for a trend; everyone asks “couldn’t it have been caught?” and “why would you waste water like that?”. Of course, all of these people could’ve chosen better alternatives, but really what’s a glass of water compared to the 449 million estimated to be used every day by AI data centers in the United States alone. And no, the solution to that isn’t ridiculing other people who use AI. We need to go back to the root of the problem.
The issue with the viralisation of sustainability isn’t the way it's being propagated, but the way that this propagation places all the responsibility on consumers and individuals instead of holding the parties with real power in the climate crisis (like governments and big companies) accountable. Instead of judging people for using AI, praise the people who don’t and condemn the institutions that support its use. The amount of Carbon Dioxide emitted in one day by textile factories in India alone (which is only the second biggest textile producer globally) is equivalent to that of 14 million people’s daily commute (Narasimhan, 2024) (calver, 2023). So, instead of trying to convince millions of individuals to change, convince a few systems to do it instead.
Denouncing the use of plastic straws, the purchase of popular brands and similar daily actions supports the idea that it’s on us as individuals to take charge of the efforts against climate change. Frankly, this may be true right now as the people in power so often choose to ignore the needs of the planet in favour of their economic desires, but it shouldn’t be.
Continue to make the right choices, to be as sustainable of an individual as you can, because at the end of the day the choices add up. We’re getting closer and closer to the 1.5°C global warming threshold set by UNEP and soon, real progress will be out of our hands, so work for real, systematic change as well.
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