IDEAS FOR GOODThe two-day Sustainable Brands International Conference 2019 Tokyo was conducted on March 6 and 7. Participating companies were interested, if not already, in moving forward toward a vision of a sustainable society. The first day’s session kicked off with “How to create the Good Life for consumers.” The panelists explained that consumers will need to lead the change in order for sustainable shopping to be successful.
The discussion featured four panelists – three from the corporate world of retail, sales and distribution, and one representing consumers’ perspective.
Session panelists
- Facilitator: Kaoru Ninomiya (CSR Director, Calbee, Inc.)
- Panelists: Takayuki Mamabe (Rakuten, Inc.), Keiko Iwaki (Nippon Association of Consumer Specialists (NACS)), Chikako Futamura (Japanese Consumers’ Cooperative Union (JCCU)), Kahori Miyake (Aeon Co., Ltd.)
Sustainable shopping as the norm
Corporations’ goal should be to create a world in which sustainable shopping is the norm.
“Just once every 10 purchases is enough. I want our casual shopping habits to be sustainable,” shared Takayuki Mamabe.
Takayuki Mamabe is the Planning Group Manager in Rakuten, Sustainability Promotion Department. He believes that shopping can have a positive effect on our lifestyles, and thus a better future. He is part of the team that set up “Earth Mall with Rakuten”. It is an e-commerce shopping site that offers only sustainable products that are socially and environmentally friendly.
“This Rakuten sweatshirt that I’m wearing now — my colleagues tell me it looks good. Thus it’s an opportunity to share, ‘This is actually organic cotton.’ Unfortunately, just being sustainable is not enough. Companies need to make something that consumers like and is sustainable at the same time.”
Aeon’s Kahori Miyake agreed: “Just being environmentally friendly is not enough. How tasty and simply can (a meal) be made? You have to keep the price reasonable for consumers at the same time.”
Retail companies are carrying out various initiatives for society and the environment, such as Aeon’s Yellow Receipt of Happiness project. It allows shoppers to donate to an organization of their choosing – goods equivalent to one percent of the total value of their receipts. It also sells fish approved for safety, security and environmental friendliness under a fish label certification.
“Currently we have the fish label, but idealistically I’d like for us not to depend on the label. Human rights and fair trade are big problems, yet we cannot say that products without the label are not of fair trade. We should make it such that all products are fair trade products,” Miyake shared.
Consumers will lead the change for sustainable shopping too
Keiko Iwaki, from Nippon Association of Consumer Specialists, educates consumers on issues of the environment and sustainability. At the moment, she is exploring ways to get them to make conscious actions regarding sustainability.
“Companies are currently implementing various initiatives within the goal of creating a sustainable society. Consumers themselves also need to adapt and lead the change,” she says.
For starters, consumers can’t take any conscious action toward those goals if they don’t understand the sustainable and ethical value in the products and companies.
Iwaki believes that consumers need to be independent and self-reliant in order to “change the state of the world through their own consumption behavior.”
It is you of today who will change the future
“You may think that time flows from the past to the future, but actually times flows from the future to the past,” session facilitator Kaoru Ninomiya shared the words of author Banana Yoshimoto.
“It is important for us to have a vision of the kind of future we want, and for us to consider what we can do to achieve that,” Ninomiya said.
The author Yoshimoto aspired to become a writer when she was a child. She imagined her books would be translated and read by people throughout the world. Yoshimoto was then able to cultivate a writing style suitable for translation with that vision. Thus the world is able to enjoy her translated novels. By clearly defining our vision for the future, it becomes clear to us what we need to do now to achieve that.
Cultivate the self to cultivate sustainable shopping
Chikako Futamura from the Japanese Consumers’ Cooperative Union (JCCU) strongly agreed with this. She also added that it is important to have a sense of self-efficacy that one’s current self can change the future of society.
“According to a study by the National Institute for Environmental Studies in the 1990s, there is a correlation between the proportion of people with a high environmental consciousness and those who hold strong beliefs in society,” she said.
“Furthermore, there was a survey for university students. It compared students who commute to university from their family home and those who live by themselves. The interest was to find out who was more concerned about environmental issues. As it turns out, students tend to become responsible for their own daily lives when living alone, and are more conscious of their impact on environment.”
“How much responsibility do you take for your daily life? There’s also a rising trend of more men doing housework, right? It is a good one. It is one of the important changes that gets more people to be more responsible in their daily lives.”
Creating our future together
As companies progress toward their vision of a sustainable society, we consumers can’t just sit and wait for those moves. As Iwaki shared in this session, no matter how much effort a company makes, sustainable brands’ initiatives will not be sustainable if we don’t understand their value.
Therefore, each of us needs to change to achieve success in sustainability. We must also remember that in order for companies and consumers to hold the same vision for the future, we need to work together to create the present that will lead to that future.
This article was originally published on IDEAS FOR GOOD.
Translated by Ayako Karino.
