Green growth vs. economic development with pollution. Throw-away society vs. sustainability

This paper will focus on the role of the customer in the context of sustainability, consumption and waste reduction.

Climate change is real and everybody can do something. When thinking about pollution, one might think about the “big polluters” (Griffiths, 2016). And indeed, most of literature focuses on the role of the industry and their impact on climate pollution. But, we cannot deny the fact that the customer should also do something.

We can see the importance of the customer when looking at the economic formula for the equilibrium level of national income: Y = C+ I+ G+ (X-M). The letter C stands for domestic household consumption of goods and services, I stands for domestic real investment, G for government spendings on goods and services and (X-M) stands for exports minus imports of goods and services. This formular represents the aggregate demand function. As we can see in this formular, consumption plays a crucial role in economy.

Another part of facing climate change is to focus on the aspect of sustainability. Figure 1 shows the triangle of sustainability. Sustainability affects economic, environmental and socio-cultural issues. In this theses we would like to combine sustainability and the consumer side of view. The goal of our paper is to analyze the different areas, where goods are consumed and how waste can be reduced in this areas.