Consumers face price of conscience

New Zealanders say they’re highly committed to living sustainable lives, but they can’t do it without big business changing its ways.

The Colmar Brunton Better Lives survey of 1000 people found 42 per cent were highly committed to living in a way that did not wreck the planet.

Rhys Taylor is one of the highly committed, and has made big lifestyle changes, but even he admits ‘‘if everybody lived as I do, we would still need 1 planets, and I’m doing a lot better than most Kiwis’’.

Taylor, who is the national coordinator for the local authoritybacked Sustainable Living Programme, moved to the small Canterbury town of Geraldine to live a low-consumption, hyperlocal lifestyle. He relies heavily on non-car forms of travel, which also keep him physically active. are members of ours. Once you get about 25 per cent, you are at the tipping point,’’ she says.

And when a tipping point on an issue comes, it can come fast.

In 2017, just 30 per cent of people expressed concern about plastic bags. In 2018, after a year in which media took up the cause of ending single-use plastic bags in supermarkets, 84 per cent said they were concerned about plastic bags.

The research also shows the commitment to live sustainably has broken out of the middle-age, middle-income silo, Taylor says.

But Colmar Brunton also found some consumers were abandoning companies and sectors that they did not trust. For example, some people had virtually given up buying fish or pork products, Taylor says.

Colmar Brunton identified ‘‘touchstone’’ behaviours people thought showed commitment: taking multiple-use carry bags to the supermarket; eating less meat; and ‘‘looking to the future’’ on transport, with 34 per cent saying they were ‘‘thinking about switching’’ to lowercarbon ways of getting around.

Sizeable minorities of the 1000 people surveyed claimed they had already made changes, including walking more (67 per cent), using scooters (20 per cent), cycling (20 per cent), or car-pooling to work (19 per cent).

Colmar Brunton did not factcheck any of those claims.

However, vehicle ownership and use continue to rise, despite transport offering households one of the biggest ways to cut their carbon footprint.

‘‘A lot of people like to see themselves as being committed to sustainable living, but I think there’s some work still to do,’’ Generation Zero spokesperson Leroy Beckett says.

Beckett lives in Auckland, and uses public transport, bikes and his feet as his main forms of transport, but he acknowledges many people would struggle to follow his example, given the city’s road-enabled sprawl.

‘‘I advocate as much as I can for systems-based change, because that is the solution,’’ Beckett says. ‘‘We have gone too far for this to be solved by consumer actions.

‘‘We are going to have to densify, and to build around public transport.’’

Even when sustainability is more easily obtained, people are slow to change.

Jaime Peters, the owner of planet-friendly cleaning supplies company Earthwise, says just 20 per cent of the dishwashing detergent market is environmentally friendly.

‘‘Four out of 10 people say they want to do the right thing, but there are a lot of barriers around for people to be able to do that,’’ he says.

Price is a key barrier, which is why Earthwise has worked hard to get its prices down. ‘‘You can’t expect people to change, if they can’t afford it,’’ Peters says.