Plastic usage in Everyday life - Marketing Implications

I thought I should start the new year by writing on something which would become a prime concern for marketers in the years to come - 'environment consciousness' . World over there is an increased concern on the role corporates/marketers play in maintaining the environment and accepting responsibility towards their actions and its impact on the society at large.

Though there is a lot of talk and discussion happening on global warming and climate change, many a times we tend to see these issues happening at the Macro level, something about which we as individuals cannot do much about. I will share a recent experience which made me realize how we as consumers add to these problems and perhaps have to think a way out of these issues.

The example is from our recent trip to Andaman, where the islands have a policy of zero plastic usage, if you walk into a general store you will not get a plastic bag and rather shown the policy (though some of the shopkeepers will give you a plastic bag, but then insist not to tell where u got it from!!!). There are notices in all beaches on don't use plastic and so on, the photo above should give you an idea of how well it is being followed...

Being a nature lover we have been consciously avoiding leaving plastic around , but this time around we thought we will be more strict in our plastic usage and try and monitor it. So we started the exercise of keeping all the plastic we used in a day in our back-pack and disposing it back in the dust-bin when we would be back to the main island after our trip. And we were surprised and guilty about the amount of plastic two of us were consuming every single day. We use plastic in everything.... whether we eat a pack of biscuit , drink water, eat chocolates, consume soft drinks, you name a product and inevitably it is packed in plastic....We were made aware of how much dependant we had become on plastic in our everyday life.

And future marketers need to look at this issue very seriously, because we need to find ways to break our dependence on plastic as the main source of packaging and move towards a more environment friendly material...

I just thought I will share this as a food for thought to start the new year, will look forward to more comments from you...

Wishing all of you a very Happy new year...