How often do you hear about climate change, carbon and plastic pollution in the media? How do you feel about it? Helpless? Concerned? Do you feel a need to act?

The Deutsche Bank Research paper Climate change and corporates was released in September this year, and among its findings was the insight that people are increasingly acknowledging personal responsibility as a factor in climate change, which In turn has started to impact buying behaviour.

The paper goes on to say that not only are the majority of Americans of the opinion that global warming was caused “mostly by humans” but, according to a Eurobarometer survey, climate change is the second most important issue among Europeans – second only to immigration – and it’s rising. As Jack Ewing observed in the New York Times earlier this month, “Increasingly, being green is a commercial imperative.”

Go to any large corporation’s website and you’ll see promises of change and claims of environmentally proactive steps or new carbon-reducing programs. But is it all just lip service? Let’s face it: what midweek shopper really takes the time to investigate corporate claims? According to the Deutsche Bank report, 85% of people “spend less than 10 minutes researching a company’s environmental claims.”

If you factor this in, we can surmise that consumers must be paying attention to the story they’re being told on product packaging and elsewhere, but it’s still a case of information asymmetry: until now there has been no real way for a company to prove their product’s carbon footprint or water consumption or the exact percentage of recycled plastic, for example. Without data, the job of garnering consumer trust falls to social media influencers and athletes, musicians and public figures – and to stories in the press about improvements to company climate-change efforts, however small they may be.

But even these aren’t failsafe measures in an era of fake news and Instagram TV; after Volkswagen’s disastrous emissions scandal in 2018 (yes, it even has its own Wikipedia page), the knock-on effect was an evaporation of public trust in large corporations. In the past 12 months, consumer boycotting of products that receive negative environmental press has become significant enough to affect company bottom lines. “Public pressure,” write the Deutsche Bank, “has passed a tipping point.”

Whether profit and sustainability are compatible is always up for debate but, increasingly, investors are putting pressure on companies to behave in ethical ways. In the face of this, and of consumer pressure, it’s becoming critical to support innovations that can redress information asymmetry and empower manufacturers with tools to showcase in a trustworthy way the changes they’re already starting to make.

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To find out how ReCarbonX’s blockchain-based manufacturing tracking systems can help your company’s productivity, compliance and brand sustainability reputation please contact us.

Image in this post courtesy Artem Beliaikin via Pexels.