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Article Three
Sustainable Consumption and Tesco
For the past 18 months the PP4SD team of John Baines, Maureen and Steve Martin have been working with the Sustainability Institute at the University of Manchester and Tesco staff to develop approaches to embedding sustainability within a large retail organisation.
PP4SD brought a range of relevant experiences to this unique project most notably grounded experience drawn from its work with Barclays Bank, the Environment Agency as well as some of the largest professional institutes in the UK such as the Institute for Civil Engineers, the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply.
PP4SD has contributed to the approaches adopted by the University of Manchester team but in addition has offered a challenging and critical context to this work in a separate paper entitled ‘Sustainable Development and Tesco- some wicked questions’.
These included: “Is continued growth compatible with the threat of climate change?” and, “How does a retail organisation deal with unsustainable patterns of consumption and production?”
Ecosystems are the mechanisms, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The dilemma we face is, at the same time as ecosystems are being degraded and overwhelmed and poisoned consumption growth is leading to elevated carbon dioxide emissions.
Underlying this dilemma is the proposition that in order to cut resource use and carbon emissions, we need to address the fundamental ethics and structure of market economics. Prosperity without Growth? addresses two related aspects of how consumption drives growth and vice-versa. This report argues that the profit motive stimulates a continual search by commercial organizations for “newer, better or cheaper” products and services – a process called “creative destruction” by economist Joseph Schumpeter. Firms who fail to innovate, adapt and design newer and exciting stuff risk their own survival. Creating new stuff would be of no value without a market for its consumption. So one fuels the demand for the other in an intimately linked cycle and in a self-reinforcing process that drives growth. However, there is growing evidence that the relentless pursuit of novelty “creates an anxiety that can undermine social well-being”. Prosperity without Growth? raises this wicked problem: “if the economy itself is dependent on consumption growth for its very survival, will sustainability remain only an aspiration?”
These are not simple problems to resolve. They are linked with many others and the role of PP4SD is to work cross professionally to seek solutions that are cross sectoral and therefore likely to be more long lasting.
The final report on this work can be downloaded at here. To learn more about PP4SD and sign up to its quaterly newsletter, visit www.pp4sd.org.uk.