Welcome back!
I was having a conversation with my mum about my blog posts when it dawned upon me that not many people know the definition of a sustainable product. After discussions with some of my friends, the most common answer to a sustainable product would be that the product is recyclable or is made out of recycled materials (which is correct but does not encompass the entire definition of a sustainable product!).
The definite attributes of what makes a product sustainable is still being highly debated, however, I’ve managed to summarise the top 5 features in the chart above.
I’ve decided to conduct a survey to learn more about people’s knowledge of sustainable products as well as opinions on its affordability in Singapore. After posting my survey on my social media accounts and sending it to every contact on my phone, I’ve managed to garner 77 responses in total! I was surprised to know that so many people took time out of their day to do my survey :”)
However, a large majority of the respondents are current students studying at the National University of Singapore (NUS), especially from the Bachelor of Environmental Studies (BES) course. Therefore, this survey might not be the most accurate representation of the general public’s view on sustainability in Singapore 🙁
Here are the results!
As I had predicted, the top response of 92.2% was that a sustainable product is made out of material that can be recycled, reused, and composted. In my opinion, this mostly accrues to the fact that many associate any environmental-related topic with recycling. Since most of the respondents are around the age range of 17-25 years old, many of us may have had a similar school experience when we were younger. In school, we were often informed and tasked to recycle, reduce, and reuse to ‘save the environment’. It was not common to learn other forms or methods to live a more sustainable and eco-friendly lifestyle. Therefore, this might have had a large influence on their answer towards the definition of a sustainable product!
However, the option of “use of ethical labour” and “no use of hazardous material or depletion of natural resources” had the two lowest responses with 67.5% and 72.7% respectively. To be completely frank, I did not know that the usage of ethical labour was a key component of a sustainable product until recently! From my point of view, this is due to the fact that the term ethical labour is not usually associated with the environment but rather leaning more towards human-rights related issues. What do you think?
Stay tuned for the rest of my survey results next week! See you 🙂
Amira ! Dude, what a gigantic improvement ! This is so much better. Keep moving in this direction, just add in some info from external sources to help put your results in context and you’ll be good to go ! Wonderful job thinking through your results.
I also have a piece of feedback and a question. Would appreciate you posting this so your peers can see.
FEEDBACK
It would be great to tell us what the actual question on your survey was. That way, the reader can see whether you gave people something open-ended and these are just the responses you organically collected and then divided into categories, or you gave them a multiple-choice Q. It makes a difference because if your Q was multiple-choice, then there could be other interpretations of ‘sustainable product’ that you didn’t capture. This isn’t a criticism, just something to think about for next time.
QUESTION
In your blog plan, you mentioned looking at the affordability & cultural identity aspects of the sustainable lifestyle. I’m curious… did you ask ppl about their cultural backgrounds / income level ? Could those intrinsic traits affect how ppl define a sustainable product ?
thanks,
jc
Hello Dr Coleman! So sorry for the late reply, I forgot to manually check if I had comments for this week’s blog and I sincerely apologise! Thank you so much for the insightful feedback and I will definitely include the original survey question in my upcoming posts 🙂 To address the question, I will be going more in-depth about cultural background in future posts as I personally feel that it played a crucial part in my view of sustainable products! In my survey, I did not explicitly ask respondents about their income level/cultural background due to sensitivity issues. Instead, I asked for their opinions on factors that affected their reason for choosing mass-produced conventional products over sustainable substitutes such as price, brand name, reluctance to try a new product, and much more. I do agree that income level/cultural background plays a vital role in how people define sustainable products. For example, culture plays a pivotal role in many lives here in Singapore, ranging from food to social customs. With certain cultural cues and customs ingrained since childhood, it might affect one’s perception of sustainability. The term “expensive” may differ from those of different income levels, and also those with higher incomes might be more exposed to social issues due to higher education levels. I will be going more in-depth on income level and cultural background in my future posts 🙂
Hi Amira,
Don’t worry about the delay – your peers’ comments are higher priority than mine.
Your reply is interesting. Because if you ask someone what THEY think are the drivers behind their opinions / behaviours, hopefully you see how the influence of their culture is unlikely to be apparent to them. As in, they have no basis for comparison. So, in social science, we typically collect objective demographic data (ideally using open-ended questions) to help us, the researchers, pick up influential factors.
Thanks for replying.
jc