Who Did You Interview?
- Engineering student
Demographics That Might Provide Helpful Context for Their Responses
- 24
- Female
- Student living in a urban environment
Key Findings from the Interview
- When you think about sustainable products, is there any that you can identify that you currently use?
- Why do you believe it is difficult as a student to be more sustainable?
- If costs weren't an issue, what opportunities do you see in using more sustainable products?
Sustainable products for me are connected to durability and products that are reusable. Living as a student with a limited budget, being sustainable in my consumption patterns can be limited. However, I try to only buy clothes that are made out of higher quality to ensure that they last longer, I always take the bike to school or the city when going somewhere and carry with me cloth bags when going grocery shopping to avoid unnecessary plastic.
First is the expense, when you are studying, paying a little bit more for a similar product that is beneficial for the environment but less so for the wallet can have a large impact on my decision process. Also, I think it is hard sometimes to actually know if a product is sustainable or not. When you think about sustainability it is usually related to renewable material, energy sources, and so on. And I feel like all products come in packaging that is not fitted for sustainability, with a lot of unnecessary plastics and ridiculous large boxes. Without a car, it is hard to handle all that waste. So, it makes me sometimes wonder how sustainable a product truly are when everything circling around the product from production to its end-point seems less so.
I think that overall, besides the positive environmental factors, it would lead to ripple effects where people implementing a more sustainable mindset also spreads to other usage areas. If it becomes more user-friendly and easy to adapt to sustainable products without any higher cost, or implementation difficulties, I believe that most people would be happy to go over to more sustainable alternatives. Increasing knowledge in a fun and interactive way I think could create a greater motive for people to become interested and change their consumption habits, at least it would for me.