Promocja zrównoważonej konsumpcji w wybranych państwach europejskich

Sustainable consumption, minimizing humans’ negative effect on their natural and social environment, is an integral part of sustainable development and constitutes a major challenge for sustainable marketing of enterprises, organizations and institutions. It may be manifested on the demand side of all markets, but at the same time it is strongly connected in terms of cause and effect with their supply side. Sustainable production makes no sense without sustainable consumption – and vice versa. The condition for the development of sustainable consumption, which often demands self-restraint, sacrifices, increased effort and/or incurring higher purchase costs, is a high level of the society’s environmental awareness. It enables people to make non-egoistic choices which take into account the needs of others and the protection of the natural environment. More and more consumers in Poland and in Europe declare that the prices of goods and services do not constitute the most important criterion for them when making purchasing decisions. In spite of this, experience to date suggests that with more evident economic profitability of environmentally friendly behaviour and purchasing decisions comes a faster pace of development of sustainable consumption and its greater popularity. Efficient promotion campaigns for sustainable consumption is and will be vital for shaping the quality of life – both on the scale of particular local environments and on the global scale. The current article presents examples of specific actions effectively promoting the attitudes and activities of sustainable consumption in Germany, Iceland and Finland. They have been identified and described in the GO GREEN ACROSS EUROPE project, realized in the years 2014-15 within Leonardo da Vinci VETPRO programme.