World Consumer Rights Day, March 15, 2021
Millions of consumers arealready feeling the effects of climate change throughout the world. To protect the planet and provide fair social conditions for present and future generations, serious attention is needed on the way we produce and consume goods and services. In this stupendous endeavor the consumers have to play a key role, firstly, through their purchasing power, ability to push for system change in supply chains systems. Consumers are already making changes to their lifestyle to be more sustainable – recycling and reducing food waste, avoiding unsustainable products, and so on, which can make a considerable impact all over the world. Towards this end a systematic action plan is inevitable globally by banning the plastic carry bags usage, ban the plastic products which cannot be recycled, incentive for business of recycling, adopting new technology for converting plastic waste into energy and so on.
By Dr. Himachalam Dasaraju
The World Consumer Rights Day (WCRD) is a day which is celebrated on 15th March every year across the world to debate on a specific theme of world importance and to promote consumer rights and awareness among consumers. It is an appropriate platform to debate and review, what consumers globally want and put them at the mainstream of world development.
The Consumer International (CI), a non-profit London-based consumer organization is organizing World Consumer Rights Day on March 15, of every year since 1983. It is in recognition of the promulgation of consumer rights by the then President of USA John F. Kennedy while addressing US congress on 15th March 1962. Since then world consumer rights day is being organized with a special focus on a specific theme like Fix Our Phone Rights (2014), Healthy Diets (2015), Antibiotics Off the Menu (2016), Better Digital World (2017), Making Digital Marketplaces Fairer (2018), Trusted Smart Products (2019) and Sustainable Consumer (2020) apart from promoting consumer rights across the world.
The theme for World Consumer Rights Day on March 15, 2021, is “Tackling Plastic Pollution”.
Plastic Pollution:
The Consumer International (CI) has announced the focal theme for this year’s debate on “Tackling Plastic Pollution” to raise awareness and engage consumers to review and promote more sustainable practices all over the world. Based on the last year’s theme ‘Sustainable Consumer’, the present social campaign will also focus on the role that the consumer advocates, businesses; governments can play an effective role in tackling the menace of global plastic pollution.On this WorldConsumerRightsDay(15March2021), it is proposed to join together all the consumer organizations around the world tocall forglobal changes to avert environmental breakdown and to tackle plastic pollution, which is a great threat to global wellbeing. It is the dire need of the day to resolve the crises of plastic pollution to diffuse the climate change and loss of biodiversity the world over.
The decade of 2020is the lastchancetolimitglobalwarmingto1.5csincepre-industrialtimes,inlinewiththeParisAgreement,andto reversethecurrenttrendofwide-scalebiodiversityloss. Global warming is a serious threat to global wellbeing, causing lots of impediments on the climatic conditions, human health, food security, biodiversity, and sustainability of the global economic activity. The unusual change and increase in precipitation, melting glaciers, and expanding Seas have a deleterious impact on the global climate resulting in abrupt climate changes, high incidents of floods, storms, hurricanes, and human health. One of the root causes for all these changes is excessive use of plastic and its pollution on the earth and ocean. Plastic has become an integral part of human consumption for a long and became inseparable from the economic activities of human life. The production and consumption of plastics, mostly single-use plastic are not sustainable and it is impacting badly on our ecosystems, causing negative environmental threats at both local and international and human health impediments.