Analysis of Behavioral Changes Observed in Users of Sustainable Practices

Abstract

This study has the main objective to analyze changes in social behaviors resulting from the application of sustainable methodologies in family and business environments. The work will be focused on understanding how the personal advantages acquired by individuals who opted to exchange unsustainable daily practices for more actives ones in a general scenario of collective change extend. Through real clients of companies related to selective garbage collection and generation of photovoltaic solar energy, it was possible to observe that the interest in studying and informing about the respective themes increases as the use of them becomes simpler, didactic and recurrent. This fact can be confirmed by creating an analogy with home garden productions, where the closer approximation of users to issues such as health, environmental, consumerism and even planting techniques is visible. This acquired knowledge takes on greater dimensions in the long run, but they are rooted more permanently, unlike most current proposals of study that offer passive and momentary learning. As people who coexist with these users are influenced, collective behavioral changes become real and palpable. Having only the existence of environmental values, with the absence of changes in habits and automatisms, there is no change in behavior on the part of people. The present work will try to show the reader that these statements are in fact real through the intersection of interviews with theoretical foundations, as well as data acquired from the already existing and functioning projects. Combining economic, social and environmental aspects, one can observe in an effective way the real impact of certain daily activities on nature and in the community. The last decades have been marked by the broadening of the debates that approach the natural resources preservation that man uses, where studies show that the present one already represents a real ecological crisis and irreducible dimensions in some cases. Climate change and countless ecosystems undergo daily destabilization and their reflections can be found anywhere in the world. The media has become increasingly emphatic, often for sensational reasons, in presenting situations such as the natural resources reduction, the increase of various types of pollution, global warming, the potable water reserves reduction, the waste excessive production, among others. These themes, related to environmental degradation, have fostered the population’s interest, since they always present the consequences that, due to the decline of environmental quality, will be imposed on the life of modern society. Is that the sustainability concept can be translated into a tripod aspects relating to these reflexes (triple bottom line), and the resulting social, environmental and economic analyzes financial, separately and jointly.