For the 24-year-old Luxembourg-born marketer, 2021 will be equally as crucial as the previous year for sustainability. “First of all, we have to shift the narrative of [sustainability] being just this very one-sided thing that is specific to the way we treat the planet and we have to take on a much more holistic approach in the sense of how we treat each other,” she states.
However, the young entrepreneur notes that the forced slowdown of society as a whole and the resulting drastic lifestyle changes have started to shift the mindsets with which people are approaching sustainability. “What the pandemic has really done is put a pause on all of us, giving us the time and space to think about what we’ve done in the past and whether or not that behaviour is sustainable for the rest of our lives without repercussions. And usually the answer is no… so I think it will be a lot about the individual shifts we will see that will then translate into us being more cautious and looking at things like the climate action more carefully.”
What months of anxiety and distress concerning a global pandemic have really initiated is introspection and a more conscious look at our mental and physical health, Liz says, initiating a move towards the more educated consumer. “We’ve become more aware of it, so maybe in the coming year we will be more inclined to make change and to ask for change.”
Alongside these individual changes, the social media influencer, on a larger scale, sees a lot of innovation happening in 2021. Companies will increasingly create new sustainable materials and ways to move beyond the traditional “Reduce, reuse, recycle” mentality and towards regeneration and circularity, constantly giving new life to things we already have in order to ultimately eliminate waste altogether.