Bi-monthly publication of CSS Group
Onam, known as the harvest festival in Kerala, which is celebrated in the month of Chingam, where Malayalees across the world celebrate with their family making ‘Sadya’ and engaging in different plays as part of the festival. As always CSS Group celebrated Onam in the traditional way in various network offices where most of the staff wore traditional attire.
The question of what actually constitutes a green lifestyle, and how it should be brought into practical situations is a common thought. Environment–consumption relationship in the postmodern consumer consumption spectrum and its relationship with the green behavior depend mostly on the consumer lifestyle. However, that consumption styles representing lifestyle have a notable effect on green commitment, which was measured in this study by certain consumption-, related attitudes. Also greenness is characterized by postmodern lifestyle features, because those elements had more influence on green commitment than socio-economic variables. It appeared that lifestyle-based factors were best able to explain the variance in green commitment measures of environmental behavior. As expected, consumption styles had a major effect on green behavior, while traditional measures of respondents’ backgrounds did not clarify so well green purchase choices or consumption. This means that when it comes to green issues, individual consumption choices are influenced not only by socioeconomic factors, but also by many other forces striving to affect consumers. However, it is important to note that social background factors could explain a significant, if minor, amount of green commitment. It is worth keeping in mind also, that lifestyles and identity formation are not only a matter of choice or identity construction.
Green Near Us: As part of the major step to protect the country’s environment and promoting the green activities across UAE the government is taking initiatives by several awareness campaigns. Now UAE government has set a deadline for Go Green. They have instructed to stop the use of harmful material; manufacturers of plastic bags will have until the end of the year 2011 to register their products as biodegradable, according to a deadline set by the Ministry of Environment and Water. Dr Mariam Al Shenasi, Executive Director at the Ministry said to Gulf News, “Forty-eight per cent of private sector companies in the UAE, such as supermarkets, that use plastic bags have already switched to biodegradable bags in line with a federal decree issued in 2009 to rid the UAE of plastic bags by 2013”
One must also bear in mind that consumption choices are buried in the social goings-on of everyday life. Although many of the consumers of Western societies are aware of environmental problems and the impact that their own behavior has on the environment, favoring green products at an attitudinal level is often an expression of going along with social standards, which govern the appropriate and expected ways in which things ought to be done in a culture.
With our continuous view to uphold the freight-forwarding/logistics fraternity, CSS’ Thank-you incentive scheme towards our fellow-forwarders and customers, conceived two years back, wherein one lucky name out of the scores of business cards that were dropped into the bowls that are placed at the D/O counter at the Corporate Office and CSLC-1, was to be picked up and rewarded with a gift, has been nothing short of successful.
The winner picked out and rewarded for the months of September – October 2011 was Job Zachariah from Aramex– Dubai, who walked away with gift vouchers valued at 200 AED from Carrefour, presented by Deepu S Dev, Marketing Coordinator, CSS Dubai.