Black Friday began the long race towards Christmas, the journey, with various stages, that the world dedicates to shopping. This is an important period for commerce, a sector, but also a period in which many of the promises made about taking climate change and everything related to it seriously are being put to the test.
Giacomo Portas, former senator, founder of the Moderate party and constantly protagonist of the Turin political scene, has been president of Envipark for six months, the Piedmontese technology park that has been dealing with sustainability for over twenty years. Once he became aware of the new role, Portas decided to use it for an awareness campaign to make key environmental issues reach an ever-increasing number of people: «If these topics don’t become everyone’s heritage, we’ll never make it. Let’s think about this past week: in seven days at least 400,000 tons of CO2eq were released into the atmosphere due to the environmental impact of Black Friday in Italy.” And he adds, launching a challenge to consumers: «We need awareness and attention to the environment. These are the situations in which small gestures become huge actions. Between now and Christmas, or rather New Year’s Eve, we must demonstrate that all the words spent in recent months are starting to bear fruit and become concrete actions.”
«Enjoy shopping – continues the president of EnviPark – perhaps in the physical stores of the cities but remember that conscious purchasing also helps the planet. Don’t waste and above all use waste separation for packaging and containers correctly. Attention to the planet passes through every small but decisive daily gesture. The environment must be placed at the center of every policy from the municipality to the country and not be considered a world apart, change must contaminate everything. Without exceeding in anguish but with the determination of the extremists, the extremists of common sense.”