More Companies Focus on Sustainable Production

Sustainability has only become an everyday topic in the last decade and a half, even though mankind has been systematically halving the raw materials and natural resources that ensure prosperity since the beginning of the industrial revolution, warns Gábor Lévai, founder of Green Brands Hungary.

In his podcast for economx.hu, he explained that he believes that the time may come when manufacturers will be obliged to recycle suitable materials, but at the same time the production and design of products will have to adapt to this.

It is now clear that human well-being in this form is unsustainable, he said. It has long been known that the Earth's resources are finite, but only recent research has shown that some processes are irreversible. It is precisely in order to minimize these impacts that we need to pay more attention to the ecological footprint of products at an individual level.

According to Gábor Lévai, in Hungary too, labels, which can be used to infer how a product was produced, are becoming more and more common. However, he also warned that there are currently few auditing companies in Hungary that meet EU standards, as the certification process alone would take several years of work for these companies.

More and more companies are looking to manufacture their products in a sustainable way, but few workers have the necessary skills. This is why they have launched a sustainability management course in cooperation with Corvinus University of Budapest, which has been popular from the start and, according to Gábor Lévai, they are trying to prevent it from becoming a mass course.

To enable EU countries to meet the 2030 environmental targets, recycling rates would need to be at least four times higher than at present, but this is unlikely to happen, especially due to the uncertainty of supply chains, which has led to a further decline in recycling rates over the past two years.