Sustainable consumption of newspaper: actualizing human-nature harmony through producer-consumer strategic sustainable resonance

Parallel Sessions 3: Sustainable consumption, consumer responses and new-markets for eco-productsGlobal warming is the most pressing environment crisis human faces, posing life-threatening risk to us. Lacking business or environmental studies could compromise natural resources and management. I explored a successful case study from free daily newspaper business that yields a triple-win situation to entrepreneurs, readers and the nature in Hong Kong, China. An innovative and inspiring golden-green lesson that contributes significantly to the human-nature harmonious growth is based on the realization of the concept of Producer-consumer strategic sustainable resonance. The study adopted a case study approach and collected the first-hand research evident by the participative observation research method coupled with the secondary data from books, newspapers, magazines and online resources for establishing the base for statistical analysis. This paper argues that the top-down state interventionism has to echo to the bottom-up civic pragmatism for resolving global environmental crises in the long run. A new concept of producer-consumer strategic sustainable resonance posits entrepreneurs as the most crucial agents for initiating and realizing human-nature harmony in my case study about recirculation of free daily, a kind of human behaviors that rolls corporate social responsibility and sustainable consumption into a fabulous one, strategically resonates to the slogan printed on newspaper and installation of recirculation boxes for facilitating the newspaper recirculation every day. As a result, the recirculation of newspaper, amazingly, brings about not only a cost-saving and revenue-exploring business to entrepreneurs, a welcoming product satisfaction to readers, but also a reducing resource stress on trees for producing newsprint. The results could inform future business management and environmental policies on integrating economic-viable and environmentally-sustainable business development in new or existing corporations.published_or_final_versionThe 16th Annual International Sustainable Development Research Conference, Hong Kong, 30 May-1 June 2010. In Conference Proceedings, 2010, p. 46-5