When Sustainability Goes Wrong: A Critical Perspective About Consumer Behaviour, Greenwashing, and its Impact on Sustainability

2. Sustainability As Global Speech: Why Society Can’T Stop Talking About It

Technology has benefited everyday life in many ways, but it has also brought disadvantages and serious problems. At the beginning of the 20th century, humanity became aware that in the moral domain there was a dark side in scientific and technological advances (Coutinho, 2009). The evolution of technology brought advantages but has encouraged the unrestrained exploitation of the planet's natural resources and caused high levels of pollution (Coutinho, 2009). As society and economy developed, the environment began to suffer from certain actions by human beings (ElHaffara et al., 2020).

According to Brahami et al. (2022), industrialization, urbanization, population explosion, wild capitalism programmed to obtain ever-increasing levels of productivity, consumption and profits are depleting the planet's resources, sending excessive amounts of carbon monoxide into the atmosphere, which is responsible for the destruction of the ozone layer and the consequent greenhouse effect. Moreover, these factors are depleting the oceans, annihilating the equatorial forests, as well as inflating non-biodegradable waste on land and in the seas: cement, polystyrene, plastics, tires, glass.