Since the beginning of May the new exhibition “Consumer Compass” is seeing to it that consumers take a serious look at their buying patterns. “Using instead of owning, and trading instead of buying, are old alternatives which need to be rediscovered, and we present them in this exhibition”, said DBU General Secretary Dr.-Ing. E.h. Fritz Brickwedde at the opening in Osnabrück. “In this ‘throwaway society’ sustainable consumption will take on even greater significance in the future”, Brickwedde asserted. Among other indicators he pointed to the term “Share Economy”, currently increasingly in use: it denotes an economic trend which involves the shared use of goods.
This eighth successive exhibition by the German Federal Environmental Foundation (Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt, DBU) was developed in cooperation with the German Federal Environmental Agency (Umweltbundesamt, UBA). As UBA Vice-President Dr. Thomas Holzmann emphasized at the opening, the environmental crisis is, at its core, a crisis of the modern industrial consumer society: “We need people who can find the courage, and the energy, to take new paths in social experimentation and try new forms of daily living.”
