"A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people." In relation to this quote from Franklin D. Roosevelt: What do you think about Czech people and their relation to environmental protection? Are they rather eco-pessimistic and not bothered with environmental topics, or the opposite is true?

By the end of 2018, we ordered a special study to find out the attitudes of Czech population to ecology, climate protection and mainly to an innovative and eco-friendly way of shopping (such as the one developed by MIWA). We asked the renowned agency Simply5 to organize the study.

An online survey was performed on a representative sample of Czech society and it brought some very interesting findings, which we are eager to share with you! Let's start with question number one: What is the role of environment protection in the lives of Czech people?

Compared to the topics of personal interest (for example health care or nutrition), environment protection is rather less important. However, it is number one among the other topics of global interest.

Waste and consumer lifestyle are believed to be the most important environmental issues as well as those which can be improved by personal effort. Both of them are practical, everyday and tangible. The other issues are rather abstract – which is probably the reason why we consider them to be the matters of big market players.

In the traditionally skeptical Czech society, there is still more than a third of non-believers who are not sure whether global warming is real and caused by human behavior or not.

Who is the most responsible for the problems? According to the Czech people, mainly manufacturing and technological companies should take care of the solutions. On the other hand, they also feel that they should change their consumer lifestyle. It is therefore apparent that the sustainable tendencies in everyday life are already present in peoples' minds.

Technological innovations should primarily help the large companies to reduce pollution. What we need to mention is that also new types of packaging would be highly valued – this shows that a vast part of society could welcome a modern packaging system such as the one developed by Miwa! 

12 % of customers claim to prefer environmentally friendly products, even if they cost more. And another 36% prefer them when the price or quality is comparable to usual products. Nice-that makes almost half a population together! But do people really do as they say?

Unfortunately, what we declare is not always the true picture of how we really act. As the survey shows, we are not willing to sacrifice our comfort much in the name of nature protection. It seems that most of the Czech people need some facilitation or "a given hand" to make a step forward towards sustainability. We will show this in detail using examples of eco-friendly shopping habits in the Czech Republic in the upcoming article.

(Title photo by Daniel Hjalmarsson on Unsplash)

Read also: Do the Czechs shop ecofriendly?