Sustainability: in Italy strong appeal, but we really can do more

Italian people show great awareness about environmental sustainability cases and claim to be ready to prefer green life style; however, this trend doesn’t seem so deep when you have tangibly to prove it.

This is only one of the set coming out from the research “How green are you?”, commissioned from Vaillant to marketing company TNS, that got involved over 13.000 people sample in 13 different countries in Europe. Comparing the gathered data, shown Thursday the 5th of may in Milano, they developed the My Green IQ, an index that links good intentions and real behaviors in order of green habits. If we consider this standard, we see that Italy is placed on the third place with a 117 value, under Austria (123) and Turkey (127).

While Germany, France, Holland and United Kingdome are at the bottom of the rank. Going into details, if we consider expressly energy uses, by this work appears that Italian people take care of efficiency and environmental impact mainly for the economic benefits, as Marco Basta, Vaillant’s Comunication Manager, explained. “ There’s a lot of attention dealing with energy saving – underlined the manager – surely looking deeper about economic point of view than energy’s wastefullness, but it produces honest behaviors anyway.

On the other side, though, we have negative points about mobility. Car is, though, very important in Italians’ life, much more than bigger states like Germany or France”. In particular comparing the efficiency’s case, the 35% of Italian people think that changing the old heating system with more sustainable and performing ones, is the best way to save energy and reduce emissions. Another interesting fact, as Basta says, is the higher attention about the electric bill compared with the gas one. In general, therefore, sustainability and energy saving is strongly felt by the Italians, that’s why this part must be taken into account by companies when they make their proposals to the client, like Gherardo Magri, Vaillant Italy’s CEO, said, proposing that is necessary to “intercept this inclination” and “support it with results easier and easier to use”.

On the same line even Andrea Poggio, Legambiente national’ secretariat, who said that both environmental and economic have seen by the consumers like two faces of the same coin. In this sense, highlighted Poggio, if uses for the boiler’s substitution with a more efficient one are too high, the sustainability’s arrangement doesn’t change into real behaviors. This trend can be detoured when a technological offer may offer many innovations balancing out prices connected with saving made marring economic and environmental advantages.