Sustainable school supplies conquer the store racks - the joint effort pays off!

With the initiative "Clever shopping for schools", the Ministry of Climate Action and the commerce in Austria are promoting climate-friendly and low-waste school articles. The demand for environmentally friendly school articles is rising: Manufacturers and retailers are increasingly convincing with low-waste and climate-friendly products.

Many of them have already been awarded with the Austrian Ecolabel.

Around 80,000 children will attend school for the first time in our country in September. In addition, there will be about 1.1 million pupils from the other school levels. They all need school materials. A total of around 250 million euros will be spent on this in Austria. The environmental initiative "Clever Shopping for Schools" is again offering a service at the start of school this year: a directory with around 4,400 recommended articles can be easily searched online and are available from cooperation partners in specialist paper shops.

For more than 11 years, "Clever shopping for schools" has been committed to getting even the youngest children - and of course their parents - excited about environmentally friendly products for school. Since its launch, it has succeeded in winning over many specialist shops and large retail chains as partners, thereby promoting the range of environmentally friendly school articles throughout the country. "The commerce sector in Austria is directly confronted with the increasing demand for environmentally friendly school articles and has noticed an unbroken interest of consumers", says Andreas Auer, chairman of the Federal Committee Papers/Play in the Austrian Economic Chamber (WKÖ). This is why the paper trade has been happy to participate in "Clever shopping for schools" from the very beginning.

"With the initiative 'Clever shopping for school', we offer all parents who shop for school supplies for their children a practical aid to find environmentally friendly school supplies. Those who look for the Austrian Ecolabel or other national Ecolabels when buying can be sure that they have made the right choice in the interest of the children and their environment," says Maria Patek, former Minister for Sustainability.

By the way, the largest share of environmentally friendly articles is made up of paper products such as exercise books, folders or pads. The decisive breakthrough in this area came in 2010 with the switch to recycled paper exercise books.

www.schuleinkauf.at