I Don’t Think “Sustainability” Means What You Think it Means

Businesses are scrambling to earn your business. As consumers place more importance on environmental causes, corporations will adopt the latest relevant buzzwords including “sustainability”, “renewable”, “green”, and “eco-friendly”, just to name a few.

The problem is, a word like “sustainable” can get easily hijacked by those who want to align the word with their business, instead of the other way around. When businesses try to push the eco-conscious talk without the eco-conscious walk, this is commonly known as “greenwashing”.

But the truth of the matter is, this eco stuff is complicated. Although some businesses may greenwash their narrative on purpose, I believe others do it unintentionally.

The “environment” consists of complex biospheres and chain reactions delicately balanced by Mother Nature herself. Claiming a product is “sustainable” or “green” is an oversimplification of a very complex issue.

A beauty company that incorporates recycled plastic into its products is not saving the world, they are just making their product marginally better. Yes, these small improvements are technically better, but they aren’t going to save the world. However, they are marketed that way. Why? Because it makes you feel like you are making a difference.

A selfish action suddenly becomes selfless. You aren’t buying this product for yourself…you’re buying it for the planet! Corporations know that as long as your purchase makes you feel like Captain America or Wonder Woman, you will be emboldened to make more purchases (and you may also pay a premium for it!)

Below, I will break down a commonly used buzzword that can be misleading when used incorrectly: sustainable.

What does “sustainable” even mean?

“Sustainable” is probably one of the most overly used buzzwords related to environmental health. I’ve noticed that everything and everyone has become “sustainable”. Every company has a sustainability page nowadays. Chevron, an oil and gas company, has a sustainability page. So do Coca-Cola and Pepsi, the companies with the most plastic ocean pollution for the 4th year in a row.

No matter where you look, everyone is talking about “doing their part”. It’s funny how it seems like everyone is on board, and yet the improvements are either nonexistent or subtle at best. Let’s just call it what it is: many companies only care about sustaining profits.

In simple terms, this is what “sustainability” is supposed to mean from an environmental standpoint: sustaining the natural balance of the world.

Any resource that is taken from the Earth should be done at a pace that Mother Nature can naturally replenish. If we are taking more than she can make, then that is not sustainable, because eventually we will reach a breaking point in which the resource is depleted. For example, if we cut down more trees than can be regrown, we are going to run out of trees.

But here is how the term got hijacked. Businesses have redefined “sustainable” products as anything that might be slightly better than another product for the environment.

Sometimes this improvement is more perception than reality. Additionally, they use a narrow perspective to convince consumers their product helps to protect the environment.

The narrow perspective of a “sustainable” product

Here’s an example of what I refer to as a “narrow perspective”: Is it better to buy a polyester shirt…or a polyester shirt made of recycled water bottles? The latter option obviously seems like the better choice. But here’s what they don’t tell you:

Just because the bottles were recycled doesn’t mean your shirt is recyclable at its end of life. Once your garment becomes unusable, it will likely end up at a landfill, or in some cases, the Atacama Desert in Chile!

A shirt made of recycled plastic will likely also contain virgin plastic to help maintain its structural integrity. Recycled polyester is rarely strong enough to create a good quality product on its own. Recycled plastic keeps virgin plastic production in business.

Just because your shirt is made of plastic bottles doesn’t mean you saved those bottles from becoming ocean pollution. In fact, the plastic waste we send to other countries to recycle very often gets polluted into the environment (either illegally dumped or burned).

And even if you could guarantee those bottles were pulled out of the sea, your purchase will not protect the ocean. In fact, your garment will shed hundreds of thousands of tiny plastic fibers with each wash. These small microplastics can bypass some water treatment facilities and end up in our drinking water, and yes, even the ocean.

If we look at this choice from a narrowed perspective, the decision is easy. But when you widen your lens and uncover these other harsh realities, the decision gets fuzzy.

Companies want to simplify the buying process as much as possible. Consumers who look at the problem holistically may not be easily swayed by a few recycled water bottles.

To be honest, companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They know consumers want them to be “sustainable”, but they also know that reaching true sustainability would cause them to lose money because they would need to produce less, sell less, and probably pay more for good quality materials and fair wages.

Many corporations hang in the delicate balance of promoting sustainable messages to consumers while upholding unsustainable growth to shareholders. The only way to appease both is through greenwashing, and that’s why it’s so prevalent.

The most sustainable product of all is…

At the end of the day, companies only care about one thing: making a sale. Since the dawn of time, we have seen salesmen peddling snake oil, their pitches laced with the latest buzzwords. Their goal isn’t to be truthful, but instead, to appear to be truthful.

I implore you to approach each transaction with a healthy level of skepticism. Here’s the reality: nearly every product you buy has some sort of impact on the environment, whether it’s water usage, carbon emissions, or waste generation. It’s true that one item could be less impactful than another, but the product’s footprint will unlikely be zero.

When it comes down to it, the most sustainable product is the one you don’t buy. But that doesn’t really help with company profits, now does it?