My name is Tim, and the time for the bull$&it is over

My name is Tim. I'm the co-founder of Utilitarian. We work with retailers to turn in-store product take-back into a customer acquisition channel. I need to say that upfront because this article is personal, and I'd rather you know where I stand than discover it halfway through.

The meeting

Picture the quarterly business review. The commercial team presents revenue by channel, margin by category, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend. The numbers are specific. They connect directly to the targets the business is measured on. Everyone in the room speaks the same language.

Then sustainability gets its slot. The metrics shift to tonnes diverted, carbon reduced, compliance milestones reached. The room goes polite. The questions are softer. The connection to the numbers that were on screen five minutes ago is not made, because it doesn't exist. Sustainability is presented as a parallel track, not part of the commercial engine.

I've been in enough of these meetings, on both sides, to know what happens next. The sustainability update finishes. Someone says "great progress." And the room moves on to the thing that actually drives the next decision: the pipeline, the margin target, the campaign performance.

This is not because the people in that room are cynical. It is because sustainability, as it is currently framed, does not connect to the scorecards they are accountable for. Revenue has a number. Margin has a number. Sustainability has a report.

And while that meeting plays out, quarter after quarter, the actual outcomes are going backwards. The Circularity Gap Report, published annually by Circle Economy and Deloitte, tracks the share of secondary materials used by the global economy. In 2018, that figure was 9.1%. By 2023 it had fallen to 7.2%. The latest report, published in May 2025, put it at 6.9%. A 24% decline in seven years.

In the same period, the volume of articles, reports, and industry debate about the circular economy almost tripled. Recycled material use actually increased by 200 million tonnes. But overall consumption rose so much faster that it wiped out every gain. More talk. More effort. Worse results.

That is what I mean when I say the time for the bullshit is over. Not that people aren't trying. But that the current approach, sustainability on one scorecard, growth on another, is not working. The evidence says so.

The forbidden romance

Growth and sustainability need each other. Everyone in the industry knows it. And yet they remain on opposite sides of the business, barely speaking, operating in different languages, measured on different scorecards, and kept apart by the unspoken assumption that what one wants must come at the expense of the other.

There is a version of this that anyone who went to school will recognise. Sales and marketing are the kids who run the corridor. They set the pace, they speak the language everyone else learns, and they are measured on the thing the school cares about most: money. The sustainability team are the diligent ones. They do the reading. They know the subject better than anyone. They are right about almost everything. But being right and being influential are not the same thing.

For a while, the sustainability kids became fashionable. ESG was the hottest topic in the building. Every company hired a chief sustainability officer. Purpose-led branding was everywhere. But fashionable and powerful turned out to be different things. When budgets tightened and the conversation shifted back to growth, sustainability found itself back at the same table, doing the same careful work, wondering why the room that makes decisions still doesn't speak its language.

Marketing and sales exist to grow the top line. That is their job. Revenue, margin, market share. Sustainability exists to ensure the business operates within environmental and social boundaries. That is its job. Compliance, reporting, risk reduction. These two functions have been set up as though they are fundamentally different conversations. One is about making money. The other is about spending it responsibly.

That framing has become so deeply embedded that both sides have internalised it. The commercial team sees sustainability as well-intentioned but peripheral. Something to support when times are good, something to trim when they're not. The sustainability team, in turn, has learned to speak in the language of compliance and obligation rather than opportunity. Dotting the i's. Crossing the t's. Doing careful, necessary, important work, and wondering why it never gets the same weight in the room as a sales forecast.

Neither side is wrong about the other. But both sides are pretending. Marketing is pretending its own numbers are better than they are. Sustainability is pretending it doesn't need to talk about money. And the gap between them stays wide because neither has been given a reason, or a mechanism, to close it.

What happens when sustainability tries

The few leaders who have genuinely tried to bridge this gap have learned how quickly the business pulls them back.

Emmanuel Faber placed sustainability at the core of Danone. Made it the first listed company to adopt France's "entreprise à mission" status. In 2021, activist shareholders pressured the board to remove him. The perception was that he had put environmental outcomes ahead of shareholder returns. Whether that was true is debatable. The market's response was not.

At Unilever, Hein Schumacher arrived in 2023 and methodically scaled back a decade of ambition. Cut plastics reduction targets from 50% to 30%. Pushed packaging goals out by years. His own words: "We have too many long-term commitments that failed to make sufficient short-term impact." He stepped down in early 2025. His replacement, the CFO, leads with "growth and efficiency."

Nike, Canada Goose, and Moncler restructured or removed senior sustainability roles. Asos and Crocs dropped or delayed climate targets. Oxford Brookes University found that 62% of sustainability practitioners reported burnout in the past year.

The lesson the industry has taken from this is to be more cautious. South Pole found that 70% of sustainability-minded companies now deliberately hide their climate goals. Bloomberg Green reported that sustainability language in S&P 500 earnings calls has fallen 76% in three years. The term for this is "greenhushing." The industry learned that talking about sustainability is risky. So it stopped talking.

And meanwhile, the industry points at Shein. I wrote two weeks ago about the reaction to SHEIN's consumer circularity study. The data was significant. The response was to dismiss it because of who published it. That pattern is worth paying attention to.

Shein is not the hero of this story. But it is not the convenient villain the industry needs it to be, either. Every brand in this sector is pursuing growth. Every quarterly call leads with revenue and new product launches. No major brand has fully decoupled that growth from environmental impact. Some are further along. Some are investing more meaningfully. But the ratio of marketing spend on launching new collections versus genuinely reducing environmental footprint remains, across the industry, heavily weighted in one direction. Nobody is perfect here. Most brands are content for Shein to remain the one getting scrutinised, as long as nobody examines their own numbers with the same attention. That is not accountability. It is a convenient arrangement.

Here is what I think happened. Sustainability kept trying to earn its place by being more thorough, more compliant, more careful. More reports. Better frameworks. Stricter targets. And to be fair, the investment grew. Sustainability budgets are larger today than they were five years ago. But so is everything else, and everything else grew faster. The same pattern as the circularity data: recycled material use went up, but consumption outpaced it so completely that the net position got worse. Sustainability did not get cut so much as it got outgrown. It was never connected to the thing that protects a budget line and grows it in proportion: a direct contribution to revenue.

Sustainability was set up to prove its worth on a scorecard that was never designed to measure what it does.

The home truths

Before the commercial side settles in too comfortably here, it needs to look at its own house.

There is a quiet confidence in most organisations that marketing has its measurement sorted. That sustainability is the function with the ROI problem, and the commercial team has it figured out. I held that assumption longer than I should have.

Marketers estimate they waste 26% of their total budget on ineffective channels. Proxima puts that figure at up to 60%. In 2025, programmatic advertising alone wasted $26.8 billion globally.

The average email click-through rate is 2.09%. The average email campaign conversion rate is 0.08%. The average cost per lead on Meta reached $27.66 in 2025, up 21% year on year, while conversion rates on those same platforms fell. Every quarter, the cost of acquiring a new email address goes up and the return on it goes down.

That is the function that considers its scorecard rigorous enough to question whether sustainability can prove ROI.

The level of waste that marketing has normalised would end a sustainability programme overnight. A quarter of the budget disappearing is a benchmark. A 2% click rate is the industry standard. And of the entire annual marketing spend, the percentage that produces a positive environmental outcome is zero. Not small. Zero.

Here is why this matters for both sides. Marketing has channels that are becoming more expensive and less efficient every quarter. Sustainability has an initiative sitting inside the business that could generate customer data, email addresses, and repeat store visits, but it has never been framed in those terms. Both functions are stuck. One because its costs are rising and its returns are falling. The other because it has never been allowed to describe what it does in commercial language.

Between them sits the opportunity neither has been shown how to see.

Taking the gloves off

This is why we exist. This is what Utilitarian was built to do.

Not to add another sustainability tool to the stack. Not to help the compliance team file better reports. To build the bridge that connects sustainability to the commercial engine of the business, in language the business already understands, on a scorecard it already reads.

I learned what the real job was the hard way. I spent eighteen months talking about environmental outcomes. The rooms nodded politely. No follow-up. No second meeting. When I reframed the same product in terms of customer acquisition, cost per email, and measurable return, the conversation changed completely. Same product. Same outcomes. Different language. Different reaction entirely.

Here is what it looks like. A customer walks into a store. They drop off an old product. They scan a QR code. In under 20 seconds, the retailer has a verified email address, product-level data on what was returned, and a customer who has just taken a sustainable action inside their store. The product is routed to the right recovery partner. The customer gets a reward. The data point sits on the same dashboard, in the same format, as every other customer interaction.

That email did not cost €25 from a paid media platform. The customer chose to walk in and do something. And every interaction produces a measurable environmental outcome reported in the same language as the rest of the commercial data.

Same euro. Both jobs. One scorecard.

We get criticised for this. Too commercial. Too simple. I understand the instinct behind that criticism. But I stopped accepting it the day I started asking marketing directors what a Digital Product Passport does for customer acquisition. The answer was silence. Ask them what an email address from an in-store take-back does, and they can tell you exactly what it's worth and what to do with it next. That is not a compromise. That is the mechanism that finally gets sustainability into the room where decisions get made.

Two sides, one conversation

I want to be clear about what I'm asking for here. I'm not suggesting anyone tear up their marketing strategy or restructure the business around sustainability. The question is much smaller than that, and that is precisely why it's worth asking. Is it really so difficult for a marketing team to redirect a few basis points of budget, sit down with the sustainability team, and explore whether there are ways to engage customers that serve both functions at once?

Sustainability cannot keep waiting for special treatment. It will not get there through sympathy, through regulation, or through being the worthy cause that gets funded when times are good and deprioritised when they're not. It will not get there by speaking in acronyms and compliance language in rooms that run on revenue and margin. The gloves need to come off.

Sustainability needs to ask itself a question it has been too careful to ask: how can I contribute to the top line and stay true to what I stand for? That is not a betrayal. That is the fastest route to permanence. The sustainability director who walks into a budget meeting with customer acquisition data alongside environmental outcomes will not need to apologise for being there. They will not need to justify their existence with a regulatory deadline. They will be there because the numbers earned them the seat.

And here is the part sustainability teams often miss. They do not need to become marketers. They need the creativity that marketing teams already have. Sustainability has the purpose. Marketing has the craft to make people care about it. Agree on the goal, then get out of the way and let them do what they do best. The results will follow, because for the first time, both teams will be pulling in the same direction.

And marketing needs to open its eyes. There are channels available right now that would improve acquisition costs, generate higher-quality leads, and create genuine reasons for customers to walk through the door. They happen to produce a measurable environmental outcome at the same time. This is not a greenwashing risk. This is not a favour to the sustainability team. This is a commercial advantage, hiding in plain sight, overlooked because it has the wrong label on it.

I know of one retailer that did something remarkably simple. They assigned a member of their marketing team to spend one day a week working alongside the sustainability function. Not a restructure. Not a new hire. Just one person who is comfortable in both conversations, sitting across both teams, looking for the overlap. Within weeks the questions changed. The language shifted. Sustainability started appearing in commercial planning meetings not as a compliance update but as a channel. That is all it took. One person. One day a week. Permission to look for the connection.

When both sides stop pretending, the picture changes. Marketing stops treating sustainability as someone else's problem. Sustainability stops speaking in a language the room can't use. The scorecard becomes one scorecard. And the conversation that has been stuck for a decade finally starts to move.

I've watched it happen. In the rooms where sustainability data and commercial data sit on the same screen, nobody says "great progress" and moves on. They lean in. They ask questions. They start planning the next quarter.

Until that becomes normal, sustainability will stay exactly where it has always been: a priority on the horizon. Always in sight. Seemingly out of reach. Not because the distance is real, but because nobody has built the path between where it sits and where the business actually operates.

We built the path. It works. And it starts with both sides admitting they need each other.

Nobody in this industry has it figured out. Not the sustainability team. Not the marketing team. Not Shein, and not the brands pointing at Shein. But the ones who will move first are the ones willing to stop pretending and start measuring what actually matters.

My name is Tim. That's what I wanted to say.