Sustainability is lucrative. Done credibly, it sells. A believable environmental claim signals something about the buyer, a statement about their values, a source of pride, a sense that the product is safer and purer, and the signal is stronger when the purchase is public and costs more. Products carrying environmental claims grew 28% over five years against 20% for those without.
Yet marketing has gone quiet: a majority of companies now deliberately say less about their environmental progress than they used to.
The reason is not really the regulation. Strip away the special vocabulary and greenwashing is just false advertising, which we already had laws for. The rules ask for proof, which is fair. The silence comes from marketers who cannot lay hands on the proof, are not sustainability experts, and have watched far bigger brands get punished for claims that turned out thin.
At the heart of this are two failures. Greenwashing, saying more than you do. And greenhushing, saying less than you do, for fear of being accused of the first. Many companies are doing good work and are afraid to talk about it. What is the cost of that silence, and what are the simple things a company can do today that customers will actually value?
"Not only are brands who are greenhushing losing the opportunity to connect with and widen their customer base with customers who are more ethically and sustainability driven but it all risks real progress across industry."
Michelle McEttrick, then Chief Customer Officer, Primark (Marketing Week, 9 Oct 2023)In the early days, building Utilitarian, I found myself walking through a minefield every time I described what we do, more worried about being picked apart than about being heard, so I played it safe. The criticism I braced for was not from customers or regulators. It was from inside the industry, the people who, in theory, want the same things we do.
About that "sort of"
McKinsey and NielsenIQ went through five years of US sales data, 600,000 products across 32 categories. Products carrying environmental claims grew 28% over the period. Products without grew 20%.
I turned an eight point gap into forty percent. Same numbers, bigger feeling. Forty sounds like a movement. Eight sounds like a rounding error. The only thing separating that from a regulator's case file is the "sort of."
So check me on it in the comments, or admit you have run the same move in a deck.
So the rules tightened, and they were right to try
For years the claims ran ahead of the evidence. "Eco-friendly." "Conscious." "Climate neutral by 2050." Words that sounded like commitments and meant, on inspection, very little. Trust in sustainability is fragile at the best of times, and a steady diet of unprovable claims wore it thin.
Here is the root of why this is so hard to police. Sustainability is both unusually broad and unusually lucrative, at the same time. Most things are one or the other. This is undefined enough to mean almost anything, and valuable enough that everyone wants to claim it.
Regulators, handed a category that resists definition, could not reach for a clean existing rule the way they would with a false price. So they reached for a broad word instead. "Greenwashing" describes throwing a wash over something, concealment in general. The name is as vague as the problem, and the enforcement that follows is case by case, one precedent at a time, a definition assembled slowly out of verdicts against other people.
In the EU, the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive is now in force and applies from 27 September 2026. It bans generic environmental claims a company cannot substantiate, and bans sustainability labels that rest on no recognised certification.
Biljana Borzan, the MEP who steered it through Parliament, put the point plainly: a company can no longer call something sustainable without explaining how. That is a fair test.
But notice the position it leaves the honest marketer in. The line they must not cross is still being drawn, one case at a time, and they will only find out where it sits when someone else trips over it.
Now watch what the test did to the marketer
The rules were meant to clean up the claims. In practice they taught a lot of marketers to stop making claims at all. The cure for greenwashing produced greenhushing.
South Pole, which surveys corporate climate communication every year, found a majority of companies now deliberately reducing what they say about their environmental progress, doing the work and going quiet about it.
Ask marketers directly and it sharpens: in a Chartered Institute of Marketing survey, 49% said they were wary of working on sustainability campaigns at all, for fear of being accused of greenwashing. Nearly half the people whose entire job is to communicate had decided this subject was safer left alone.
It is tempting to read that as timidity. It is not. A marketer is not a circularity specialist, and a global survey by the World Federation of Advertisers and Kantar found only 10% of marketers consider themselves well advanced on sustainability. You cannot speak loudly about evidence you do not fully understand, because the first sharp follow-up question exposes you.
Look at who is being made an example of. In December 2025 the UK Advertising Standards Authority banned ads from Nike, Superdry and Lacoste in a single batch, each for environmental claims it judged unsubstantiated. These are not small or careless companies. They have legal teams, brand teams, budgets, and they still ended up on the wrong side of the line.
A marketer at a mid-size retailer reads that and draws the obvious conclusion: if they can get it wrong, I certainly can. Stay quiet and the downside, a ruling, a call-out, your name on the campaign, simply never arrives.
ESG mentions on US earnings calls have collapsed, from a peak of 155 S&P 500 companies at the end of 2021 to fewer than 30 two years later. When almost everyone has gone quiet, you can no longer tell from the outside who went quiet and kept going from who went quiet because they quit. BP dropped its 2030 production-cut target outright. The Net-Zero Banking Alliance wound up after its members walked.
Silence has become a single signal that covers both. The company still doing the work now looks identical to the company that gave up, because neither is saying anything you can check.
The way out is not a better claim. It is a provable one.
A product claim is about the thing on the shelf. A conduct claim is different. It is about what the company does. "We donate to this cause." "We invest in the transition." "We run a take-back programme." And here is the trap inside it: the activity can be completely real and the claim still misleading, if the headline outruns the mechanism underneath it.
If the problem is missing proof, then confidence is not a personality trait to be summoned. It is the natural result of having a fact you cannot be argued out of. A marketer is confident exactly when they are standing on something solid. So the question stops being "how do we get braver" and becomes "where is the provable fact we can stand on".
Take the hardest case to defend, the conduct claim, and watch it become the easiest. A take-back programme is a conduct claim: it is a statement about something the company does. Consider the moment it turns on, which already happens in thousands of stores. A customer brings back a worn-out product, a pair of shoes, a jacket, something they bought, used and are finished with. In most stores that product is collected, weighed, and sent on, and the only record that survives is a figure in kilograms.
You cannot build much of a claim on a weight. It says nothing about which products, from which customers, going where. Which is exactly why these programmes stay quiet about them. Or worse, the headline outruns the record, the way Crocs' own take-back could not trace what happened to the shoes returned.
Change one thing. Capture that moment as data. The brand and category of the item, the date, the store, and a verified record of where it goes next, confirmed by the recycler who receives it. Now the retailer is not holding a vague intention. They are holding a specific, dated, independently confirmed fact about a real product and a real outcome.
Look at what that single fact does. It is plain enough that a marketer who is not a sustainability expert can state it and defend it, because there is nothing to interpret. "We recovered this many items, in these categories, through this verified route, recorded at the point of return." There is no follow-up question it cannot survive. A claim with a receipt is the one that differentiates.
This is the distinction I keep coming back to. The marketer never had a sustainability problem. They had a vagueness problem. Hand them the vague word and they freeze.
This is the work we do at Utilitarian. We turn the in-store take-back moment into item-level, verifiable data, so the marketing team has a concrete fact to talk about rather than a vague hope to avoid. And because the customer is no longer anonymous, you can thank them in the moment, for this pair of shoes, this return, building trust through a shared effort. None of that is possible when take-back is left anonymous.
Why this is bigger than a marketing problem
Here is what keeps me on this. If a retailer cannot talk about its environmental work, it cannot sell off the back of it. And if it cannot sell off the back of it, the commercial reason to do the work in the first place disappears with it.
That is the real cost of the silence. Sustainability that pays for itself gets funded year after year. Sustainability that has gone too quiet to move a single sale becomes a line item waiting to be cut. We spent a decade teaching everyone to find the holes in green claims, for good reasons. But if the lesson the market took away is that the safest thing to say is nothing, then we have not cleaned up sustainability marketing. We have switched off the engine that pays for sustainability at all.
So here is the question I would put to any retailer reading this. Forget what you are afraid to claim. How much of what your business already does, today, could you prove if you had simply captured it?
I suspect the honest answer is: far more than you think, and far more than enough to start talking again.
