Why "sustainability" tries to mean everything to everyone, and ends up meaning nothing to anyone.
A few years ago, I watched a young woman ask a panellist from a premium sustainability brand a simple question. "Should you also make a lower-cost version available, for people who want to buy your clothes, who want to be sustainable, but cannot afford it?" The panellist talked about the brand's investment and activism, and said honestly that making clothes to their standard is expensive. It was not really an answer.
It was difficult to listen to, because the truth that was not said out loud is, in my opinion, why so many sustainability professionals feel uninspired and exhausted right now. They feel asked to perform miracles, and not listened to. They have taken "do better for the planet" as the brief. But the question is whether that is what they were asked to do, or a mission they chose to take on.
The fix is not to care less. It is to narrow. There is a defined, legally backed set of things that are material to a fashion or retail business, and a defined obligation attached to them. Start there, argue in the language the business already speaks, and the work becomes fundable. Everything outside that set is a values choice, and people need to consider carefully whether it is one the whole company is prepared to invest in, or just a personal opinion.
Margin pays for the impact
A few years ago, when we first established Utilitarian, I sat in the audience at a youth panel on sustainability. Panels like this are always worth the time. You are challenged, you remember why you do what you do, and now and then you catch a moment of friction between aspiration and reality.
One of the young representatives put a question to a panellist from a well-known premium sustainability brand. Her question was simple: people who share every one of your values but cannot afford your clothes, what do you do for them? Should there be a version they can buy too?
The panellist pointed to the brand's investment in environmental protection and its activism. They said, honestly enough, that making clothes to their standard is expensive. But they did not answer the question she asked. She asked who the mission reaches. They answered how sincerely it is held. Those are not the same thing.
I do not think there is a clean answer, and that is the point. Every brand lives in a grey area between making a profit, positioning itself through marketing, spending margin on activism, and making something sustainable that ordinary people can actually afford. You can choose some of those. The honest question, the one she had really asked, is whether anyone can do all of them at once. Most cannot. Few will say so.
Burnout is not unique to ESG teams
That same grey area shows up inside companies, and it has a cost almost nobody counts.
Most people in sustainability are tired. A study of 159 sustainability professionals found 62% had experienced burnout in the past year. That is high, but it sits among others: around 73% of lawyers, 70% in marketing and creative roles, higher still across healthcare. Burnout is not unique to this field.
I think much of it comes from one confusion, and it is worth being precise. There is a difference between a misalignment of materiality and a misalignment of values, and the two get mistaken for each other constantly. One you can solve with evidence. The other is not yours to solve at all.
You're not a visionary, you're a vendor
In Devil Wears Prada 2, Miranda Priestly says, "you're not a visionary, you're a vendor." Harsh, but accurate, and I think it might be the most useful thing a sustainability professional could hear.
Nobody asks why the finance team exists. Nobody asks why legal or marketing exists. Every department grumbles about the others, but no one questions whether they belong in the building, because what they do is plainly load-bearing. The company cannot run without them.
Sustainability is here to stay. But it has a branding problem, and that is its most immediate challenge. For many it still reads as a nice-to-have, a cost centre that does not carry commercial value.
In the film, if Miranda had a strong team, and the right vendors working with her, the scandal that drives the plot could have been avoided. It is time to remember why ESG exists, get back to basics, and do it better.
What "material" actually means
Materiality is the discipline underneath all of this, and I cannot remember the last time I heard someone use it. Part of the reason is that most people in the field were never trained in it: fewer than half of sustainability professionals hold a related degree, and most leaders moved across from other parts of the business. If no one ever sat you down and explained it, that is the norm, not a personal failing. But it is worth learning, because it is the difference between a case the business will fund and an opinion it will nod at and ignore.
Properly, materiality has two halves. Financial materiality asks how an issue affects the business. Impact materiality asks how the business affects the world. Double materiality, the standard EU regulation now requires, means weighing both. The second half is not financial in its own terms, and I will not pretend it is. But a business can only act on it through its own lens, which is financial, legal, or licence to operate. That is exactly why the regulation exists. It takes an impact the market does not price and attaches a consequence the business understands.
For a large fashion or retail business, "material" is not a feeling. It is three defined things:
- What affects enterprise value. The sector's financial-materiality standards, the SASB Apparel, Accessories and Footwear Standard, now maintained by the ISSB, already name them: chemicals in products, labour and environmental conditions in the supply chain, and raw materials sourcing.
- What you must report. Double-materiality reporting under the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, for large in-scope businesses: both how issues affect the company and how the company affects the world.
- What you must operationally do. Mandatory extended producer responsibility for textiles, now coming into force under the revised Waste Framework Directive, which makes producers fund the collection, sorting and recycling of what they place on the market.
Stack those three and you have a precise definition of material. It is wider than the investor view and far narrower than "the planet."
All three carry obligations and costs. The question for ESG professionals is what you will do about them. How will you recommend the business not only comply, but create additional value, in a competitive environment where every other stakeholder is coming to terms with the same obligations?
The narrow thing that is actually yours
This is the whole reason we lead with the financial return on everything we do, and I want to be plain about it, because it reads to some as a lack of conviction. It is the opposite.
Take a collection point in a store. Under the new rules, a retailer increasingly has to provide one, and has to help fund what happens to what comes back. That is not a debate. The obligation sets the floor. The real work starts after that, and it is the work most retailers have never been shown how to do. Given that the collection point has to exist, what can you do with it? How does it lower a cost in one part of the business, earn revenue in another, and meet the obligation at the same time? Answer those together and a compliance cost becomes a commercial case, with the environmental outcome riding on a number the business already trusts.
And the obligation is not yours alone. If you are a retailer, your brand partners carry the same producer responsibility you do. The collection point you are already obliged to run can help them meet an obligation they cannot easily meet themselves. A cost on your side becomes a service on theirs, and a reason to want the relationship. The same logic runs down the chain to the recycler and back to the customer. That is what a focused sustainability function looks like: not advocating for everything, but owning the one place where obligation, cost, and opportunity meet.
So here is what I keep coming back to
We should stop using the word sustainability. Not soften it. Stop.
I have worked in this space for over fifteen years and still cannot define it in one sentence, because it means something different to everyone. At best it is what most people would call doing good business. That scope is far too broad for today's standards, and it is everyone's obligation, not one team's.
ESG is clear. Environmental, social and governance. It considers the perspectives that sit outside day-to-day operations, and it does what it says. ESG professionals work on what is material to their business and their industry. There is a defined set of frameworks a business must align to, and the job is to work inside the business to turn that alignment into competitive advantage. And if you are really good, you will find a way to use it to maximise the impact you are most passionate about.
So if you stripped the word sustainability out of your work tomorrow, and had to name the cost, the duty, the return, or the choice instead, how much of what you currently call sustainability would survive being said out loud?