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 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 get softer. The connection to the numbers that were on screen five minutes ago is not made, because it doesn't exist. Someone raises Digital Product Passports. The requirements aren't finalised yet. The response is predictable: let's hold off until we know for sure. Everyone in the room knows it will cost more to start later. But later is always the easier answer. The update finishes. Someone says "great progress." The room moves on to the pipeline, the margin target, the campaign performance.
But the function doing the ignoring has its own problem. Marketers waste 26% of their budget on ineffective channels. The average email click rate is 2%. The cost per lead is rising every quarter. And of the entire annual marketing spend, the percentage that produces a positive environmental outcome is zero. Neither side has its house in order. Both need what the other has.
The global circularity rate has fallen from 9.1% to 6.9% in seven years while industry discussion almost tripled. More conferences. More commitments. More frameworks. Worse outcomes. We built Utilitarian to close the gap: one in-store action that delivers a marketing outcome and an environmental outcome on the same scorecard, in the same language the business already speaks.
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
The quarterly business review. The commercial team presents revenue by channel, margin by category, cost per acquisition. The numbers are specific. They connect to the targets the business is measured on. Everyone speaks the same language.
Then sustainability gets its slot. The metrics shift to tonnes diverted, carbon reduced, compliance milestones. The room goes polite. The connection to the numbers on screen five minutes ago is not made, because it doesn't exist. Someone raises upcoming regulation. The requirements aren't finalised. The response writes itself: let's wait until we know for sure. Everyone in the room knows it will cost more to start later. Later wins anyway.
I've been in enough of these meetings to know what happens next. Someone says "great progress." The room moves on to the pipeline, the margin target, the campaign performance. Not because anyone is cynical. Because sustainability does not connect to the scorecards anyone is accountable for.
The numbers marketing doesn't talk about
There is a quiet assumption 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.
These are the same numbers the commercial team brings to the meeting where sustainability is asked to prove its ROI. It is worth both sides seeing that clearly.
And of the entire annual marketing spend, the percentage that produces a positive environmental outcome is zero.
The industry treats wasted marketing budget the same way it treats overproduction and unsold stock: as a normal cost of doing business. In both cases, the waste is built into the model, and nobody is asked to justify it.
Marketing wastes 26% and calls it a benchmark. Sustainability asks for budget and is told the ROI isn't clear enough.
The gap nobody owns
Growth and sustainability need each other. Everyone in the industry knows it. And yet they remain on opposite sides of the business, operating in different languages, measured on different scorecards, kept apart by the assumption that what one wants must come at the expense of the other.
Marketing is pretending its numbers are better than they are. Sustainability is pretending it doesn't need to talk about money. Both are losing because of it.
For a while, sustainability 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, sustainability found itself back doing careful, important work, wondering why the room that makes decisions still doesn't speak its language.
The few leaders who tried to bridge the gap learned how fast the business pulls them back. Emmanuel Faber placed sustainability at the core of Danone. Activist shareholders pressured the board to remove him in 2021. The perception: he had put environmental outcomes ahead of returns. At Unilever, Hein Schumacher scaled back a decade of ambition. His own words: "We have too many long-term commitments that failed to make sufficient short-term impact." His replacement leads with "growth and efficiency."
The industry's response? Go quiet. 70% of sustainability-minded companies now deliberately hide their climate goals. Sustainability language in S&P 500 earnings calls has fallen 76% in three years. Meanwhile, the industry points at Shein as the convenient villain, while every brand on the same spectrum avoids the same scrutiny.
Sustainability did not get cut so much as it got outgrown. Budgets grew. But everything else grew faster. It was never connected to the thing that protects a budget line: a direct contribution to revenue.
The more good you try to do, the more it costs. That has been the rule. Not because it has to be, but because nobody connected the two scorecards.
And while the scorecards stayed separate, the outcomes went backwards. The Circularity Gap Report puts the global circularity rate at 6.9%, down from 9.1% in 2018. Recycled material use increased by 200 million tonnes. But consumption rose so much faster it wiped out every gain. More conferences. More commitments. More frameworks. Worse results.
The bridge
This is why we built Utilitarian. Not another sustainability tool. The bridge that connects sustainability to the commercial engine, in language the business already understands, on a scorecard it already reads.
I learned what the real job was the hard way. Eighteen months talking about environmental outcomes. Polite nods. No follow-up. When I reframed the same product as customer acquisition, the conversation changed completely. Same product. Same outcomes. Different language. Different reaction entirely.
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 sits on the same dashboard 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.
Two sides, one conversation
I'm not suggesting anyone tear up their marketing strategy. 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 needs to ask the 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. And sustainability does not need to become marketing. It needs the creativity marketing already has. 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.
Sustainability does not need special treatment. It needs to show up on the P&L. Not as a cost. As a contribution. That is how it becomes permanent.
Marketing needs to open its eyes. There are channels right now that would improve acquisition costs, generate higher-quality leads, and create genuine reasons for customers to walk through the door. They produce a measurable environmental outcome at the same time. This is not a greenwashing risk. 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 marketing team member to spend one day a week working alongside the sustainability function. Not a restructure. Not a new hire. Just one person comfortable in both conversations, looking for the overlap. Within weeks the questions changed. Sustainability started appearing in commercial planning meetings not as a compliance update but as a channel. One person. One day a week. Permission to look for the connection.
When both sides stop pretending, the picture changes. 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.
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.