Most businesses that struggle with sustainability aren’t short of motivation. The desire to do something meaningful, for the environment, for their people, for the long-term health of the business, is usually genuine. What gets in the way is rarely a lack of will. It’s a lack of the right foundations.
Understanding why that happens, and what to do about it, is where the real progress starts.
There’s a well-known phenomenon in consumer behaviour sometimes called the “bag for life” problem. A person commits to stopping single-use plastic bags. Each time they forget to bring one, they buy another reusable bag instead. Over time, they accumulate a collection, and when you account for the full environmental cost of producing each one, the total footprint is often higher than the single-use bags they were trying to replace.
The same pattern plays out in businesses regularly, and across every area of sustainability – energy, procurement, carbon, governance and beyond. The initiative gets launched, the commitment gets made, but the underlying conditions that would allow it to work haven’t been put in place first.
Take energy efficiency. A business invests in LED lighting or new HVAC systems, expecting to see a meaningful reduction in bills and emissions. But if no one has reviewed the energy tariff, assessed actual usage patterns, or identified where the real consumption is happening, the savings often fall well short of expectations. The solution was good. The groundwork wasn’t there.
Procurement is another common example. A sustainable supplier policy gets signed off at leadership level, setting out clear expectations around environmental standards and ethical sourcing. But if the people making day-to-day purchasing decisions haven’t been briefed, or if the criteria for assessing suppliers haven’t changed, the policy sits in a document, and the buying behaviour stays exactly as it was.
Carbon commitments follow a similar pattern. A business announces a net zero target or commits to measuring and reducing its footprint. Without clear ownership of that goal, a realistic plan for how it will be achieved, and an honest assessment of where the emissions sit, the commitment can stall before it gains any traction. Twelve months later, the target is still there. The progress isn’t.
None of this reflects badly on the businesses involved. These are organisations that wanted to move in the right direction. The problem is that sustainability initiatives are often introduced as additions to existing ways of working, rather than as changes to them.
The most effective sustainability work tends to start with a different question. Rather than asking “what should we implement?” it asks “what does this business actually look like right now, and what would need to change for this to work?”
That means looking at how decisions get made, where accountability sits, what processes would need to shift, and whether the people responsible for delivery have the knowledge, tools and time to follow through. It also means being honest about what’s been tried before, and why it didn’t stick.
For many businesses, this kind of audit surfaces issues that weren’t obvious at the outset. A sustainability strategy that looks coherent on paper can unravel quickly if it depends on teams that are already stretched, or if it requires cross-departmental coordination that doesn’t currently happen. Equally, a business that thinks it has no sustainability story to tell often has more to work with than it realises, it just hasn’t been mapped or measured yet.
The point isn’t to identify failure. It’s to understand what’s there before deciding what to build on top of it.
One of the areas where this disconnect shows up most clearly is in carbon reporting, specifically around Scope 3 emissions, the indirect emissions that come from a business’s supply chain, the goods and services it buys, and how its products are used and disposed of.
For most businesses, Scope 3 represents the largest share of their carbon footprint, often by a significant margin. But it’s also the least visible and the most difficult to measure. Many businesses have made commitments based on what they can see, their own energy use, their own fleet, their own operations, without realising that the majority of their impact sits elsewhere.
Getting to grips with Scope 3 means understanding where your materials come from, how they’re transported, what happens to your product at the end of its life, and which suppliers carry the most risk. That’s not a quick exercise, but it’s a necessary one if a carbon commitment is going to mean anything in practice. We’ve gone into more detail on how to approach this in our guide to building a sustainable supply chain.
There’s no single template for getting this right, because every business is starting from a different place. But the businesses that make consistent progress tend to share a few common characteristics.
They’re clear on where their most significant impacts are, and they concentrate effort there rather than trying to move everything at once. They have identified who owns each element of the sustainability agenda – not just at a senior level, but in the teams and functions where the day-to-day decisions get made. They’ve made sustainability part of how they already work, rather than a parallel workstream that runs alongside the business and competes for attention.
And critically, they’ve been willing to look honestly at the gap between where they are and where they want to be, rather than working backwards from an ambition that hasn’t been tested against reality.
If your business has made sustainability commitments that haven’t gained traction, or you’re trying to work out where to focus, the first step is usually the most straightforward one – getting a clear picture of what’s happening and where the real barriers are.
That’s exactly where we can help. 5D works with businesses to cut through the complexity, identify what needs to change, and build the foundations for sustainability that last. Get in touch at info@5dsustainability.co.uk or book a call to start the conversation.
On the discovery call, we will ask you about your business, to understand your goals and advise how 5D Net Zero can help you on your net zero journey.
To start the process, just use our calendar to book a discovery call.
