The 2025 Playbook: How to Make Your Sustainability Project a Success
Focus On Business Value--Not Environmental Value--to Win In the Current Market
I attended the recent Super South Conference in Atlanta, which highlighted sustainability innovation in the Southeast. Since the South isn’t normally seen as a hotbed for environmentalism, I was curious to get a perspective on sustainability that’s probably closer to Main Street than places like Aspen or Berkeley.
One thing jumped out at me:
There are two divergent perspectives on how to go about incorporating environmental sustainability in your business—but only one is going to succeed in 2025 (and potentially for well beyond).
If you’re in sustainability, which path you choose may determine your success or failure.
Let’s look at how to succeed using sustainability in 2025.
Option 1: Values Focus
In one panel, comprised manufacturers whose companies made products for commercial office space, each panelist shared the innovative work that their company was doing on their product lines.
A lot of it was genuinely exciting—products built for adaptive reuse or recycling (waste is a giant issue in the office decor industry), products that better used water, or that relied less on dangerous chemicals (indoor air quality is a significant concern).
The problem: No one cared.
The panelists wouldn’t directly state this, but the impression was that all of their best efforts were dying in the face of indifference. The rest of the business wouldn’t adopt the change. Third-party designers wouldn’t specify a new product. Clients wouldn’t ask for them.
They had great ideas, but no traction for adoption.
“The problem,” one panelist explained,
“is that we just need to do a better job of educating our clients on why they need to care about the sustainability work we’re doing. They’ll then require it in their projects.”
I’ve spent most of my career launching new products and new businesses. I’ve learned the hard way that when you start saying “if only our customers were smarter and understood how good our product is”, it means only one thing:
You’ve failed.
Option 2: Give ‘em What They Want
Contrast this with the experience of a startup I spoke to.
4Earth does industrial, commercial and municipal waste-water treatment. They have a modular solution that, using technology developed at Georgia Tech, enables a company to process their waste water with the goal of reusing the water on-site. Worst-case, this reduces the amount of (treated) water they send into the sewer system. Best-case, they can recapture the water and create a closed-loop system at the factory.
It’s a huge environmental impact—and absolutely critical in water-sensitive markets, like California and the American Southwest.
But, if you talk to their team, their solution is all about the cost savings that their pilot customers are seeing—drastic reduction in sewage bills and reduced water costs (their platform also uses AI to optimize water usage).
If you didn’t know better, you wouldn’t realize that they’re also reducing a factory’s carbon footprint, improving climate resiliency and increasing sustainability.
They’re running multiple pilots and have a backlog of clients waiting to get onto their system.
Rethink, Reframe, Refocus
Clearly one of these strategies works in 2025.
If your sustainability project—whether it’s an internal improvement, a new product or a new company—is going to succeed, it must be grounded in business fundamentals for your user. Gone are the days when sustainability projects could be successful based on environmental impact alone.
How do you do this?
Rethink, Reframe, Refocus:
Rethink: Ask yourself: What am I doing, fundamentally, and why? And are there other routes to accomplish the same goal? (This is the easy step).
Say you’re a building owner and you’re trying to reduce your building’s carbon footprint. You decided to focus on energy efficiency—turning the lights off at night and the weekends, for example—as the best way to reduce your building’s carbon usage. You switched to light bulbs that use less power. Maybe you’ll even have a smart system that automatically turns lights on and off based on sensors and an AI system, and tie into your grid’s billing system to shift some demand to cheaper, off-peak hours. You’re implementing a sophisticated energy management system.
But what are you doing at a fundamental level?
You’re using less electricity.
(Told you this was the easy step!)
Reframe: Ask yourself, how what you’re doing impacts the business. How are you improving profitability?
Back to the building example: You’re reducing electrical usage in your building. What’s the business impact of that? Well, less electricity means lower power bills. You’re reducing your building’s operational costs.
Most successful sustainability projects reduce costs, increase efficiency, increase productivity—or all three.
Refocus: How can you tell this new, reframed story?
Your energy efficiency project—which you were excited about because of its carbon impact—is now a story of slashing operating costs via clever efficiency improvements. You found a way to save a measurable amount of money versus the status quo—well done!
What’s critical in today’s environment is that you tell that story—how you reduced costs, in this example—and keep your focus there. You and I know that you improved efficiency for more noble reasons—for you and me, that’s the point!—but what makes the project happen is its cost impact.
(Critically, this business focus is also the reason the project will continue to happen, whether others share your concerns about the climate or not. Even climate deniers would rather spend less money.)
Let’s Sell Office Products
How could my panel—the ones who just needed smarter, more enlightened clients who shared their values—have had the sustainability impact they envisioned?
Let’s use Rethink/Reframe/Refocus:
Rethink: What were they trying to do? They wanted to reduce the carbon impact of their products and, specifically, reduce the volume that went to a landfill at the end of its life.
For simplicity, let’s take a single item: A desk.
One way to do reduce the number of desks in the landfill is to divert them to reuse programs. Maybe a local non-profit needs your old desks, and you could take your desks at the end of their lives and send them to a second user.
Alternatively, maybe you could design the same desk, but use ingredients that could be more easily recycled.
But what are you trying to do, fundamentally? Reduce the volume of product in the landfill.
What if you redesigned your products to use less material?
If your goal is reducing landfill volume, designing products that use 15% less material means 15% less eventual landfill waste.
Reframe: How would reducing the amount of material being used impact the business?
That’s simple—it reduces costs.
Depending on how aggressive you are at reducing your material usage, it could reduce a lot of cost.
Refocus: Who benefits from reduced costs?
We do, certainly! Less money spent on materials!
But, because we’re not jerks, we’re going to share some of that with our clients too—lowering the of our desk price for them.
Now everyone wins! Our business improved its margins, and our clients paid less for desks. As long as we maintain high performance standards for our designs, we can likely reduce materials without compromising the quality of our products.
(By the way, this is the same strategy Ikea pursued as part of its sustainability goals.)
By Rethink/Reframe/Refocusing our sustainability efforts, we were able to help our clients achieve something they need no new education to appreciate—saving money. And we did so sustainably.
Ensuring there is a business impact to your sustainability project—and then keeping focus on that—is how to succeed with a sustainability project in 2025.