What is sustainability?

Sustainability has had an increasingly significant impact in the minds of both consumers and businesses in the past few decades. Consumers now more than ever expect the businesses they buy from to acknowledge their corporate social responsibility and maintain overt sustainability practices. In 2019 the GlobalWebIndex found that “42% of U.S. and UK consumers say products that use sustainable materials are important in their day-to-day purchasing”. This is important as data from the WorldBank in 2018 shows that these countries are respectively the fifth and first largest consumer markets globally. Even more crucial is the 2020 reporting from GlobalWebIndex which found that “84% [of consumers] say a poor environmental track record would or might cause them to stop buying from a brand”.