Why Sustainability Fails—And How a Principles-First Approach Can Fix It

There are three types of professionals in every industry:

1. The Principles-First Leaders – They ask, “What must change?” and act on it.
2. The Acronym Chasers – They master every new standard to signal expertise but miss the point.
3. The Bystanders – They simply don't engage with the industry's development.

Business sustainability perfectly illustrates this spectrum. A small group focuses on understanding what truly needs to be done and how. The majority busies themselves with expertise signaling—mastering an alphabet soup of standards (TCFD, SFDR, TNFD, ESPR, CS3D, GRI). And a few remain on the sidelines, wondering what their role might be.

Sustainability hasn't just become a practice—it's become an industry unto itself, one that creates and services trends rather than solving fundamental problems. This development didn't follow a neat, linear progression. Like all industry evolution, it's organic and necessarily messy.

But sustainability faces a unique challenge: it's extraordinarily vulnerable to human bias. The translation process—moving Earth-science research findings into economic frameworks—lacks methodological rigour. The result? Policies and business strategies destined for long-term failure despite short-term appearances of progress.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: sustainability as a concept is fundamentally misunderstood.

The Bathtub Problem

Ask a fourth-grader to explain what happens when you open a tap over a bathtub with a small drain. They'll tell you without hesitation: eventually, it overflows. This is, evidently, a flow problem. The state of the system—the water level—only becomes relevant when it dramatically spills on the floor, demonstrating failure to prevent an unfortunate outcome.

This is sustainability at its core.

When companies reduce sustainability to a disclosure game, they create a merry-go-round of forensic measurement. Consultancies profit from measurement services. Clients put disclosures on autopilot. But is anyone meaningfully turning green? Of course not.

Shared Principles Drive Real Change

What prevents breaking this procrastination cycle? The absence of shared principles—a cornerstone of any effective theory of change.

Without shared understanding, efforts stagnate. When people don't align around the same principles to frame the problem, they cooperate to maintain the status quo. If our fourth-graders don't agree the bathtub presents a flow problem, some might suggest building higher sidewalls instead of addressing the real issue.

Climate is a bathtub problem. One bathtub (the atmosphere), many taps (business emissions). Biodiversity is a bathtub problem. Different bathtubs (heterogeneous ecosystems), many taps (pollution and human expansion).

The Industry's Fundamental Mistake

The industry doesn't view sustainability as a bathtub problem. Carbon emissions and plastic pollution demonstrate this vividly.

Consider climate. One bathtub, countless taps. Industries persist in viewing these taps as isolated issues, fixating on product-level impact metrics while overlooking systemic challenges. They measure, for a given tap, its flow and whether that flow is reducing over time. Yet the primary goal remains opening as many taps as possible—what we call economic growth.

Plastic pollution follows the same pattern. Plastics don't biodegrade easily and remain in the environment for centuries. Production levels follow an exponential curve. Global recycling rates have painfully reached just 9%. We have approximately 10,000 million tonnes of plastic on the planet, doubling every 14 years at current growth rates.

What do industries focus on? The carbon footprint of plastic products and a magical wish that recycling will solve the bioaccumulation problem. It won't.

The Product Fallacy

Sustainability can never be a property of a product. It is a property of an ecosystem and the rate at which humans put pressure on that ecosystem.

As long as industry's primary goal remains opening as many taps as possible—increasing aggregate supply without internalising ecosystem sustainable limits—measurement becomes procrastination, and our rear-view mirror shows a problem getting exponentially worse.

Beyond Impact Measurement

With most businesses focused on increasing output, impact measures become seductively attractive: produce more output with less input. But this tunnel vision leads to production intensification and greater business vulnerability in the face of increasing physical risks.

Not the future we need.

The odds of businesses self-regulating to cap aggregate output are next to zero without first working on principles and second, having policy-makers do more than prudently tighten the rules.

Principle-First Success Stories

There are many who have shifted their principles to align with our planet's physical realities. Their stories deserve more attention than corporations celebrating a 2% reduction in scope 1 and 2 emissions.

Wide Open World, a lifestyle clothing brand using Natropy's APres model, exemplifies principle-first sustainability. Rather than focusing on impacts first, they internalise ecosystem sustainable limits as their starting point. Working on impacts follows naturally as a necessity to ease business constraints.

The distinction is crucial. Any environmental sustainability strategy must frame principles first if it hopes to avoid merely treading water.

Making this shift isn't just good practice—it's the only path forward for businesses that want to be part of the solution rather than contributors to an overflowing bathtub.

Racing to Reach the Reckoning point

In effective problem solving, you must first define both the current reality and the ideal outcome. This clarity reveals the gap before you begin testing solutions—a fundamental practice every executive knows but too few apply to sustainability.

Our current economic system depends on growth, which means it depends on increasing physical flows of natural capital—land, water, minerals, fossil fuels.

These flows are finite. They're being exponentially depleted, amplifying risks to our society's long-term viability. This isn't opinion; it's physics.

The ideal situation can be framed with bias for the status quo: "We'll develop while engaging in practices that offset the negative effects of such development." This would indeed be ideal. Who wouldn't wish for infinite prosperity without negative consequences? But this scenario is fiction. We live in a world of trade-offs.

The real ideal situation, from the environment's viewpoint, is bringing its functioning back within planetary boundaries—stopping the erosion of resilience and preventing irreversible state shifts. The math is brutal. The degrowth required isn't compatible with stable societies as currently structured.

Before contemplating viable degrowth paths, we must reach an inflection point. At Natropy, we argue that developed societies must first focus not on degrowth or even green growth, but on zero aggregate growth—allowing free markets to find Pareto efficiency (self-organising supply and demand optimally) within a constrained world.

Instead of obsessing over marginal efficiency gains at the micro-level, we must leverage the private sector to protect stocks of natural capital that must remain untouched. This precipitates the reckoning point where growth by expansion becomes impossible, while the process of creative destruction—responsible for genuine progress—remains alive and vibrant.

This is the future of business: not endlessly larger, but endlessly better within planetary boundaries.