Sustainability in business: benefits, examples and first steps

Written by: Sytze Dijkstra, Global Head of Client Strategies  | Last updated: 15.10.2026

Sustainability can feel like an enormous topic. The introduction of new regulations and standards have put new topics on the corporate sustainability agenda and customers are asking for more data and more commitment.

For many businesses, therefore, the challenge is no longer whether sustainability is relevant, but what to prioritise. Climate, nature, human rights, waste, working conditions and supply chains may all be relevant, but companies often don’t have time and resources to address all at once.

That is why a generic sustainability checklist is rarely a useful starting point. A manufacturer, a hotel group and a professional-services firm do not have the same impacts, risks or opportunities. Each needs to understand its current position and concentrate on the issues that are material to how it operates and creates value.

Traditionally, the answer was a double materiality assessment. And a double materiality assessment continues to provide a robust, comprehensive approach to assessing which issues matter most to the business, its stakeholders and the world around it, and then turning those priorities into action, performance management and reporting.

Our forthcoming 2026 research, based on a survey of 59 in-house sustainability professionals and ten in-depth interviews, shows that companies are increasingly judging sustainability strategy choices and initiatives against commercial business needs: compliance, risk, resilience, customers, operations and long-term value. In other words, sustainability needs to be in the business.

What does sustainability in business mean?

Sustainability in business means managing an organisation’s environmental and social impacts while protecting its ability to perform over the long term. It is not a separate agenda or set of initiatives. It shapes choices about products, assets, suppliers, people, investments and how the business responds to change.

The familiar three pillars provide a useful starting point:

• Environmental sustainability. Impacts and risk related to the use of energy, water, materials and natural resources, and the effects on emissions, waste, pollution and nature.
• Social sustainability. Treatment of people in the organization and across the value chain, including working conditions, health and safety, inclusion, human rights, communities.
• Economic sustainability. The organisation’s ability to remain resilient, competitive and financially viable while managing its wider impacts.

These pillars interact. Changing a material may reduce emissions but increase cost or create a supply risk. A new supplier standard may strengthen human-rights controls but require procurement teams to change contracts and monitoring. Good decisions consider the connections and trade-offs.

How do sustainability, CSR and ESG differ?

Sustainability is the broad goal: improving impacts and strengthening long-term resilience. Corporate social responsibility, or CSR, often describes voluntary social and community programmes. ESG refers to environmental, social and governance information used to assess performance, risk and accountability. In practice, the terms overlap. What matters is whether the work influences how the business operates and makes decisions.

Why does sustainability matter to a business?

The answer depends on the business. Not every sustainability initiative produces an immediate financial return, and not every impact can be reduced to a simple business case. But the connection to business needs is becoming clearer and more explicit.

In our 2026 survey, regulatory compliance was the leading reason for investing in sustainability, selected by 71% of respondents. Risk and resilience was selected by 31%, and energy or process efficiency by 29%. Customer requirements, market differentiation and sales were also important. The pattern is practical: investment is easier to defend when it addresses an obligation, avoids risk, reduces cost or supports revenue.

Risk and resilience
Sustainability issues can become business risks through higher energy and material costs, supply disruption, asset exposure, regulation or changing customer expectations. For example, a company that depends on water-intensive production may face higher costs or operational limits in a water-stressed region. A business sourcing a commodity from a region with high labour right risks may face litigation, regulatory enforcement or reputational damage if a link is found between its activities and an incident.

The practical response is to connect the sustainability issue to the affected business process. That may mean adding physical-climate risk to asset planning, human-rights checks to supplier selection or resource scenarios to product and investment decisions.

Commercial value
Sustainability can also support tenders, customer relationships, product development and access to new opportunities. Customer requests are an important driver for acting on sustainability. When companies see how changes to product design or packaging and the availability of environmental product information can help meet customer requirements and protect sales, it’s much easier to get these done.

Companies can also differentiate and win new business if they can demonstrate that a sustainable solution offers value to the customer, be it lower costs, reduced risk or better performance. Customers lean forward when that value is made specific to their situation and supported by numbers, ideally alongside real examples of what the product has delivered to others.

People and performance
Sustainability in business also means that sustainability is delivered by the people who run the business, not by a single team. In our survey, sustainability professionals indicated that they worked closely with procurement, operations and finance. These relationships matter because procurement controls supplier expectations, operations manages energy and resources, and finance influences investment and performance management.

What does business sustainability look like in practice?

The right actions depend on the organisation’s impacts and priorities. The following examples show how broad sustainability themes become practical business work.

Operations and resources
A manufacturer may identify energy use as a material cost, a significant source of GHG emissions and resilience issue. Operations can assess the highest-use sites and processes, prioritise efficiency measures and include improvements in capital planning. The operational director owns delivery, supported by facilities, finance and sustainability. Progress can be tracked through energy use per unit of production, cost savings, emissions reduction and delivery against the investment plan.

People and supply chains
A retailer or food business may identify labour conditions and traceability as material supply-chain issues. Procurement can include minimum standards and due-diligence clauses in supplier contracts, segment suppliers by risk and agree corrective actions where gaps are found. Useful progress metrics include the share of priority suppliers assessed, issues resolved, overdue actions and purchasing spend covered by the process.

Products and customers
A manufacturing company may find that customers increasingly ask for product carbon footprint data, recycled content or evidence on product impacts. Product, sales and sustainability teams can select priority product lines, conduct life-cycle assessments to evaluate their impacts and use the findings to improve specifications and customer information. Progress may be measured through the share of revenue covered by product assessments, changes in material or carbon intensity, and the ability to answer customer and tender requirements with credible evidence.

How can a business get started?

1. Understand the current position
   Begin with what already exists. Review policies, targets, performance data, responsibilities, governance and initiatives already under way. Gather readily available evidence such as energy and emissions data, supplier information, customer requirements, employee metrics and existing investment plans.
   Do not wait for perfect data. Missing or unreliable information is itself an important finding. It shows where ownership, definitions or systems need to improve. A maturity assessment can help distinguish established strengths from the gaps that will limit delivery.
2. Choose priorities that fit the business
   Consider the business model, sector, locations, value chain and stakeholders. Look at impacts as well as business risks and opportunities. Make sure that this is not done in isolation, but in the context of the business priorities. Then decide which issues require action now, which need further evidence and which can be monitored or picked up in the future. This is where sustainability becomes focused rather than generic.
3. Turn priorities into a plan
   For each priority, define the outcome, actions, owner, resources, progress metrics and review point. Separate improvements that can begin now from work requiring investment, new data or cross-functional change. Build actions into existing budgets, contracts, product processes and management meetings wherever possible.

Common barriers and what to do about them

• Limited data. Start with the information available, document assumptions and give someone responsibility for improving the evidence. Treat the data gap as part of the action plan, decide where better data matters most, and set out the actions for improving data availability and quality over time.
• Competing priorities. Explain the operational, financial or stakeholder consequence of the issue. Sequence the work and focus first on decisions where sustainability and business value are most closely aligned.
• Unclear ownership. Name an executive sponsor and an operational owner. Sustainability may provide expertise and coordination, but the function controlling the process should own delivery.
• Difficulty engaging colleagues. Connect the issue to the team’s objectives first and sustainability second. Involve people early and engage them to shape the way sustainability is integrated into their work. Put sustainability into existing planning, investment and review processes and avoid creating a parallel process.
• Limited capacity. Make explicit choices about what will not be addressed immediately and get buy-in from senior leadership on these. In our survey, workload had grown faster than resources for 61% of respondents. A shorter, deliverable plan is more useful than an exhaustive one that cannot be implemented.

Where should your business start with sustainability?

A business does not need to solve every sustainability issue at once. It needs a clear view of where it stands, which issues are most relevant and what it can do next. That means starting with evidence, choosing priorities that fit the business and translating them into owned, measurable actions.

Simply Sustainable’s maturity assessment provides a structured view of current capability, strengths and priority gaps. Our sustainability strategy support then turns that evidence into focused priorities, targets and a practical route to delivery.