Sustainability, Affordability and Permission to Consume
By Fiona van Iersel
Minerva Empowerment
Marketing Sustainability and Ethics
14 January 2026

Guilty as charged: sometimes, even when I want to be sustainable, I am not. Not because I do not care—I very much do—but because in that moment I just cannot. I have had to get off my high horse a bit. Not everyone can afford organic food. Not everyone can afford fair trade. A lot of people are just trying to get through the day. We mean well, but times are tough, and that matters.

Even picking up my child in my electric car raises uncomfortable questions. Where will the battery end up? Where does the electricity come from? And this is a new car: how does that compare with keeping an older one on the road? Buying something described as green does not make the trade-offs disappear.

Sustainability can work as permission-giving: permission to keep consuming while feeling that we are doing the right thing. I do not think that necessarily comes from a bad place. I believe people want to do the right thing. But if every ride fully reflected its environmental costs, how many people could still afford it? That is a question about access as well as impact.

Marketing’s job includes making a business viable. Sustainable or not, a company still has to work financially. So the tension is real: how do we account for environmental costs without making essential services inaccessible to the people who rely on them?

I also worry about a culture in which every imperfect attempt at sustainability is treated as proof of bad faith. Accountability matters, but so does learning from unintended consequences. If a business believes that trying and falling short will only bring public humiliation, what encourages it to keep improving?

I also think this is where we have to be honest about scale. Individual households matter, yes. But corporate decisions matter way more. Corporations shape supply chains, pricing, defaults, and availability. They can move the needle in ways individual consumers simply cannot. So putting all the responsibility on individuals feels unfair, especially when many people are already stretched.

Sustainability is messy. It is full of trade-offs, and marketing sits in the middle trying to make heavy, complex issues feel accessible. I do not have a clean answer. But the useful conversation has to include systems, affordability and where real impact comes from.