Recently, I spent a weekend in Portland, Oregon. Most households in the Mount Tabor neighborhood where we styaed had a Ridwell box on the porch — a subscription service that picks up hard-to-recycle items not accepted in standard curbside bins. There wasn't a plastic bag in the city. The to-go containers were all compostable, and the compost bins outside my parents' house near the city were nearly triple the size of the trash bins. The bike commuters, with their own greenway routes throughout the urban landscape, were as steady as the car traffic. Biking not your thing? The city has streetcars, light rails, busses, and a large silver bullet shaped tram to help city-dwellers get where they need to go without a car.
Portland gets dismissed as an outlier. But I'd argue it's less a quirk than a preview. The values driving those choices — a preference for less waste, more transparency, companies that take circularity seriously — aren't contained to one city or one coast. They're moving through the broader market, with Portland simply having the policy infrastructure to make them visible. But what looks like a lifestyle there is actually shaping purchasing decisions everywhere.
The research bears that out — consistently, across very different audiences.
Learn more in our upcoming webinar: "Sustainability still sells"
In the B2B market, ERM Shelton's Fall 2025 B2B Pulse surveyed 435 senior procurement decision-makers across the U.S. and Europe. More than 80% say sustainability is "sometimes or always" a tie-breaker when choosing between competing suppliers. More than half say their company has paid more for a product or service specifically because it was better for the environment.
On the consumer side, a collaboration between thinkPARALLAX and EcoFocus Research found that 83% of Gen Z and Millennials factor environmental considerations into their purchase decisions — a cohort that will represent 65% of purchasing power by 2030. More than half have actively avoided purchasing from companies with poor environmental track records. And it's not only younger consumers driving this: the Arbor Day Foundation's 2025 Canopy Report, conducted with The Harris Poll across 2,025 U.S. adults, found that half of all Americans actively seek out information about a company's environmental commitments before making a purchase. Across age groups, income levels, and political affiliations, 85% say businesses should actively support environmental initiatives.
These numbers don't move the way political sentiment does. They're remarkably stable.
Read more: The sustainability retreat is over
Meanwhile, corporate sustainability communications are contracting. Companies are reading the political and regulatory environment and pulling back accordingly. That's a meaningful strategic error. When most of your competitors go quiet while customer expectations hold steady, the companies still communicating clearly and credibly gain ground.
The companies best positioned right now are the ones who have stopped trying to be everything to everyone and started connecting their genuine impact to the specific audiences and business outcomes that matter most. That's harder and more disciplined work than publishing an annual report or signing a coalition pledge, and it's more durable, too.
Read more: Climate action is still moving forward — you just have to know where to look
The question isn't whether sustainability still matters to your customers. The data on that is settled. The question is whether your company knows how to leverage what it's actually doing in ways that move the needle on real business goals.
That's what our webinar on June 25, Why Sustainability Still Sells, developed with Reputation Economy Advisors, gets into. Register here.
