How to Communicate Your Business’s Sustainability Initiatives
by Sustainability Tracker 02/07/2026
Guide, Thought Starters
by Sustainability Tracker 02/07/2026
Guide, Thought Starters
This article was contributed by Sustainability Tracker.
Your business is doing real sustainability work. The challenge is communicating it in a way that consumers trust, regulators accept and a way that actually influences purchasing decisions.
That challenge is harder than it sounds right now.
A 2025 global survey by Blue Yonder found that only 20% of consumers believe brands accurately represent their sustainability efforts in their marketing. A further 26% outright distrust brand sustainability claims. In Australia specifically, a 2024 Research Ink study found that more than one in four Australians cite scepticism of sustainability claims as a direct barrier to buying sustainably. This means poor communication is actively costing brands sales they would otherwise earn.
More than three quarters of Australian consumers factor sustainability into purchasing decisions, and 56% say they are eager to learn about corporate sustainability initiatives.
The demand is real, but so is the trust deficit. The gap between them is where effective sustainability communication lives.
This article is a practical guide for marketers and brand leaders on how to close that gap, and how to do it in a way that holds up under regulatory scrutiny.
The failure mode is almost always the same: claims that are too broad, too vague, or untethered from what the business actually does.
Words like “eco-friendly,” “sustainable,” “green,” “natural,” and “clean” are everywhere. They are also, as of March 2025, explicitly flagged under Australia’s AANA Environmental Claims Code as unacceptable without substantiation. And the ACCC’s 2023 guidance on environmental claims blacklisted them outright as too broad to convey meaningful information to consumers.
The ACCC’s position is that the test for a misleading claim is not whether a single statement is technically defensible. It’s whether the overall impression created by your marketing is accurate. That includes what you say, what imagery you use, what you leave out, and whether qualifications buried in small print contradict the headline.
In its 2022 internet sweep, the ACCC found 57% of Australian businesses reviewed were making potentially misleading environmental claims. Most were not deliberately deceiving anyone. They were using the language their industry had normalised — and that language no longer meets the standard.
The ACCC’s December 2023 final guidance sets out eight principles for environmental claims. For marketers, four matter most in practice:
Accurate and truthful claims. The claim must reflect what your business actually does. If a benefit applies only under specific conditions, those conditions need to be prominently stated and not buried.
Evidence before publishing. Before any environmental claim goes live, you need to be able to substantiate it. Independent, third-party verification is the strongest form of evidence. Internal data and supplier representations are weaker and carry more risk if challenged.
No misleading omissions. Omission is treated as seriously as a false statement under Australian Consumer Law. A claim that is technically accurate but creates a misleading overall impression — through selective framing, imagery, or missing context — can still constitute greenwashing.
No aspirational claims without a plan. The ACCC specifically warns against future-facing claims (“net zero by 2030,” “carbon neutral by 2040”) unless you have a documented, realistic plan to get there. This is one of the ACCC’s highest-priority enforcement targets in 2025-26.
One number worth knowing: the maximum corporate penalty for breaching Australian Consumer Law on environmental claims increased to $100 million for conduct on or after 28 March 2026. This is no longer just a reputational risk. It carries real legal exposure.
Here’s the most useful reframe for any marketer working on sustainability messaging: you are writing for two audiences simultaneously, and they evaluate your claims differently.
The regulator looks for accuracy and evidence. The consumer forms an impression quickly, often in seconds, often from a single phrase on packaging or a headline in a feed. Greenwashing happens when those two things come apart — when the overall impression your marketing creates doesn’t match the underlying facts, even if no individual sentence is technically false.
That distinction matters because it means you can tell the truth and still mislead. A claim can be factually accurate and contextually dishonest. The ACCC’s standard for greenwashing is not whether your claim is defensible in isolation — it’s whether the total impression created by your messaging, visuals, and placement is accurate. That’s a higher bar than most marketing teams are currently writing to.
Before publishing any sustainability claim — on a product page, in a campaign, on packaging, in an email — run it through these five questions:
Is this claim specific and measurable? Could a reasonable person understand exactly what it means? If you’re relying on words like “green,” “eco-friendly,” “sustainable,” or “natural,” the claim isn’t ready. Those terms have no legal definition and no measurable standard — they’re puffery. Follow any broad language immediately with the specific fact underneath it.
Weak: “Eco-friendly packaging.”
Strong: “Packaging made from 80% recycled content, recyclable through standard kerbside systems.”
What are your visuals communicating? Words are only part of the message. Colours, imagery, icons, and layout all shape consumer perception — and the ACCC’s guidance explicitly covers non-verbal elements. Leaf icons, ocean imagery, and green colour palettes can all constitute a misleading environmental claim even without accompanying text.
Ask whether your visuals reflect the actual level of impact, or whether they’re borrowing credibility from generic sustainability signals. If the image came from a stock library rather than your own operations, that’s a flag worth considering.
Where and how will this claim be seen? The same statement lands differently in a long-form article versus on a shelf label at point of purchase. Short-attention environments increase the risk of misinterpretation because the qualifying context that makes a claim accurate often doesn’t survive the edit. Ask how much time your audience actually has to process what you’re saying — and whether the claim holds up with or without the surrounding explanation.
Also worth asking: are you presenting standard industry practice as a differentiator? Claiming credit for something your competitors also do, without disclosing that, is a form of misleading framing.
What’s missing? Regulatory risk often comes from omission rather than from false statements. If a claim depends on conditions — “compostable” that requires industrial composting facilities, “carbon neutral” that depends on purchased offsets — those conditions need to be visible. Not in footnotes. Not in terms and conditions. In the claim itself, or directly adjacent to it.
Ask whether there are trade-offs you haven’t disclosed, or outcomes you’re claiming credit for that you don’t fully control.
Can you prove it, and can someone else find that proof? This is where many brands fall down — not because the evidence doesn’t exist, but because it’s scattered across supplier PDFs, internal documents, and certification files that no one outside the business can easily access.
Having proof is the first requirement. Making it findable and followable is the second. If a claim is challenged — by a journalist, a competitor, or the ACCC — you need to be able to respond quickly with documentation. More importantly, your customers and stockists shouldn’t have to go searching for it.
Beyond the FACTS check, the single most reliable principle for sustainable communication is this: describe the mechanism, not the label.
Labels require consumers to trust you before they have reason to. Descriptions give them the information to form their own judgment. And descriptions, when specific, are also far more interesting because they tell a story about how something actually works.
Compare:
“Our bottles are sustainable.”
“Our bottles are made from sugarcane that captures carbon as it grows, powered by the plant’s own agricultural waste during manufacturing.”
The second statement communicates the same environmental intent, but it earns its place. It tells the reader something they didn’t know. It’s also more legally defensible, because it makes a specific, verifiable claim rather than a broad one that invites challenge.
August 2025 research from South Pole and Mobium Group found that Australians consistently respond better to specific, concrete language than to broad sustainability claims, and that ESG jargon actively creates confusion and erodes trust even when it’s well-intentioned.
“Net zero” and “carbon neutral” ranked among the least understood and least trusted terms. “Reduces emissions by 30%” and “made from renewable materials” performed significantly better.
The same research found that 54% of Australian consumers want brands to acknowledge when they’ve missed targets and explain how they’ll recover. Transparency about imperfection builds more trust than polished declarations of achievement. If you’re partway through a transition, say so and say what your next step is.
Third-party certification is the most effective single tool for closing the consumer trust gap, because it moves your claim outside your own marketing and into a system with published criteria and external accountability.
Certifications that carry genuine weight with Australian consumers and regulators include B Corp, GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard), Ethical Clothing Australia, Australian Certified Organic, and Fairtrade. For carbon and emissions claims specifically, verification through Climate Active significantly reduces both consumer scepticism and regulatory exposure.
If certification is not yet in place, be honest about where you are in the process. “We’re currently in B Corp assessment” is a credible claim. “We operate to the highest sustainability standards” is not.
One practical note: always verify any certification logo you display against the certifying body’s own public registry before publishing. The ACCC has specifically flagged unofficial marks that mimic genuine certifications as an enforcement concern.
Sustainability claims don’t only live in advertising. They appear in annual reports, pitch decks, social captions, product descriptions, email campaigns, and investor presentations, and all of it falls under Australian Consumer Law. The ACCC’s enforcement scope covers the full communications footprint of a business, not just paid media.
Before publishing any claim, confirm it’s consistent with what your operations actually look like today. A claim that holds up in a product description needs to hold up in a Federal Court proceeding.
The FACTS framework and the principles above are a useful place to start. But there’s a practical problem that sits underneath all of this: most brands’ sustainability evidence is scattered.
Certifications live in one folder. Supplier data lives in another. Lifecycle assessments are in a PDF someone emailed two years ago. The result is that marketers are writing claims based on institutional memory rather than documented, accessible evidence, and when those claims are challenged, the evidence trail is hard to reconstruct quickly.
That friction increases risk. It also slows down the people who need to act on it: the brand manager updating a product page, the sales team responding to a retail partner’s sustainability questionnaire, the CEO preparing for a media interview.
This is the problem Sustainability Tracker is built to solve. The platform gives brands a structured environment to bring their certifications, documentation, product-level claims, and supporting evidence into one accessible place. So the evidence that backs your marketing claims is organised, current, and findable, rather than scattered across systems your customers can’t access.
That matters for three reasons.
First, it makes your claims verifiable by the people evaluating them (consumers, stockists, media, and regulators) without requiring them to take your word for it.
Second, it ensures your marketing team, product team, and sales team are all working from the same documented foundation, rather than versions of the story that have drifted over time.
Third, structured, evidence-backed content is more likely to surface in search results and AI-generated answers — which is increasingly where purchase-influencing research happens.
Sustainability Tracker also includes Compass, a guidance tool that helps flag risky or vague language before it goes to market. It’s a practical sense-check that sits inside the workflow rather than after it.
The brands doing the most credible sustainability communication on Sustainability Tracker right now are the ones who have made their evidence easy to find, easy to follow, and easy to trust. They’ve solved their infrastructure problem as much as their messaging problem.
Find out what Sustainability Tracker can do for your brand.
Before any sustainability claim goes live, work through these:
The brands winning on sustainability communication right now are the ones who have made their evidence specific, accessible, and consistent across every channel it appears in.
The risk is not usually a false statement. It’s the gap between what you say, what’s true, and what people take away. When those three things don’t align — in your copy, your imagery, your scope, or what you’ve left out — you have a greenwashing problem, even if every individual word is technically accurate.
The FACTS framework gives you a practical way to close that gap before claims go to market. Independent verification gives consumers a reason to trust claims they can’t verify themselves. And a single, well-maintained source of evidence — structured so that customers, stockists, and regulators can actually find and follow it — turns your sustainability work from something you ask people to believe into something they can see for themselves.
This is the standard Australian consumers and regulators are now expecting. The brands that meet it will be the ones that earn the trust gap the rest of the market is leaving open.
What is greenwashing in marketing?
Greenwashing is when a business makes environmental claims that create a false or misleading impression about how sustainable its products, services, or operations actually are. Under Australian Consumer Law, this includes claims that are technically accurate but misleading due to omission, exaggeration, or the overall impression created by messaging and visuals — not just by individual statements.
What does the ACCC require from businesses making sustainability claims?
The ACCC’s final guidance, published in December 2023, requires that environmental claims are accurate and truthful, supported by evidence before publication, free from misleading omissions, clearly scoped to what they actually describe, and consistent with the overall impression created by the full communications footprint of the business. The maximum corporate penalty for breaching these requirements increased to $100 million for conduct on or after 28 March 2026.
What words should marketers avoid in sustainability communications?
The ACCC and the AANA Environmental Claims Code (effective March 2025) both flag broad, unqualified terms as high-risk: “eco-friendly,” “green,” “sustainable,” “natural,” “clean,” and “environmentally friendly” all fall into this category unless immediately followed by specific, verifiable evidence. Terms like “carbon neutral,” “net zero,” and “recyclable” require clear qualification and substantiation.
How do you write a sustainability claim that won’t be considered greenwashing?
Describe the mechanism rather than applying a label. State what you actually do, what it’s made from, how it’s verified, and what the scope of the claim covers. Follow any broad language immediately with a specific, measurable fact. Ensure the claim is supported by accessible evidence, consistent across all channels, and accurately scoped.
The free Compass guidance tool automatically flags any risky language before you publish. It’s a great resource for sense checking your communications.
What is the difference between greenwashing and greenhushing?
Greenwashing is overstating or misrepresenting environmental credentials. Greenhushing is the opposite — deliberately saying nothing about genuine sustainability work, typically out of fear of scrutiny or regulatory risk. Both carry commercial costs: greenwashing risks legal exposure and loss of consumer trust, while greenhushing leaves genuine work uncommunicated and cedes credibility to competitors who are willing to speak.
How can Sustainability Tracker help brands avoid greenwashing?
Sustainability Tracker gives brands a structured platform to bring certifications, documentation, product-level claims, and supporting evidence into one accessible place. So the evidence behind your marketing claims is organised, current, and verifiable rather than scattered across internal systems.
Compass, Sustainability Tracker’s guidance tool, helps flag vague or risky language before it reaches the market.
A verified brand profile on Sustainability Tracker provides an independent, third-party source consumers and stockists can reference to verify claims they encounter in your broader marketing.