Why sustainability initiatives fail (and it's rarely an attitude problem)

Picture this: someone approaches a set of recycling bins holding an ice cream cup. There's a bin labelled "mixed waste" and one labelled "recycling." The cup has a paper body and a plastic lid — so which bin does it go in? Is mixed waste for items that combine materials, or is it simply the bin where anything goes? After a few seconds of genuine uncertainty, they give up and toss it into general waste.

Nobody who set up that system intended this outcome. The infrastructure was there, the labels were there, and yet the system failed — the design made the right choice harder than the wrong one.

This is one of the most common and most overlooked problems in sustainability: organisations invest in the right infrastructure, communicate their values clearly, and then wonder why behaviour doesn't follow. The instinct is to conclude that people aren't engaged enough. In my experience, the problem usually sits elsewhere — in the friction built into the system itself.

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A case study: sustainability strategy for a premium co-working space

A few years ago, I worked on a sustainability strategy for a premium co-working space in Moscow. The brief covered the full scope of how the space could embed sustainability into its operations and communicate it meaningfully to members — across everything from procurement to how sustainability initiatives were introduced and maintained over time.

One area that needed particular attention was waste sorting. The space had recently installed separate recycling bins at the coffee point and had all the right elements - separate containers and labels, yet items kept ending up in the wrong bins. Which was frustrating for both the cleaning staff and the members who were trying to sort correctly.

We spent time observing how members actually used the space. Watching real behaviour in context is something that gets skipped more often than it should, especially when an organisation already has a theory about what the problem is. Here, the assumption was that members needed more education, or more encouragement. But observing people's behaviour, we discovered the problem wasn't people's attitudes - it was the system's lack of intuitive design.

The bins were labeled (plastic, glass, paper, and general waste), but nowhere did it say what to do with specific items that are most often thrown away at the coffee point - tea bags, cups, stirring sticks, napkins, etc. People stood confused over everyday items: Is a used napkin considered paper recycling or general waste? What about coffee cup lids - recyclable plastic or not? There were instructions nearby, but they were so dense with text and poorly placed that nobody bothered reading them.

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What we changed

To make waste sorting more effective, we needed to teach people how to use this system without actual teaching - because let's face it, who has time for a boring lecture on waste sorting? We decided to create visual instructions that would make the system more intuitive and let people decide where to throw the thing in their hands within seconds.

The signage intervention was one part of a broader set of recommendations, but it's a useful illustration of how design thinking applied to sustainability can shift outcomes without requiring attitude change.

We designed visual guides placed at eye level directly above each bin, showing the actual items people encounter at that coffee point rather than abstract material categories. A crossed-out paper cup above the paper bin. A plastic lid above recycling. A napkin above general waste. The icons did the sorting work, so members didn't have to carry that knowledge themselves every time they threw something away.

The system performed significantly better afterwards — contamination rates dropped and the cleaning staff spent considerably less time re-sorting. More importantly, the low-level friction that had been quietly undermining the initiative disappeared. Members who were already motivated to sort correctly could now do so easily, and those who hadn't been paying much attention were guided by the design itself.

The broader strategy addressed the same principle across other areas: making sustainable behaviour the path of least resistance rather than a conscious extra effort, and giving the space a coherent way to talk about what it was doing and why.

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The wider implication

When sustainability engagement is low, the first question most organisations ask is how to get people to care more — better communications, stronger messaging, more visible leadership commitment. These things matter, but they rarely address the root cause.

The more useful question is: what is the system actually asking people to do, and how much effort does it require? Where does the right choice demand more time, knowledge, or attention than people will reasonably give it in a normal moment? Sustainable behaviour at scale tends to follow from systems designed around how people actually behave, rather than how we'd like them to behave.

This applies well beyond recycling bins. It shapes how companies design products, build services, and communicate sustainability commitments to customers. The distance between a company's intentions and the impact it actually achieves is, more often than not, a design problem.

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Veronika Marfina is a brand strategist and business innovation consultant working with sustainability-focused companies across Europe. She helps founders and leadership teams develop brands, communication strategies, and business models that grow.

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