A few weeks ago I stayed in a hotel in New Zealand that claimed to be doing all sorts of wonderful things for the environment. Your key card is made of wood (fun to look at, but a questionable sustainability move). Your room lights are triggered by the world’s strictest motion sensor, such that if you sit still, even for a few seconds, darkness engulfs you. If you wish to make a cup of tea, as I did, you will discover quickly that there is no kettle, and walk out into the hallway to find an enormous vending-machine-style drink dispenser, where your tea is forcibly dispensed in a single-use cup and mingled with the remnants of coffee and hot chocolate and every other beverage dispensed by the great machine.

I see ‘sustainable’ changes like this everywhere — another hotel that claimed that foregoing housekeeping would cut your carbon footprint (why not just clean the room without changing the linens?); my gym eliminating plastic membership cards and instead forcing you to download a location-tracking app on your phone that only registers with the sensor 50% of the time; an airline that encouraged people to pack lighter to reduce their carbon footprint on a long-haul flight (which is better, I suppose, than the airlines that take it even further and charge for carry-on).

These ‘sustainable’ changes suck because, well — they suck. Lights are actually kind of useful, even when you’re sitting still. Kettles do use a little burst of electricity, yes, but a kettle and a ceramic cup is a far nicer experience than some mingled concoction from a vending machine. And yes, plastic gym membership cards will probably end up in landfill — but what about all the bottled protein drinks sitting in the fridge behind the counter?

A shitty customer experience is the end result of all these changes, and it matters regardless of how much it does for the planet, because shitty experiences become poorly perceived brands, and poorly perceived brands become brands of last resort.

And perhaps that would be a heroic sacrifice, if the brand was truly committed to sustainability (and believed that a shitty customer experience was a necessary result of this commitment). But anyone who actually experiences these changes walks away with a simple conclusion: this is just more enshittification, plain and simple. And boy, have we had enough of that.

These kinds of measures are not about sustainability, but cost-cutting. The nuance here is that yes, sustainability measures can often reduce costs, but this should be seen as a byproduct — a secondary benefit, rather than a primary driver. You can’t remove the kettles to save money and then justify it after the fact as a sustainability move. (If you did, you’d first have to compare the impact of washing ceramic cups vs. disposing of paper cups; the energy required to boil a few kettles vs. the 24/7 running of a drink-making machine.)

And that’s the other problem with all of this — most of it is not actually that good for the planet at all. It’s either so small (looking at you, wooden key cards) or a virtually equivalent swap that makes little positive difference to the environment while making a not-so-little negative difference to the customer.

In every situation, the customer loses out. If they choose a hotel for its convenient location, they get a shitty experience and associate it with green labels. If they choose the hotel because of its sustainability credentials, they get a shitty experience and a sinking feeling that this was all just greenwashing anyway.

If we let corporate sustainability become associated with enshittification, we lose — again. But I fear this is where we’re headed. In this new era, the language of the sustainability departments and reports has shifted to strictly-business words like ROI and efficiency and resilience. I feel a little guilty here, because Meg and I have been encouraging this very kind of positioning for years, but hadn’t seriously considered what happens when corporate greed inevitably takes it too far.

I worry that this new push for sustainability as efficiency will be received by customers purely as more enshittification, dressed up in a green label that makes them feel bad for complaining.

Sustainability professionals should be genuinely concerned about this. If leadership insists on pushing through sustainability efforts in ways that undermine the customer experience, and therefore the brand, the sustainability people will become the bad guys.

As we continue operating in this very tight but also very weird economy, leadership teams will face even more pressure to squeeze as much juice from the shrivelled little lemon as they can — to cut and cut and cut to make the front-facing experience leaner while the margins get fatter.

Meanwhile, the people paying for it will come away annoyed that the only thing all this ‘saving the planet’ action seems to be doing is making their lives harder.

We must call out enshittification dressed up as sustainability whenever we see it. At the end of the day, it’s just another form of greenwashing — but it’s one that will annoy even those who aren’t shopping for ‘sustainable’ options, and give us all a bad name in the process.

📚 Book: Seed, by Bri Lee

I tore through this very tense, very dense little book about two scientists, alone in Antarctica, grappling with climate change, mysterious enemies, and their own moral convictions. The narrator is endlessly complex and the writing crisp and powerful. Highly recommend.

📚 Book: Vigil, by George Saunders

The podcast episode below inspired me to read this book, which surprised me in just how funny and eccentric it was, but it also brought up some interesting tensions about how we think about good and evil (especially in the context of climate change and fossil fuels), and how today’s solution is almost always tomorrow’s problem.

🎙️ Podcast: George Saunders on Anger, Ambition and Sin

This podcast episode goes off the deep end quite frequently, but it was still a fascinating listen, in ways I almost can’t describe. If you’re interested in reading Vigil, I highly recommend listening to this episode first. It brings a lot of context and you’ll hear Saunders reading passages in his own voice, which really changed the way I read the book.