The average corporate sustainability report runs to 80 pages. It contains methodology disclosures, stakeholder mapping diagrams, materiality assessment matrices, tables of metrics in categories most readers have never encountered, and case studies of individual company programs. It is, in almost every case, written for compliance purposes and for institutional investors. The consumer who interacts with the company's products every day was not the intended reader — and it shows.
The Readability Problem
Even among professionals, sustainability reports are difficult to compare across companies. Different organizations measure scope 2 emissions using different accounting methods. Water usage may be reported in absolute terms or intensity-adjusted per unit of revenue. Social metrics vary in definition, scope, and coverage depending on which framework each company has chosen to follow. A financial analyst trying to make a direct comparison between two companies' environmental performance using their annual sustainability reports would need significant time and domain expertise — neither of which ordinary consumers have.
For consumers, the situation is considerably worse. The technical vocabulary alone functions as a barrier: 'scope 3 value chain emissions,' 'TCFD-aligned disclosure,' 'GRI Universal Standards boundary setting.' These terms have precise meanings to specialists and are impenetrable to nearly everyone else. This isn't an accident — the complexity of sustainability reporting has evolved in ways that serve compliance and investor communication, not consumer comprehension. The abstraction gap between the report and the purchasing decision is nearly total.
What Consumer-Facing Sustainability Data Looks Like
Consumer-facing sustainability information needs different properties than investor-facing disclosure. It needs to be fast to interpret — a letter grade, a score out of 100, a clear trend indicator. It needs to be comparable across companies at a glance. And it needs to be actionable: the person deciding which product to buy should be able to apply the information in the time it takes to read a nutrition label. The underlying methodology can be published in full for anyone who wants to audit it — transparency and simplicity aren't mutually exclusive.
This translation challenge — from complex, multi-dimensional sustainability data to simple, actionable consumer signals — is the core design problem that Susty exists to solve. The detailed reports will always exist, and they serve real purposes. What has been missing is the interface layer between the reports and the person at checkout. Building that layer, and building it honestly, is the work.