What Prevents Consumers from

Adopting Sustainable Living Practices in 2026?

A strategic analysis of the barriers, the behavioural dynamics, and what forward-thinking organisations are doing about it.

61%

Cite Cost as #1 Barrier

Deloitte / Kantar, 2025

80%

Only 20% Trust Brand Claims

Blue Yonder Survey, 2025

42%

Say Products Hard to Find

Kantar, 2025

79%

Say AI is Critical to the Future

Bain & Co. ESG Survey, 2025

The Intention-Action Divide: Why Sustainability Remains Out of Reach for Most Consumers

Here is a paradox that should trouble every sustainability strategist, brand leader, and policymaker working today: most consumers care deeply about the environment, yet most are not living sustainably. Not because they lack values — but because the structures, systems, and marketplaces they navigate make it genuinely difficult to act on those values in any consistent, meaningful way.

This is the core challenge facing sustainable living in 2026. According to Bain & Company's ESG Consumer Lab Survey — one of the most comprehensive of its kind, covering over 14,000 people across eight countries — four out of five consumers remain engaged on environmental issues. Sustainable purchasing is rising. Eco-conscious attitudes are hardening. And yet the behaviours that define a genuinely sustainable lifestyle — in energy, food, transport, fashion, and home management — remain the exception rather than the norm.

The gap between what people say they want and what they actually do has a name in the academic literature: the attitude-behaviour gap. Understanding what drives it, and what can be done about it at scale, is one of the most commercially and strategically important questions for businesses operating in 2026. This article examines the barriers from the ground up — the financial, structural, informational, psychological, and systemic forces that keep sustainable living out of reach — and explores how Berkins Consulting is helping organisations turn those barriers into strategic opportunities.

KEY CONTEXT

The shift in sustainability engagement is not about values — it is about access, trust, and infrastructure. Consumers who want to live more sustainably are being failed by systems that make it harder, not easier, to do so. Fixing that is not a consumer education problem. It is a business design problem.

01

Cost Remains the Dominant Obstacle

No analysis of barriers to sustainable living is complete without spending considerable time on cost, because the data consistently and across every major survey return to cost as the defining obstacle. Deloitte's Sustainable Consumer research found that 61% of respondents cite the expense of sustainable products and services as their primary reason for not adopting a more sustainable lifestyle. Kantar confirms the same figure. The Blue Yonder 2025 consumer survey found that 54% of respondents cite higher costs as a barrier to sustainable purchasing, even as nearly half express a genuine willingness to pay a modest premium of 5–9.9% more for sustainable options.

There is an important nuance here that often gets lost in the headline numbers. Consumers are not uniformly unwilling to pay more for sustainability — they are unwilling to pay significantly more, especially amid sustained cost-of-living pressures that have made every household budget calculation more fraught. PwC's research found that consumers globally are willing to pay an average premium of 9.7% for sustainably produced goods — a meaningful number, but one that is quickly eroded when sustainable alternatives carry a 30–50% premium over conventional equivalents, which is common across categories from food to personal care to home energy.

The problem is also structural. Sustainable products often carry a genuine cost premium because they are manufactured in smaller volumes, use more expensive materials, or operate in supply chains without the economies of scale that conventional products benefit from. Until those economics change — through policy intervention, consumer scale, or manufacturing innovation — the cost gap will persist. And for lower-income households, that gap is not a trade-off to be managed. It is a hard wall.

Primary Barriers to Sustainable Living — Global Consumer Survey Data 2025–2026

Percentage of consumers citing each factor as a significant barrier (Multiple sources, 2025–2026)

Cost / Affordability

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61%

Lack of interest/awareness

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61%

Not enough information

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50%

Hard to find / accessibility

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42%

Unclear/misleading labels

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38%

Distrust of brand claims

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30%

Inconvenience/time cost

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28%

Feels pointless / no impact

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26%

Source: Deloitte Sustainable Consumer 2024, Kantar, Bain ESG Survey 2025, Blue Yonder 2025, GlobeScan 2025

The Hidden Costs Consumers Cannot Always See

The financial barrier extends beyond the point-of-sale price. Switching to sustainable energy, for instance, often requires upfront capital for solar panel installation, home insulation, or EV charging infrastructure that many households simply do not have — even if the long-term economics are favourable. Similarly, buying sustainably produced food or clothing can require access to specialist retailers, subscription services, or farmers' markets that are geographically and logistically unavailable to consumers in certain communities.

Mintel's 2025 UK Everyday Sustainability Consumer Report makes a crucial strategic point: for sustainable products to achieve mainstream appeal, they must either be affordable or demonstrably offer cost savings to the consumer. Brands that can position sustainability as a financial benefit — through durability, reduced waste, energy savings, or lower long-term costs — consistently outperform those that ask consumers to absorb an upfront premium based on environmental values alone.

Trust Deficit: Greenwashing, Scepticism, and the Collapse of Consumer Confidence

When the Market Cannot Be Trusted, Consumers Stop Trying

Of all the barriers to sustainable living documented in 2025 and 2026, the erosion of consumer trust may be the most corrosive — because it does not just prevent individual transactions. It undermines the entire motivational architecture that drives sustainable behaviour. If consumers cannot trust that a 'sustainable' product is what it claims to be, then the premium they pay, the effort they make, and the compromise they accept all become meaningless. And when meaninglessness compounds over time, it produces something even more damaging than indifference: active scepticism.

The numbers paint a stark picture. Blue Yonder's 2025 consumer survey found that only 20% of consumers believe brand sustainability claims — meaning eight in ten people approach green marketing with some degree of doubt. A separate analysis found that more than 82% of products lack clear sustainability messaging, creating what researchers have termed a 'credibility gap' that gives misleading claims room to flourish. In the UK, 52% of consumers report having encountered false or misleading sustainability information about brands. In Mexico and Canada, that figure rises to approximately 65%.

Greenwashing — the practice of making environmental claims that are exaggerated, vague, or unverifiable — has been extensively documented in the academic literature as a significant suppressor of sustainable consumption. Research published in the Journal of Sustainability (2025) confirms that greenwashing increases consumer perceived risk, decreases brand trust, and directly damages purchase intentions. Studies across the cosmetics, fashion, and food sectors show that once a consumer perceives greenwashing from a brand, the damage extends beyond that product: brand avoidance and switching behaviour typically follow.

Who Consumers Believe Should Lead Sustainability Efforts — 2025

Greenhushing: The Unintended Consequence of Overcorrection

In response to mounting greenwashing accusations and tightening regulatory scrutiny — including the EU's forthcoming Green Claims Directive — many brands have begun a practice researchers call 'greenhushing': deliberately reducing or eliminating sustainability communications to avoid reputational and legal risk. GlobeScan's 2025 Healthy and Sustainable Living Report identifies this as a growing problem that is eroding public awareness and weakening the sustainability signals consumers need to make informed choices.

The irony is acute. Brands that are genuinely making progress on sustainability are staying silent about it — leaving the communications space to those whose claims are less credible. The result is a market where consumers are receiving less accurate information at the precise moment when they are most sceptical of the information they do receive.

Deloitte's research captures the psychological consequence of this dynamic: a 'growing scepticism and fatigue' among consumers, with a 'higher proportion, for the second consecutive year, either reporting that adopting a more sustainable lifestyle makes no difference, or that it is too difficult or time-consuming.' This is not apathy — it is the rational response to a market that has repeatedly failed to deliver on its promises.

The Accessibility Gap: Convenience, Infrastructure, and Geographic Inequality

Sustainable Choices Are Not Available Equally to Everyone

Accessibility is the sustainability barrier that receives the least attention in brand communications and the most attention in lived experience. Bain & Company's 2025 ESG Consumer Survey found that 38% of respondents say barriers to access limit their ability to adopt sustainable habits — up sharply from prior years. Forty-two percent say they would buy more sustainable products if those products were available locally. These are not marginal figures. They represent a structural failure of sustainable product distribution that no amount of consumer education will fix.

The accessibility barrier operates across several dimensions. Geographic access is the most visible: consumers in rural or lower-income urban areas often lack proximity to retailers stocking sustainable alternatives, access to recycling infrastructure, availability of public transport that would reduce car dependency, or community composting and food waste programmes. EV charging infrastructure remains geographically concentrated in ways that make electric vehicle ownership impractical — and sometimes impossible — for many households, regardless of financial capacity.

Time is the second dimension of accessibility that is consistently underweighted in sustainability strategies. Sustainable living, as currently structured, frequently requires more research, more planning, more effort, and more time than its conventional equivalent. Reading labels carefully, comparing environmental claims, locating specialist retailers, managing waste streams across multiple categories, and maintaining habits that run counter to the default infrastructure — these are not trivial burdens. For households managing complex work and family schedules, they are prohibitive.

The Infrastructure Gap That Policy Has Not Closed

The systemic infrastructure deficit is perhaps the most consequential accessibility barrier — and the one most clearly outside individual consumer control. A household that wants to compost food waste needs access to a kerbside collection or community facility. A family that wants to reduce car use needs reliable, affordable public transit. A renter who wants to switch to renewable energy needs a landlord willing to install the necessary systems. A consumer who wants to buy sustainably needs sustainable options at competitive prices in their local market.

In the absence of this infrastructure, the burden falls entirely on individual consumers to engineer their own sustainable systems — an ask that is both unreasonable and self-defeating as a policy approach. Mintel's research consistently finds that the most effective interventions are those that make sustainable choices the path of least resistance, not a deliberate act of counter-cultural effort.

STRUCTURAL INSIGHT

Telling consumers to 'make better choices' without building the infrastructure that makes better choices possible is not a sustainability strategy — it is a blame-shifting exercise. The organisations and governments that will drive meaningful change are those that redesign default systems, not those that ask individuals to override them on willpower alone.

The Psychological Barriers: Fatigue, Powerlessness, and the Attitude-Behaviour Gap

Why Good Intentions Routinely Fail to Produce Good Outcomes

The gap between environmental attitudes and sustainable behaviour is one of the most studied phenomena in consumer psychology, and one of the most frustrating for sustainability advocates. Decades of research confirm that positive environmental concern does not reliably translate into sustainable action. The reasons are both structural and psychological, and understanding the psychological dimensions is essential for any organisation trying to move consumers from awareness to adoption.

GlobeScan's 2025 research reveals a meaningful shift in the emotional landscape of sustainability: global concern and engagement with sustainability have declined compared to previous years, 'especially among Gen Z' — the cohort most frequently cited as the driving force of the sustainability movement. The factors GlobeScan identifies include climate fatigue, feelings of powerlessness, economic uncertainty, and reduced brand communication. Together, they describe a consumer population that is not abandoning environmental values but is exhausted by the gap between those values and the practical reality of living sustainably in a world not yet built for it.

Mintel's 2025 US Everyday Sustainability report adds a crucial finding: despite being sceptical about the impact of their personal sustainability efforts, young consumers feel they live more sustainably than their peers — a psychological dynamic that reflects both genuine effort and a defensive rationalisation of the gap between aspiration and behaviour. Acknowledging this complexity, rather than dismissing it as hypocrisy, is fundamental to effective sustainability strategy.

Perceived Consumer Effectiveness: The Belief That Matters Most

Academic research published in 2025 identifies perceived consumer effectiveness (PCE) — the belief that one's individual actions can make a tangible difference to environmental outcomes — as the single most pivotal psychological motivator for sustainable behaviour. Consumers with high PCE are more likely to overcome structural barriers, including cost, limited access, and inconvenience, because they believe the effort is worthwhile. Consumers with low PCE, conversely, are unlikely to act sustainably regardless of how accessible or affordable sustainable options become.

The practical implication of this finding is profound: sustainability communications that emphasise the scale of the environmental crisis, the inadequacy of current action, and the complexity of systemic change actively suppress PCE — and therefore actively suppress sustainable behaviour. The narrative that works is not 'the planet is in crisis, and individual action is insufficient.' The narrative that works is 'your choices matter, and here is specific evidence of their impact.' That shift, from catastrophe framing to agency framing, is one of the most evidence-backed levers available to any sustainability strategy.

GlobeScan's research confirms this with a striking finding: well-being — specifically personal health, financial security, and convenience — is now a stronger motivator for sustainable behaviour than environmental concern. Positioning sustainability as a smarter, healthier, more cost-effective way of living produces better behavioural outcomes than positioning it as a moral obligation to a threatened planet.

Counterproductive Fram 05

Berkins in Action: A Case Study in Removing Barriers

The following case study is drawn from Berkins Consulting's engagement experience in consumer strategy and sustainability. Identifying details have been composited to protect client confidentiality. The dynamics — and the outcomes — are representative of patterns we observe consistently across consumer-facing sectors.

ENGAGEMENT PROFILE

Sector: FMCG / Retail — Household & Personal Care

Organisation: Mid-sized UK consumer brand, 850 employees, 4 product lines

Challenge: Sustainability-positioned reformulation and relaunch failing to drive adoption

Status at Engagement: 18 months post-relaunch. The category share is declining. Customer research shows confusion and disengagement despite £2.4M sustainability investment.

The Situation: A Sustainable Product That Consumers Could Not — or Would Not — Choose

The brand had done something genuinely impressive: it had reformulated its core household cleaning range to be biodegradable, cruelty-free, and manufactured using renewable energy. The packaging had been redesigned using 80% recycled materials. The supply chain had been audited to third-party standards. The environmental credentials were real, meaningful, and independently verified.

Eighteen months after the relaunch, market share was declining. Retail buyers were reducing shelf space allocations. The brand's own customer research revealed a familiar and painful pattern: consumers were either unaware of the reformulation, unconvinced by it, or actively doubting its credibility. The sustainability investment — which was genuine — was producing no measurable commercial return and no discernible shift in consumer behaviour.

When Berkins was engaged, the initial ask was to review the communications strategy. Within the first three weeks of discovery, it became clear that communications were the symptom, not the cause. The brand had invested heavily in making a better product but had never systematically investigated the specific barriers that were preventing its target consumers from choosing it.

What Berkins Found: Five Interlocking Barriers

05

The Berkins Approach: Barrier-First Strategy Design

Rather than developing another communications campaign, Berkins restructured the brand's approach around a barrier-first methodology: mapping and prioritising the specific obstacles preventing mainstream consumer adoption, then designing targeted interventions for each.

Barrier

Berkins Intervention

The Outcomes: What Barrier-First Design Delivers

Nine months after Berkins' engagement began, the reformulated range was delivering measurable commercial results — not by changing the product, but by systematically removing the obstacles that had prevented consumers from choosing it.

BERKINS REFLECTION

The product had always been good. What it had never had was a clear path from consumer hesitation to consumer confidence. Every barrier we removed was a barrier the brand had helped create — through pricing strategy, communications design, and retail execution. The sustainable product was not failing because consumers do not care about sustainability. It was failing because no one had ever mapped the specific reasons this particular consumer, in this particular moment, was choosing something else.

The Generational Dimension: A More Nuanced Picture Than the Headlines Suggest

Not All Consumers Face the Same Barriers — and Not in the Ways You Might Expect

Generational analysis of sustainability barriers consistently produces findings that challenge conventional wisdom. The assumption that Gen Z and Millennials are the sustainability vanguard while older generations lag is, at best, an oversimplification — and in some dimensions, is demonstrably wrong.

Bain & Company's 2025 ESG Consumer Lab Survey contains a striking finding: over the past three years, Baby Boomers have added more new sustainable habits than any other generation — including Gen Z. The researchers attribute this to relative financial capacity, greater housing security (enabling investments in solar panels, insulation, and other high-upfront-cost improvements), and life-stage flexibility that allows for more deliberate lifestyle redesign.

Gen Z, meanwhile, faces a paradox of its own. GlobeScan's 2025 research documents a decline in sustainability engagement among young consumers, driven by 'climate fatigue, feelings of powerlessness, economic uncertainty, and reduced brand communication.' This is the generation that grew up understanding the climate crisis most viscerally — and it is also the generation that feels most acutely the gap between that understanding and the structural capacity to act on it. Economic precarity, renting rather than owning, and limited financial reserves make the cost premium of sustainable living disproportionately burdensome for younger consumers.

The Wellbeing Pivot: Meeting Consumers Where Their Motivations Actually Are

One of the most commercially significant findings in the 2025 sustainability research literature is GlobeScan's identification of wellbeing as 'the consumer unlock for sustainability.' Personal health, financial well-being, and convenience are now stronger motivators for sustainable behaviour than environmental concern — a finding with profound implications for how sustainable products and services should be positioned.

Mintel's 2025 consumer research confirms this: brands that emphasise cost savings through durability, effectiveness, or multipurpose functionality — and frame sustainability as a secondary benefit rather than the primary ask — consistently outperform those that lead with environmental credentials. The consumer who buys a reusable water bottle because it is cheaper than buying single-use bottles every day, and better for their health, and better for the environment, is a more reliable customer than the consumer who buys it purely out of environmental obligation.

This is not a cynical observation about consumer values — it is a practical one. Sustainable living that aligns with self-interest, convenience, and financial benefit will reach mainstream consumers. Sustainable living that requires sacrifice, inconvenience, and premium pricing will remain the province of a committed but commercially insufficient minority.

Closing the Barriers: Strategic Principles for Businesses and Policymakers

From Barriers to Bridges: What the Evidence Actually Recommends

The research is detailed enough that strategic recommendations are not speculative — they are evidence-based. The organisations and policymakers that are moving the needle on sustainable living share a set of principles that distinguish them from those that are not. These are not aspirational statements: they are observable practices with documented outcomes.

1. Make the Sustainable Option the Default

The most powerful lever for changing consumer behaviour is not persuasion — it is design. When sustainable options are the default — when the opt-out, rather than the opt-in, is required — adoption rates increase dramatically without requiring any change in consumer awareness, motivation, or values. Energy suppliers who automatically enrol customers in green tariffs, retailers who default to plastic-free packaging, food service providers who offer the plant-based option without requiring a special request — all are applying a principle backed by decades of behavioural science.

2. Certify Claims Independently and Communicate Simply

The trust crisis in sustainability communications is real, documented, and damaging. The most reliable antidote is third-party certification from credible, named, independently operated bodies — combined with radical simplicity in how claims are communicated. One or two verified claims, clearly explained, consistently outperform seven unverified ones in both credibility and purchase impact. The EU Green Claims Directive, when implemented, will make independent verification a regulatory requirement for many organisations. The strategically intelligent approach is to treat that as an opportunity, not a compliance burden.

3. Use Wellbeing and Financial Benefit as the Lead Narrative

Position sustainability as the smart, healthy, cost-effective choice — not as the morally correct one. Lead with personal health benefits, household cost savings, product durability, and convenience. Let the environmental benefit be the secondary message, reinforcing the primary purchase logic rather than competing with it. This framing dramatically expands the addressable consumer population beyond the sustainability-committed minority.

4. Invest in Accessibility Infrastructure, Not Just Products

Sustainable products without sustainable infrastructure are reaching only the consumers who are motivated and equipped enough to seek them out — a small fraction of the potential market. Investment in distribution reach, local availability, recycling and returns infrastructure, and digital tools that make sustainable choices easier to find and compare is as strategically important as investment in product development.

5. Measure Consumer Barriers Continuously, Not Once at Launch

Barriers to sustainable living change as markets evolve, economic conditions shift, and consumer experiences accumulate. Organisations that establish ongoing consumer insight feedback loops — not just pre-launch research, but continuous monitoring of why consumers are and are not choosing sustainable options — are consistently better positioned to respond to barrier shifts before they become commercially significant problems.

Conclusion: The Sustainable Future Will Not Arrive Without Removing the Barriers

Commitment Without Capacity Is Not a Strategy

The most important conclusion from the 2025 and 2026 sustainability research literature is also the most uncomfortable one: the barriers preventing consumers from adopting sustainable living are not primarily failures of consumer commitment. They are failures of system design, business strategy, and policy architecture. Consumers want to live more sustainably. The majority are trying to. What they are encountering — at the point of purchase, in their local infrastructure, in the communications they receive, and in the economic pressures they navigate — is a marketplace and a policy environment that makes sustainable living consistently harder than the alternative.

Fixing that is not a consumer education problem. It is a business design problem, a retail strategy problem, a communications integrity problem, and a public policy problem. It requires organisations to investigate the specific barriers their specific consumers face, and to design interventions that address those barriers directly — rather than investing in sustainability credentials that remain invisible at the moment of decision.

The businesses that will define their categories over the next decade will be those that understood this distinction early enough to act on it. Not the ones with the most ambitious sustainability targets, or the most impressive environmental credentials, or the most beautifully designed sustainability reports. The ones that made it genuinely easy — financially, practically, emotionally, and informationally — for mainstream consumers to make the sustainable choice. Without even having to think about it.

That is the commercial opportunity embedded in every barrier documented in this article. And it is the work that Berkins Consulting does.

ABOUT BERKINS CONSULTING

Berkins Consulting partners with consumer brands, retailers, and policymakers to design sustainability strategies that close the gap between consumer intention and sustainable action. Our barrier-first methodology identifies and removes the specific obstacles preventing mainstream adoption — translating sustainability investment into measurable commercial outcomes. If your organisation is ready to move beyond sustainability credentials and start removing barriers, we are ready to help.