A Function Under Pressure

The sustainability function inside most organisations is, by now, well established on paper. The titles exist. The reporting cycles run. The frameworks multiply.

What is less visible is the person doing the work.

ESG reporting has expanded substantially over the past decade. So has the expectation that a sustainability professional, often working alone or in a small team, will cover Scope 1 through 3 emissions accounting, CSRD compliance, SBTi alignment, stakeholder engagement, product design review, and internal training. Simultaneously.

What gets lost in that accumulation is harder to measure than a carbon inventory. It is the capacity to think.

Formation and Origins

Kelsey Parsons grew up in Trinidad and Tobago. Her route into sustainability was not straightforwardly professional. She describes a childhood shaped by proximity to nature. “You have to protect what you’ve got around you,” she said.

A love of place preceded the career.

She studied geography and international relations at the University of Plymouth, then completed a master’s in global development and environment at the University of Bristol. Early roles included a media internship focused on climate communication and a student union environment officer position.

She entered corporate sustainability through Gunnebo Entrance Control, serving as sustainability officer and then global sustainability officer across approximately two years. She now consults independently through Weaving Green, working across climate strategy, carbon accounting, and sustainability training.

Kelsey describes her orientation as holistic. “I don’t like to focus just on the environment,” she said.

“I like to know how it’s interconnected into profit and purpose and people.”

That framing has shaped how she reads the condition of the professionals she now advises.

The Pattern Nobody Documents

The pattern Kelsey observed inside organisations was consistent. Every in-house sustainability professional, regardless of seniority or stated ambition, eventually ends up doing the same thing.

“Every in-house sustainability person ends up working on some level of reporting,” she said.

The degree varies. The gravitational pull does not.

What the reporting burden produces, over time, is a workforce that is technically busy and strategically constrained. The frameworks expand. The checklists lengthen. The people filling them in are often the same people who were hired to change something.

Kelsey does not frame this as organisational malice. She frames it as structural drift.

Reporting mechanisms created to impose accountability have, in many cases, displaced the work they were designed to support.

The result is what she calls the “alphabet salad situation.” A proliferation of frameworks, each with legitimate origins, creating collectively a compliance burden that consumes more than it produces.

The people carrying that burden are increasingly fatigued. And when they leave, or are cut, the frameworks remain.

The Work Today

Kelsey now operates across two distinct practices. Through Weaving Green, she advises organisations on climate strategy and carbon accounting. From April 2026, she has also joined Port of Tyne as Innovation Manager for Energy and Sustainability, focusing on alternative fuels, shore power, and infrastructure readiness in the maritime sector.

Her consulting work has shifted substantially toward training: preparing people within organisations to speak about sustainability clearly and credibly. This is partly a communication problem. It is also a governance problem.

If the people closest to the data cannot explain what it means to the people making decisions, the data does not move anything.

Her Caribbean background informs how she reads different markets. Corporate sustainability in the Caribbean remains at an earlier stage than Europe or North America.

Organisations there are, in her characterisation, “still on the community engagement, sort of planting trees side of things.”

Governments are, in some cases, moving faster than the private sector. She cites Barbados as an example of accelerated energy transition.

The gap between governmental ambition and corporate practice is, she suggests, familiar terrain. She has seen a version of it in Europe too.

What Remains Unresolved

The episode’s underlying question is whether the reporting architecture currently in place is producing anything beyond compliance. Kelsey’s position is careful. She does not dismiss reporting. She argues it will, and should, narrow.

“Reporting will scale down,” she said, “in the sense of we’re not going to ask everything under the sun anymore. We’re going to ask what we need to ask.”

Her expectation is that leaner, more targeted disclosure will eventually feed innovation rather than obstruct it. The data will become credible enough to justify investment decisions.

That is a conditional argument. It depends on reporting becoming better, not merely less. It depends on organisations retaining the people who understand what the data means. And it depends on those people being given something to do with it beyond filling in the next disclosure requirement.

None of those conditions are guaranteed.

The ESG backlash has, in some organisations, accelerated the disposal of sustainability functions. Kelsey observes that organisations that cut their teams have ended up on a different trajectory from those that kept them. The differentiating factor, she suggests, is not regulatory pressure. It is customer behaviour.

The younger consumer cohort is purchasing differently. Whether that demographic shift moves fast enough to offset near-term cost pressure is an open question.

A Terminological Proposal

Kelsey’s suggested reform is a linguistic one, and it is more precise than it sounds. She would rename sustainability departments as value-making departments.

“I will scrap sustainability as a word and probably put in value-maker, change-maker, something like that instead.”

The argument is that language shapes what a board hears. A value-making department is, by definition, doing something a chief executive already cares about. A sustainability department is, in many organisations, still heard as the department that handles the thing that used to be called CSR.

Whether renaming a function changes what it is asked to do is genuinely uncertain. The structural incentives do not disappear with the title change. The reporting requirements continue regardless of what the team is called.

What Kelsey is pointing at is a positioning problem. Sustainability, as currently framed in most organisations, sits adjacent to strategy. Her proposition is that it should sit inside it.

The distance between those two positions is not just semantic. It determines whether the people doing the work are consumed by compliance or empowered to change something.

A system optimised for exit, not longevity

In the UK office market, furniture decisions are tied to lease events, not asset life.

At lease end, companies relocate. Fit-outs are replaced. Furniture is written off. Around 300 tonnes go to landfill each working day. Another 200 tonnes go to recycling. Much of it remains high quality.

This is not a failure of materials. It is a failure of alignment.

The entity specifying the furniture does not own it long enough to bear the downstream cost. Procurement cycles reward speed, aesthetics, and compliance with current design trends. Residual value is rarely considered.

Responsibility ends at exit.

Formation inside a mispriced decision

Dr Greg Lavery traces this misalignment back to his early engineering work.

In 1994, he was designing waste infrastructure for a coal-fired power station. The plant was expected to operate for 50 years. The waste system was scoped for seven.

The reason was not technical. Ownership would change. Liability would transfer.

“They won’t own the power station after seven years.” Greg’s response was immediate. “That’s not the right answer.”

The decision exposed a structural gap. Design decisions were being made on a shorter horizon than the asset’s impact.

Greg moved from engineering into strategy to understand how those decisions were made, and how they might be changed.

The same logic, scaled across furniture

A decade ago, Greg encountered the same pattern in office interiors.

Furniture followed a predictable path:

• Procured new at the start of a lease
• Used for a fixed term
• Disposed of at exit

The system ignored embedded carbon, material scarcity, and cumulative cost.

The supply chain amplified the inefficiency. Raw materials sourced globally. Processed across multiple countries. Margins added at each stage. Then discarded after a single use cycle.

“It’s incredibly wasteful.”

The issue was not lack of alternatives. It was that the default option remained easier.

Replacing new demand, not just extending old supply

Through Rype Office, Greg focuses on displacing new furniture demand rather than servicing the secondhand market.

The distinction is operational.

Secondhand markets serve a small segment willing to accept visible wear. Greg targets the majority that expects “as new” performance and appearance.

This requires remanufacturing, not reuse.

The process includes:

• Material-level restoration, including non-toxic scratch removal and re-finishing
• Reupholstery and recolouring to meet current design specifications
• Integration of multiple supply streams into a single coherent design

Typical project composition:

• ~40% client’s existing assets, remanufactured
• ~40% externally sourced assets, remanufactured
• ~10–20% new items

The outcome is indistinguishable from new.

“If someone can tell the difference… then we’ve failed.”

Cost is typically around 20% lower than wholesale new. Environmental footprint is reduced by roughly 80%. Waste is similarly avoided.

The constraint is not performance. It is market behaviour.

Where incentives block substitution

The furniture industry is structurally linear.

Manufacturers are configured around centralised production. Revenue depends on selling new units.

Design cycles reinforce this. Annual colour trends and aesthetic shifts create artificial obsolescence.

Greg describes this as a form of “fast fashion” applied to interiors.

Sales incentives reinforce it.

“If your bonus… depended on selling more new stuff, of course you’re incentivised to sell more new stuff.”

Remanufacturing introduces friction into this model. It reduces volume demand. It decentralises production. It shifts value from manufacturing to service and operations.

As a result, incumbents have limited incentive to promote it.

Policy begins to intervene at scale

The UK government is attempting to shift this dynamic through procurement.

Greg is part of a taskforce designing the Circular Economy Growth Plan. The focus is not theory but implementation across sectors including the built environment.

One mechanism is purchasing standards.

Government contracts are being structured to require circular outcomes. In one case, suppliers must provide IT equipment without purchasing new devices.

This creates immediate demand for remanufactured supply. It also signals quality thresholds to the wider market.

The scale matters. Government spending exceeds £200 billion annually.

Procurement becomes a lever to reshape supply chains.

The behavioural constraint

Despite cost savings and performance parity, adoption remains inconsistent.

Greg attributes this to perception and awareness.

The term “secondhand” carries negative associations. Buyers expect visible compromise.

This creates a signalling problem. Even when outcomes are equivalent, expectations are not.

Greg recalls a project where users assumed a fully remanufactured office was new. “That’s a win.”

The challenge is scaling that outcome without requiring direct exposure each time.

The unresolved dependency

Circular models reduce reliance on global supply chains. They create local employment. They lower cost and emissions.

But they depend on three conditions:

• Sufficient supply of recoverable assets
• Operational capability to remanufacture at scale
• Willingness from buyers to specify non-new solutions

The first two are technical. The third is behavioural.

Greg places responsibility on decision-makers inside organisations. “I wonder if there’s a circular solution to this.”

Until that question is routinely asked, the system defaults to replacement.

No natural endpoint

The circular model does not resolve the system. It competes with it.

Linear incentives remain embedded in manufacturing, design, and procurement.

Policy can shift demand. Technology can improve quality.

But ownership cycles still define responsibility.

The same question persists from Greg’s early career: Who designs for consequences that occur after exit?