Following the hierarchies: A guide to sustainable decision making
When trying to make sustainable choices, it can at times be a real challenge, particularly with the amount of greenwash mixed in with the gems. This is true whether you're working in sustainability, running a business, or simply trying to make better daily individual decisions. One of my favourite set of frameworks to guide action is the various iterations of the sustainability hierarchy. While the waste hierarchy might be the most well-known of these, similar principles apply across various aspects of sustainability, from transport to other resource use.
The power of systemic change
Before diving into specific hierarchies, it's crucial to understand that the most impactful action individuals can take is using their collective power to drive systemic change. While personal actions matter, and they should not be discounted as both impactful and crucial to building one's own knowledge and critical thinking skills, leveraging our influence as consumers, employees, and citizens creates far deeper transformations. Systematic change through collective action is by far the single most effective way to help our future generations.
Your vote, your dollar, and your time are all powerful tools for change. By supporting candidates with strong environmental policies and engaging with governments on sustainability initiatives, you can help shape policy. Your purchasing decisions send strong signals to the market and support companies with genuine sustainability commitments. Perhaps most importantly, where you choose to work and spend your professional time can have enormous impact. By choosing to work for organisations that prioritise sustainability, or bringing your skills to the sustainability sector, you can contribute to positive change every day.
Understanding the power of hierarchies
The beauty of the various sustainability hierarchies lies in their simplicity and effectiveness. Each hierarchy follows a similar reverse pyramid pattern, with the most environmentally beneficial actions at the top and less preferable options toward the bottom. These frameworks help prioritise actions and make complex sustainability decisions more manageable. I've used the waste hierarchy to take you through the tiers in more detail below.
The quarterback: Avoid or refuse
The most impactful action is always to avoid or refuse. This principle is straightforward: the best way to reduce environmental impact is to prevent resource use in the first place.
For example, borrowing from a toy or book library instead of purchasing new items exemplifies this principle perfectly. In our household, children’s toys often only hold attention for a few weeks, making library borrowing both environmentally and financially sensible. This sharing economy approach prevents unnecessary resource consumption while still meeting our needs.
In business settings, avoidance might look like choosing virtual meetings instead of travel, implementing paperless systems, or questioning whether new purchases are truly necessary. Better to avoid the purchase of a new asset if the existing ones are underutilised.
Moving down the hierarchy: Reduce
Not everything can be avoided, and that's okay – we shouldn't feel guilty about simply existing in our modern world. This is where reduction comes into play. Whether it's carpooling instead of driving alone, installing efficient fixtures, a jacket instead of switching on the heater, reduction offers significant benefits while acknowledging real-world constraints.
In commercial settings, reduction often yields substantial financial returns. Simple actions like upgrading to efficient fixtures and fittings can have defined payback periods while creating meaningful environmental impact at scale. I regularly see efficiency projects drop consumption by over 10% with a return on investment of only 2 to 3 years.
In thinking about reduction you will logically think about options such as generating your own power or harvesting your own water to reduce your reliance on utilities, if you haven’t started either efficiency projects or generation/harvesting projects I find an 80/20 principle works best. Only look at that thumping solar system or oversized water tank once you've made your way through about 80% of the reasonably available efficiency steps. Getting the sizing right by focusing on efficiency first can significantly reduce your upfront costs and improve your payback period. There's no point paying for a larger system than you need, especially when efficiency measures often come with much shorter payback periods.
The middle ground: Reuse and repurpose
Breathing new life into items otherwise destined for landfill can happen at the reuse/repurpose level. It might mean at a few more uses before something makes its way to recycling or landfill. The delay here is what we are going for. Simple actions like turning an old pair of boots into a pot or using that old cotton t-shirt in the garden extend the life of single use items. While these actions still involve resource use that will eventually fail, they extend product lifespan and reduce waste. Avoiding the linear single-use alternatives in the process.
Lower tiers: Recycling
While recycling is often the first thing people think of regarding sustainability, it's actually lower in the hierarchy than avoiding, reducing, or reusing. It's important to understand that while recycling is preferable to disposal, it should not be our first option. Many consumers are often misled by false product packaging with lax regulations around the use of the Mobius Loop recycling logo and manufacturers either knowingly or unknowingly misleading customers. While the logo might suggest to the consumer ‘infinite recycling’ the reality may very well be downcycling over time, resulting in a finite number of times that they can be remade into new products. For others, such as aluminium cans, it can represent a significant opportunity, especially when considered against the alternative of mining virgin materials and the significant embodied energy that goes into their manufacture as opposed to remanufacture.
Organic food waste which contributes to rising methane emissions is important to target here by offering separate recycling collection, worm farming, composting or other aerobic methods. Turning organic waste into soil or soil additives is vital for one of our most precious resources.
Business as usual: Disposal
Disposal represents the traditional linear economy approach – the "business as usual" that we need to move away from. We are finite creatures living on a finite planet. Whether it's emissions from fossil fuel vehicles or resources ending up in landfill or being burnt, disposal should be our last resort, especially when thinking about the impact our chorus of actions will have on our descendants in 100 or even 1,000 years from now.
Applying hierarchies across sectors
Transport hierarchy
The transport hierarchy prioritises active transport (walking, running, cycling) at the top - the avoid/reuse option, followed by mass transit, e-micro mobility, electric vehicles, and finally, traditional motor vehicles. Each step down represents a greater environmental impact.
If you are designing new communities, following this hierarchy is essential. Factoring in comfort such as shade, water or end-of-trip facilities to shower are essential to help prioritise. Speed and safety are huge factors here too.
There is a huge amount of positive externalities attached to higher up the hierarchy here too. Better air quality, less congested streets, health and fitness all add to the good news.
For the most part, personal motor vehicles are stored, be it privately or in public locations, for over 90% of the time. So they are almost always an underutilised resource. This being said, if you don't have any other options then you don't have any other option. It's a hierarchy after all, and chocolate still sells despite being atop the healthy eating pyramid.
Water and energy hierarchy
For water and energy, we start with avoiding unnecessary use, then focus on improving efficiency. On-site generation be it through rainwater harvesting or solar and wind come next - the greater generation/storage and capture closest to where it is needed reduces the demand for transmission infrastructure and losses from its movement, followed by traditional supply and likely offsets from their use.
A note on offsets
While carbon or biodiversity offsets can play a role in sustainability strategies, they should not be seen as a primary solution. Some organisations are choosing to delay action, waiting for grid decarbonisation or planning to purchase offsets to meet their targets. The likelihood is that we will see an avalanche of boards running for the lift to achieve corporate net zero targets. This approach carries significant risks, particularly if economics force costs to skyrocket when everyone rushes to meet their commitments or regulation catches up to some of the more opaque options.
It might be therefore considered prudent to limit offsets to reduce these risks as part of your total emissions reduction strategy, with zero being the ideal.
I still hold out hope for the offset space, particularly when it comes to carbon sequestration and becoming nature positive. Something I'm sure we will see more of as the world continues to move in this direction.
Collective action
While understanding and following sustainability hierarchies is important, their greatest potential lies in their application at scale. Consider joining environmental advocacy groups, engaging with your local government, or starting conversations about sustainable practices in your workplace. Support businesses that demonstrate genuine commitment to sustainability and share positive experiences with sustainable alternatives.
One of the most powerful approaches we're beginning to see is businesses moving beyond competitive advantage to collaborate on sector-wide decarbonisation. This abundance mindset recognises that climate and sustainability action isn't a zero-sum game - when businesses work together to transform their sector, everyone benefits.
Whether it's sharing best practices, jointly investing in new technologies, or creating industry-wide standards, collaboration accelerates progress far more effectively than competition. This collective approach recognises that the challenge of climate change and biodiversity repair is too big for any single organisation to solve alone, and that working together to decarbonise entire sectors benefits not just individual businesses, but society as a whole.
Moving forward
Understanding and following these hierarchies provides a clear framework for decision-making in sustainability. Whether you're an individual or an organisation, starting at the top of these hierarchies – with avoid and reduce – will generally yield the best environmental and financial outcomes.
Remember, while not every top-tier action will be possible in every situation, using these hierarchies as a guide helps ensure we're making the most effective choices available to us. In our journey toward sustainability, it's not about demonising the choices we have to make but about arming ourselves to make the most informed decisions to create lasting positive impact for the trees you'll never sit under and the people you will never meet.