VANDUER | It might not seem that way. But companies are still doing the work.

85%

That's the share of companies, according to Harvard Business Review, that are holding steady or expanding their sustainability efforts right now, amid all the headlines about corporate retreat and ESG rollback. Not 15%. Not half. 85%.

Which means the crisis in corporate sustainability isn't primarily a crisis of action. It's a crisis of visibility.

The guide calls the silence epidemic "greenhushing" — the deliberate under-reporting of genuine progress, usually out of fear: fear of being called a hypocrite, fear of getting it wrong, fear of legal exposure. It's greenwashing's quieter, more widespread sibling, and in some ways it's more damaging. When companies doing real work go quiet, the space fills with companies that aren't. The bad actors inherit the narrative. The credible voices retreat.

The result is a strange inversion. A company reducing emissions, redesigning its supply chain, and making genuinely difficult trade-offs says nothing. A competitor with a single green product line and a heritage of extraction says everything. Consumers, reasonably, can't tell the difference.

Greenshouting, as the guide defines it, is the corrective: communicating sustainability efforts openly, accurately, and courageously, grounded in evidence, honest about limitations. Not greenwashing. Not silence. The harder thing in between.

This is territory we've been working in since VANDUER started. The companies we're most interested in aren't the pioneers, the brands that built themselves on sustainability from day one and have the credentials to prove it. They're the majority: companies in genuine transition, doing the hard work, and either not communicating it at all, or communicating it so cautiously the message disappears.

The costs of that silence are now well-documented. Edelman's 2025 Trust Barometer found that 53% of consumers assume a brand is doing nothing, or hiding something, when it stays quiet about environmental initiatives. A study by Revolt found up to 31% of reputational advantage among market leaders comes down to how they are perceived on environmental issues. IBM's 2024 data shows companies embedding sustainability into core operations are 52% more likely to outperform on profitability.

The business case for speaking up is stronger than the business case for staying quiet. It always has been. What's changed is the framework for doing it credibly.

The guide's most useful contribution is naming what separates greenshouting from greenwashing: it starts with what's actually happening. Not the aspiration. The progress. The honest answer to "what have you actually done, and what are you still figuring out?" That's not a PR question. It's a strategic one.

Patagonia's framing for their 2025 impact report puts it well: "nothing we do is sustainable." The report is called "Work in Progress." Progress beats perfection. Direction of travel matters more than current position.

That's the move. Not silence. Not overreach. Just telling the truth about where you are and where you're going, with the evidence to back it up.

The 85% are doing the work. It's time to hear about it.

It might not seem that way. But companies are still doing the work.

85%

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