The Trust Gap: Why Consumers Don't Believe Sustainability Claims Anymore

Here is a number worth sitting with. When Euromonitor surveyed consumers around the world for its Voice of the Consumer: Sustainability study, 53% said they trust what they read on labels, packaging and company websites. That figure was presented as encouraging. Flip it round and it reads differently: nearly half of the people looking at your sustainability claim have already decided not to believe it before they've finished reading it.

Consumer trust in sustainability claims has been falling for years, and most businesses know it. What they get wrong is what that distrust actually does. The comfortable assumption is that sceptical consumers become careful consumers. They check. They compare. They dig into the evidence and reward the brands that hold up. If that were true, the trust gap would be uncomfortable but fair: do the work, show the evidence, win the sceptics over.

New research suggests that is not what happens. Scepticism doesn't sharpen attention. It switches it off.

Consumer trust in sustainability claims, by the numbers

The Euromonitor figure is not an outlier. Survey after survey lands in the same territory: depending on the market and the question, somewhere between half and two-thirds of consumers say they doubt the environmental claims brands make. In 2023, KPMG found that 54% of UK consumers were prepared to stop buying from a company found to have misled on its sustainability claims. The direction of travel is consistent even where the exact numbers vary.

None of this happened overnight, and it didn't happen because consumers stopped caring about sustainability. Most surveys still show a majority of people wanting to buy from businesses that take environmental impact seriously. The trust collapsed claim by claim. Every "eco-friendly" label with nothing behind it, every carbon neutral badge built on offsets, every green product range that turned out to be five items out of five thousand. Individually, small. Cumulatively, they taught consumers a lesson: the words on the packaging are marketing, not information.

Regulators have reached the same conclusion, which is why the enforcement landscape looks the way it does. The UK's CMA now has direct fining powers for misleading green claims. The ASA is actively monitoring ads at scale. From 27 September 2026, the EU's Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive bans generic environmental claims outright across all 27 member states. Regulation is a lagging indicator of trust. When the rules get this specific, it's because the audience stopped extending the benefit of the doubt some time ago.

The comforting story businesses tell themselves

Inside most businesses, the trust gap gets processed as a scrutiny problem. The reasoning goes: consumers are sceptical, so they'll be checking our claims more carefully, so we need better substantiation ready for when they look.

The substantiation part is right. The "when they look" part is the problem.

That reasoning assumes the sceptical consumer behaves like an auditor. Confronted with a claim they doubt, they investigate. And some do. But the assumption that scepticism produces investigation has now been tested directly, and it didn't hold.

You can see the assumption in how substantiation gets organised. Evidence is compiled into reports, appendices and landing pages that sit downstream of the claim, waiting for an interested reader. Whole compliance workflows are built around the person who clicks through. Almost nothing is built for the person who doesn't, and the research now suggests the person who doesn't is the majority.

Scepticism is a brake, not a fact-checker

A research team at Hiroshima University set out to understand exactly how green scepticism shapes buying behaviour. The study, published in the journal Sustainability, surveyed consumers in China in late 2025 and analysed 511 valid responses. One market, so treat it as a strong signal rather than a global law, but the mechanism it uncovered travels.

The team expected scepticism to directly lower people's intention to buy green products. That direct link turned out to be weaker than earlier studies suggested. What they found instead was more interesting, and for anyone communicating sustainability, more uncomfortable.

Sceptical consumers didn't investigate more. They looked for less information about green products, not more. And they felt less anticipated guilt about choosing the less sustainable option. Both of those things, information seeking and that quiet pull of conscience at the shelf, are what normally drive green purchasing. Scepticism eroded both.

The guilt finding deserves a moment, because it's less intuitive than the information one. Anticipated guilt is the quiet calculation a buyer makes at the point of choice: if I take the cheaper, less sustainable option, will I feel bad about it? For engaged consumers the answer is often yes, and that feeling does real work in favour of greener products. Scepticism dissolves it. If the green option is probably exaggerating anyway, there's nothing to feel guilty about. Doubt doesn't just weaken the claim; it releases the buyer from the choice.

Associate Professor Eunji Seo, who led the research, put it in terms that deserve to be quoted in full: scepticism does not act like a "fact-checking engine." It acts like a "psychological brake," reducing consumers' willingness to engage with green information at all.

That is the finding worth stopping on. The cost of the trust gap is not that consumers will catch you out. It's that they stop engaging entirely. They don't read the evidence page. They don't compare your claim against your competitor's. They put the whole category of green messaging in a mental folder marked "probably marketing" and move on.

Being doubted is recoverable. Being ignored is much harder.

The greenwasher's bill gets sent to everyone

There's a second implication buried in this research, and it's the one that should bother honest businesses most.

If scepticism made consumers investigate, greenwashing would be a self-punishing strategy and rigorous claims would win on merit. But if scepticism makes consumers disengage, the damage doesn't stay with the brand that caused it. It spreads across the whole market. The company that spent two years building a properly evidenced, carefully worded set of claims is talking to the same switched-off audience as the company that slapped a leaf on the packaging.

The Hiroshima researchers describe exactly this cycle: as trust drops, engagement drops, and even honest companies' efforts get lost in the noise. The greenwashers wrote the cheque. Everyone else is helping to pay it.

Trust in claims is also asymmetric. One exposed exaggeration outweighs ten accurate statements, because the exaggeration confirms a suspicion while the accurate statements merely fail to trigger one. A consumer doesn't need to catch your brand doing it. They need to catch any brand doing it, once, for your next claim to be read through narrowed eyes.

This is also why going quiet doesn't work as a response, however tempting it feels. Silence doesn't rebuild trust; it just removes your voice from a conversation that continues without you. The businesses that pulled back from sustainability communication over the past two years haven't insulated themselves from the trust gap. They've conceded the space to the claims that caused the problem.

What actually rebuilds consumer trust in sustainability claims

If scepticism is a brake rather than a fact-checking engine, the practical goal of sustainability communication changes. The job is not to survive scrutiny. The job is to be credible to someone who isn't willing to do any work. That reframing points to five things that matter more than most businesses realise.

Make the claim specific enough to be checkable at a glance

"Sustainable packaging" requires trust. "Packaging made from 80% recycled fibre, verified in March 2026" doesn't require trust; it requires only reading. Specific claims with numbers, dates and boundaries do the fact-checking on the reader's behalf. That's precisely what a disengaged audience needs, because they won't do it themselves.

Put the evidence where the claim is

If your substantiation lives three clicks away in a 60-page PDF, it functionally doesn't exist for a sceptical reader. The Hiroshima findings say sceptical consumers seek less information. So the distance between claim and proof needs to be as close to zero as you can make it. One claim, one line of evidence, one link. Every extra step filters out another slice of an audience that was barely engaged to begin with.

Borrow credibility while yours is discounted

The researchers point to third-party certification as one of the few levers that works in low-trust environments, and the logic is sound. When your own words are being discounted, independently verified ones aren't. Certification, third-party validation and named external data all carry weight your own copy currently can't. Choose recognisable schemes, use them precisely, and never stretch what they cover.

Say what isn't finished

Counterintuitively, the unfinished parts of your sustainability story are a trust asset. A claim that includes its own limits, what you haven't measured yet, where you fell short, what depends on factors you don't control, reads as information rather than persuasion. It's also the direction regulation is moving: precise, bounded, evidenced. The businesses that walked back overconfident net zero pledges in the last two years mostly didn't fail on ambition. They failed on communicating certainty they never had.

Repeat small truths rather than staging big moments

Trust doesn't rebuild through one impressive report. It rebuilds the same way it eroded: incrementally, through repeated small encounters with claims that turn out to hold. A modest, verifiable statement made consistently across your packaging, website and reporting does more re-engagement work than an annual sustainability campaign. If a claim is worth making once in a campaign, it's worth making quietly all year in the places people actually look: the product page, the delivery email, the label. Frequency of honesty beats scale of announcement.

The advantage smaller businesses are sitting on

Most of the trust gap was created by large companies with long chains between the claim and the evidence: marketing teams several floors from operations, agencies several steps from either. If you're an SME, your chain is short. The person writing the claim can usually walk over and look at the thing being claimed. That proximity is a credibility advantage that large businesses spend serious money trying to imitate.

It only pays out if the communication reflects it. Specific, evidenced, plainly worded claims are cheaper to make when you're close to your own operations. The trust gap is market-wide, but the ability to close it, customer by customer, is disproportionately available to smaller businesses.

A concrete version: a food producer claiming "lower-impact packaging" can, in an afternoon, turn that into "we moved to 90% recycled board in January, which cut packaging weight by a fifth; the trays are still plastic and we're working on it." No consultant required. The claim got longer, more honest and more believable at the same time, and the person who signed it off could see the trays from their desk.

None of this is glamorous. That's rather the point. The trust gap was created by communication that wanted to be impressive, and it will be closed by communication that is content to be checkable. Impressive asks for belief. Checkable doesn't need it.

The audience hasn't stopped caring. They've stopped doing the work of believing. The businesses that win back trust will be the ones that stop asking for it and start making it unnecessary.

My Green Comms helps SMEs communicate sustainability clearly, credibly, and in a way that stands up to scrutiny. If you'd like to see what that looks like in practice, start free at mygreencomms.com.

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This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. If you have concerns about your legal accountability for environmental claims, speak to a qualified solicitor.