How can businesses turn sustainability ambitions into practical action? Timo Márquez Arreaza, Senior Sustainability Marketing Manager at Saint-Gobain, shares five valuable lessons on costs, collaboration, credibility and building a career in sustainability.

With thanks to Prof. Adrian Zicari, Academic Director CoBS.

In principle, sustainability is easy to support. Making it work in practice is another matter. How do businesses reconcile short-term commercial pressures with long-term environmental goals? How can they demonstrate that their products really make a difference? And what skills do future professionals need to help drive change?

Speaking to students on the Responsibility & Organisations course at ESSEC Business School, Timo Márquez Arreaza, Senior Sustainability Marketing Manager at Saint-Gobain, offered a practitioner’s perspective on these challenges. Drawing on his work helping teams across countries promote more sustainable construction products, he shared lessons that extend well beyond the construction industry.

Here are five particularly useful takeaways for students preparing to enter the world of business and the field of sustainability.

Stop seeing sustainability as a cost. Start seeing it as risk prevention

One of the biggest obstacles to sustainability is the tension between short-term financial performance and long-term objectives. Businesses face immediate pressures to improve productivity, sales and margins, while sustainable solutions may require investment today to deliver benefits tomorrow.

Márquez Arreaza suggests reframing the debate. Rather than treating sustainability simply as an additional expense, businesses should consider how it can help avoid larger costs in the future.

His example of insurance companies is revealing. When assessing assets such as bridges, schools and highways, insurers increasingly need to consider whether those assets will remain viable in the future. Buildings and infrastructure must be designed to withstand evolving environmental conditions and avoid becoming stranded assets.

The student takeaway: When making a business case for sustainability, don’t focus exclusively on the initial price tag. Ask what risks an investment could reduce, what future costs it might prevent and how it could preserve an asset’s long-term value.

This change in perspective can help managers connect environmental responsibility with commercial logic. Sustainability is not necessarily a choice between doing the right thing and doing good business – sometimes, it’s about recognising that the two reinforce each other over time.

Good intentions are not enough: Substantiate your sustainability claims

Greenwashing is an increasingly important challenge for businesses. Companies may communicate the environmental or social benefits of their products without sufficient evidence to support their claims. This can mislead customers, whether intentionally or otherwise, and undermine confidence in sustainability initiatives.

For Márquez Arreaza, credibility depends on data, documentation and a clear understanding of a product’s impact throughout its life cycle.

At Saint-Gobain, life-cycle assessments help teams examine where raw materials originate, how products are manufactured and transported, how customers use them, and what happens when they reach the end of their useful life. Establishing a credible picture requires information from multiple teams, audits and coordination across countries and stages of the value chain.

This is no small undertaking. Large companies often face fragmented information, different regulatory frameworks and varying practices across markets. Yet this complexity is precisely why robust evidence matters when companies make claims about reducing their carbon footprints.

The student takeaway: Whenever a business claims that a product is sustainable, ask three questions: What exactly is being measured? What evidence supports the claim? And does the assessment consider the product’s wider life cycle, rather than just one attractive feature?

For future managers and marketers, this is particularly important. Communicating sustainability is not simply about telling a compelling story – it’s about ensuring that the story can withstand scrutiny.

Understand the forces that move markets: Push and pull

How does sustainability move from an ambitious idea to standard business practice? Márquez Arreaza offers a useful distinction between two forces: what pushes the market forward and what pulls it.

• Push comes from regulation: Laws, directives, building codes and minimum performance standards establish expectations that businesses must meet. These requirements can encourage the adoption of more energy-efficient, lower-carbon and circular solutions. Their pace and stringency, however, vary between countries and regions.
• Pull comes from ambition and differentiation: Some companies choose to go beyond minimum requirements because they want to innovate, improve performance or position themselves as leaders. Voluntary building certifications, incentives and customer demand can help encourage this progress.

The distinction also helps explain why customers’ willingness to pay more for sustainable products is not a straightforward question. Márquez Arreaza describes the answer as both yes and no. Where regulation requires certain environmental standards, customers may have little choice but to comply. For newer solutions that have not yet become mainstream, some customers are still willing to pay a premium – potentially around 2–5% in the examples he discussed – to differentiate their projects.

Over time, however, the objective is for these solutions to become standard practice rather than premium offerings.

The student takeaway: Don’t assume that market transformation depends solely on consumers becoming more environmentally conscious. Understand the combined influence of regulation, incentives, customer expectations and competitive positioning. If you want to introduce a sustainable solution, identify both the pressures compelling organisations to change and the benefits that might persuade them to go further.

Think beyond the product: sustainability requires collaboration across the value chain

Saint-Gobain’s work illustrates why even a committed company cannot deliver sustainability alone.

Consider circularity in construction. Recycling materials such as glass, insulation and gypsum require more than developing a product that can be recycled. Waste must be collected from construction sites, sorted, transported and returned to facilities where it can be processed and reused.

A manufacturer cannot necessarily perform every part of this process efficiently. Saint-Gobain therefore works with waste-management companies that possess the necessary expertise and operational capabilities.

The wider system also needs appropriate regulations and a marketplace in which recovered materials have economic value. If sending waste to landfill remains cheaper than recycling it, the financial incentive to recover materials may be weak.

The same principle applies to the broader built environment. Investors, architects, engineers, contractors, building owners, tenants, asset managers and insurers all influence decisions that affect a building’s environmental performance. Sustainability must therefore be considered throughout the value chain, not delegated to one company or department.

The student takeaway: When tackling a sustainability challenge, map the system before proposing a solution. Who makes the decisions? Who controls the resources? Who has the necessary expertise? What incentives encourage or discourage action?

An idea can be technically sound and well-intentioned yet fail if the wider system does not support it. Collaboration is not merely a desirable extra – it can be essential to making a solution work at scale.

Build professional expertise first. Then add sustainability

Perhaps the most valuable advice Timo Márquez Arreaza offers students concerns their future careers.

His recommendation is straightforward: become good at a particular profession or activity first, then integrate sustainability into that expertise.

Someone aspiring to work in marketing, for example, should first understand customer needs, stakeholder relationships and the fundamentals of marketing. An aspiring engineer should develop strong technical capabilities before applying them to sustainability challenges.

As Márquez Arreaza explains, this is a more effective way to present yourself to potential employers than simply expressing a desire to save the world without identifying the specific skills you can bring to the task.

His own role provides a practical illustration. As a marketing manager, he works to help teams develop and promote sustainable product offerings, understand customer challenges and communicate environmental benefits credibly. His contribution draws on professional expertise applied to a sustainability objective.

The student takeaway: Ask yourself not only what sustainability issue you care about, but also what you can become particularly good at doing. Could you contribute through finance, marketing, engineering, procurement, operations, consulting or another field? Developing valuable professional skills gives you a practical way to influence decisions from within an organisation.

Sustainability needs specialists, but it also needs professionals across every function who understand how to integrate environmental and social considerations into everyday business decisions.

From ambition to action

Timo Márquez Arreaza’s experience at Saint-Gobain highlights a central lesson: making sustainability part of business as usual requires more than ambitious targets. It demands credible evidence, a long-term understanding of risk, an appreciation of market forces and collaboration across organisational boundaries.

It also requires people who can turn these ambitions into practical decisions within their own areas of expertise.

For students, the challenge is therefore twofold: develop the professional capabilities that employers need, and learn how to use those capabilities to help businesses become more sustainable.

The golden question to take away: Rather than asking only how you can work in sustainability, ask how the profession you choose can become a force for sustainability.

Disclosure: Originally in presentation notes format, this text has been edited with the help of AI and then proofed and re-edited by the CoBS editorial team.

Useful links:

• Link up with Timo Márquez Arreaza on LinkedIn
• Read related posts: From Linear to Circular: Leading businesses that last and Sustainability: A rational myth
• For CoBS member school students: Register for the CoBS Advanced International Certificate in Responsible Business Practices
• Discover ESSEC Business School France-Morocco-Singapore
• Apply for the ESSEC Global MBA.

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