When did what we say about sustainability stop mattering?

By Enzo Dotto, Chief Public Affairs and Sustainability at Santex.

A few years ago, a corporate sustainability report was a technical document that almost no one read. Today, it has become a communications asset that everyone claims to have reviewed, while the gap between the narrative and the actual impact remains enormous.

Greenwashing today is not usually an act of deliberate dishonesty. It is something subtler and more dangerous: the collective illusion that designing an attractive report is the same as transforming an operation.

We walk into an office and see plants, recycling bins and perhaps a solar panel on the roof. We read that the company is “carbon neutral,” and we feel reassured.

What we do not see is that, in a technology company, for example, 94% of its carbon footprint may come from Scope 3 emissions: third-party servers, team travel or infrastructure the company does not even control directly.

We do not see that artificial intelligence is consuming energy at an accelerating rate that the industry still does not know how to measure accurately. Nor do we see that “neutrality” often simply means purchasing carbon offsets while continuing to emit the same amount.

What we choose to leave out is often more important than what we choose to show.

Recently, while speaking with leaders from different industries at our office, we found ourselves sharing the same diagnosis: fatigue.

We are tired of metrics that look good in a picture but have no influence on business decisions.

A retail company with 2,000 franchises described the physical challenge of taking sustainability out of the corporate PDF and bringing it to the checkout counter.

A regional bank understood the real power of its credit lines to finance the productive transition, but struggled to communicate that impact without reducing it to the soft-focus language of marketing.

A local cooperative recognized that its remarkably high community satisfaction score—an NPS of 73.97—was the direct result of sitting down with residents and speaking face to face about what could and could not be done in their town.

Every organization has uncomfortable areas in its management. The problem is that we were taught to sweep them under the rug.

At Santex, we decided to try something different with STX Pulse.

We did not want to create another traditional report that looked backward. We wanted to build a framework that would help us look ahead.

We organized our management approach around five dimensions—origin, model, footprint, connection and future—but its real value lies in making public commitments with specific dates, metrics and accountable owners. We know that next year we will have to revisit those commitments and publicly account for what worked and what did not.

For us, the most valuable part of this process was beginning by acknowledging what remains incomplete.

We stated in writing that we emitted 112.56 tCO₂e and relied on carbon offsets because we still need to improve our internal processes.

We acknowledged that measuring Scope 3 emissions in the technology industry remains an imprecise field, and that we still do not have a global AI-use policy capable of mitigating its significant energy footprint.

We simply do not have all the answers.

Starting from that blank page allowed us to define more realistic objectives: measuring the carbon footprint of the code we develop for our clients, training our entire development team in digital sustainability and designing a diagnostic system to be used before every technology project begins.

The first part of management is uncomfortable. The second is what makes it actionable.

But the real paradigm shift does not happen when we use this knowledge only to look at ourselves in the mirror. It happens when we share it.

Instead of protecting a methodological advantage, we understood that its real value lies in turning it into a shared advantage.

We want to bring these uncomfortable, transparent conversations directly to our clients’ tables.

Our goal is not only to deliver high-quality software. It is to make what we have learned along the way available to others, giving them the tools and methodologies they need to measure, report and manage their own digital impact.

Scaling impact means understanding that the sustainability that matters is not the sustainability you publish, but the sustainability you practice.

And in the digital age, the efficiency of our code and technology architecture directly affects the environmental footprint of the organizations that place their trust in us.

In an industry where innovation moves quickly and consumes resources in increasingly visible ways, the question is no longer how “green” we can appear on a corporate website.

The question is whether we are prepared to measure seriously, make difficult decisions with that data in hand and help our ecosystem do the same.

The corporate world is already saturated with abstract promises.

We need to begin with the right question: not what we want others to believe we are doing, but what we are prepared not to hide.

At the end of the day, the only way to make sustainability credible again is to acknowledge—with maturity and as a community—how much further we still have to go.