🌐 Fun: Why Sustainability Needs It and How To Have It

In 2007, Martha Stewart invited me onto her show as the Earth Day guest.

I was living in Brooklyn, running a sustainable furniture company, and hosting a little radio show called The Lazy Environmentalist. I was nervous and excited.

They said they would send a car.

What showed up outside my apartment was the biggest black SUV I’d ever seen. Dark-tinted windows. Completely absurd.

I looked at it and thought: Hell yes.

My producer told me I couldn’t get in that car.

I got in the car.

I think about that moment a lot because it captures a problem sustainability still hasn’t solved:

Nobody wants to be policed.

Over the last two decades, I’ve become convinced that one of sustainability’s biggest mistakes has been the instinct to correct, judge, and shame people for the straw, the burger, the flight, the SUV.

It hasn't just failed to work. It's made the work harder.

Charlie Sellars is Director of Sustainability at Microsoft and author of What We Can Do: A Climate Optimist's Guide to Sustainable Living.

He's the person behind Microsoft's Ocean Plastic Mouse — made from 20% water bottles and plastics pulled directly from oceans and waterways. His first sustainability product at Microsoft. The quick win that opened every door after it.

Charlie’s TEDx talk is titled Let’s Make Sustainability Fun Again.

My first thought: Fun again? When was it ever fun?

But Charlie's real question is sharper: Do you want to be right, or do you want to be effective?

Because when sustainability feels like punishment, most people tune out. When it feels engaging, practical, even joyful, people lean in.

But making sustainability more inviting is only half the battle. The other half is pointing people toward the choices that actually matter.

That's where lifecycle analysis comes in — understanding the full environmental impact of something from cradle to grave. And what it reveals is often surprising.

For most devices, 80–90% of lifetime emissions happen before you ever turn them on. Including the phone or laptop you may be reading this on right now.

Which means the most important thing you can do isn't obsess over chargers or settings.

Just keep it longer.

Here's what stood out from my conversation with Charlie.

Practicality trumps self-righteousness.

"Do you want to be right, or do you want to be effective? I think we've focused too long on being right at the expense of being effective. And then nobody wins."

A slow-moving crisis doesn't respond to urgency plus blame. It responds to people who make participation feel worthwhile.

Doom burns people out.

"If the house is on fire, let's get everyone out. But if you're in a house that's lightly simmering for decades, if you're just constantly being faced with doom and gloom, we burn out. We just burn out so fast."

Psychology matters as much as science. Enthusiasm is not a soft strategy. It draws people in and sustains engagement. 

An inconvenient word did as much harm as good.

"There was a long history of bipartisanship around a lot of these environmental efforts. And then Al Gore came along and put the word inconvenient in there. Half heard a call to action. But a lot of people — even just hearing the headline — said, we're being judged. And that's the easiest way to get somebody to totally disengage."

The release of An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 was a seminal moment in the modern sustainability movement. Would a better word choice have galvanized a broader audience?

Just spitballing here, but perhaps something more in the American canon, like: A Self-Evident Truth

Nobody wants to be judged for their burger.

"I'll say that I work in sustainability, and their first reaction is to apologize to me. I go talk to my father-in-law, and he's like, ‘Sorry, I just had a burger.’ You're all right, dude. We shouldn't beat each other down for what we've done. We should lift each other up for what we're about to do."

When even casual mentions of sustainability trigger guilt, the framing has failed.

Most of your device's lifetime emissions happen before you turn it on.

"The actual usage of a device is between 10 to 20% of the total lifetime emissions of that device. You need to use your device for like a decade before the energy of you using it exceeds the energy it took to make it in the first place."

Without lifecycle analysis, we optimize the wrong thing. With better tools comes faster progress.

Lego spent money making things worse. The lifecycle analysis told them so.

"Lego committed to a specific kind of recycled plastic for all of its Legos. But they did that before they did the lifecycle analysis. And then, once they did it, they realized it actually had higher emissions. They're like, oops. Our bad."

Companies getting ahead on sustainability aren't the ones trying the hardest; they're the ones measuring the right things.

The “yes” team is invited back.

"I've seen time and time again, the best way to do that is to get them jazzed. Let them see their own excitement and their own value in that work rather than coming and knocking on the door being like, hey, you have to do this."

At Microsoft, no sustainability initiative advances without buy-in from industrial designers, procurement, software developers, and other teams. None report to the sustainability function. The only real lever is making sure the work feels worth doing.

Any job can be a sustainability job.

"Any job can be a sustainability job if you're willing to layer it on top of what you already do. My publisher is not a sustainability company. But because they were willing to partner with me on making the book as sustainable as possible, they have become a sustainable publisher."

The opportunity isn't in the job title. It's in the decision to show up differently inside your current role.

🌐 Supercool Takeaway

For internal stakeholders, sustainability doesn't scale through guilt. It scales when participating is fun and worthwhile.

Operator Takeaways

Frame it as an opportunity, not a sacrifice. Nobody opts into punishment.

Measure before you spend. Lego poured money into a solution that made things worse. Lifecycle analysis tells you where effort actually lands.

Build the team of yes. The sustainability function that earns a reputation for saying no gets deprioritized. The people who make the work exciting get invited back.

This Week’s Podcast Episode

Fun: Why Sustainability Needs It and How To Have It

🎙️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, and all other platforms.

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Where Supercool Traveled This Week

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