How Sustainable Business Has Changed in the Last Five Years: An Interview with Noa Shtang

Sustainable business has changed more in the last five years than in the fifteen before it. What was a voluntary marketing label is now something investors price, regulators police, and procurement teams filter for, though the follow-through still lags the rhetoric. Few people track those sustainable business trends from as close range as Noa Shtang, founder of EcoHubMap, a platform for sustainable and eco-friendly businesses. We spoke with her about how the sustainability landscape has shifted since she launched the platform, what’s changed for the businesses she lists, and where she sees things heading next.

You started EcoHubMap five years ago. What made you think a directory was needed?

The word “sustainable” gets used loosely. I say that as someone who reads company About pages for a living. Companies can put it on a label with no independent verification behind it, and five years ago that was the norm rather than the exception. I wanted a place where people could actually filter by category and by certification, rather than trusting a headline claim. That’s still the core of the site: a sustainable business directory that’s organized by sector and kept current, instead of a “best of” list published once and left to rot.

How has the sustainable business conversation changed since you started?

Faster than I expected, honestly, and not in a straight line. When we launched, most businesses applying for a listing led with their packaging or their recycling bins. Now the serious ones lead with emissions data. On the corporate side, the circular economy went from a niche concern to something like three-quarters of large businesses calling it a priority in the surveys I track, and that share is still climbing. B Corp certification has more than doubled in the same stretch: B Lab’s count has passed 9,500 certified companies worldwide, up from around 4,000 when we started. That’s a real shift from “sustainability team of one” to something boards are actually tracking.

What about on the regulatory side?

That’s where it’s gotten genuinely complicated. Europe pushed hard on mandatory disclosure with the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), then walked part of it back with this year’s Omnibus simplification package. The reporting thresholds are narrower now, and the draft revisions cut the mandatory data points by more than half.

Meanwhile, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and China are all phasing in mandatory ESG reporting aligned with the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) from 2026 onward. So instead of one global standard, we’ve got a patchwork: tightening in some places, loosening in others.

For a small business, that patchwork is genuinely hard to track. It’s a big part of why certifications like B Corp or Fair Trade end up doing the heavy lifting for smaller firms. Someone else has already done the audit, and the logo travels across borders in a way self-reported claims don’t.

Has investor interest kept pace with the regulation?

More than kept pace. US SIF’s 2024 trends report put U.S. sustainable investing assets at about $6.5 trillion, and the forecasts I’ve seen have the broader sustainable finance market compounding at close to 20% a year through the end of the decade. That’s a big part of why boards started paying attention in the first place. It stopped being purely a values question and became a capital-allocation question. Money moves faster than regulation. In this case it moved first and dragged the policy conversation along behind it.

Has greenwashing gotten better or worse?

Both, depending where you look. Enforcement is inconsistent. The FTC’s Green Guides, the U.S. rulebook for environmental marketing claims, haven’t been substantively updated since 2012, and federal action on green claims was basically flat the last couple of years. States have stepped into that gap. California’s AB 1305 now forces any company claiming carbon neutrality in the state to publish the documentation behind the claim, with penalties of up to $2,500 a day for non-compliance. The direction of travel is clear either way: less trust in a company’s own claims, more weight on third-party verification.

What’s driving demand for a directory versus, say, just searching Google?

Consumers want it, and they’ll pay for it. PwC’s 2024 Voice of the Consumer survey found shoppers willing to pay an average 9.7% premium for sustainably produced or sourced goods. The gap is between wanting it and finding it. In survey after survey, a large majority of people say they want an easier way to identify which companies are actually environmentally friendly, as opposed to which ones just say they are.

That gap is the whole reason the directory exists. It’s also increasingly a B2B story, not just a consumer one. By the numbers I see, roughly half of B2B buyers already prioritize sustainable suppliers, and that’s expected to climb toward two-thirds within a few years. Procurement teams need the same filtering a consumer does, just at bigger volume.

Is all this activity translating into real change, or is it still mostly talk?

Honestly? A mixed picture. Something like 90% of executives will tell you sustainability matters. Ask how many companies have a documented corporate sustainability strategy behind that belief and the number drops to around 60%. That’s the execution gap: what leadership says in public versus what’s actually built into how the company runs.

And yet the direction is real. Close to 90% of businesses now say sustainability is key to their future value, which is a much stronger number than you’d have gotten five years ago, even with the uneven follow-through. I’d rather see that honest gap reported than false confidence. At least it tells you where the work still is.

The directory isn’t the only thing on the site. What are the Hot Spots and Green Spots sections?

They’re two lenses on the same map. Hot Spots highlight places facing serious environmental pressure: pollution, wildfires, floods, deforestation, mining damage. We currently track more than 360 locations worldwide and keep updating them as situations develop.

Green Spots are the opposite side: places, cities and regions where real progress is happening, whether through renewable energy, conservation, better waste management or climate initiatives. One tells you where the problems are. The other tells you what’s working.

You also just launched an AI sustainability policy generator. What problem is that solving?

A very practical one. Smaller businesses are increasingly being asked, by clients, procurement teams, partners or investors, to produce a written sustainability policy. Often they’re already doing the work. What they don’t have is the time or the in-house expertise to turn it into a properly structured document.

Our Sustainability Policy Generator analyzes information from the company’s website, lets the business add its own ESG or sustainability documents, and produces a structured, editable draft from what’s actually there. It doesn’t invent claims. It organizes what a company is already doing into a document they can review, adjust and use.

One thing I’m careful to say: it’s a starting draft, not a compliance sign-off. Anything regulatory still needs a human who knows the rules. The tool is free while we keep developing it.

Where do you want EcoHubMap to go from here?

More of everything, but connected. More listings, more countries, deeper sector pages, and Hot Spots and Green Spots growing as new environmental pressures and solutions emerge. The directory, the map data and tools like the policy generator should reinforce each other rather than sit side by side as separate products.

If I had to put it in one line: five years ago the hard question was “is this company actually green?” The trends shaping sustainable business over the next five years come down to a blunter question: “can they prove it, line by line?” The proof layer is what we’re building.