Your Sustainability Metrics Might Be Misleading You

30 Jun, 2026

Your Sustainability Metrics Might Be Misleading You

An analysis of 40 billion waste objects in 2024 showed that paper and cardboard accounted for 56% of residual waste at sorting facilities. This is despite the claim that it has a 70.9% recovery rate. High recovery numbers and high waste volumes coexisting should make sustainability teams pause. 

A 95% landfill diversion rate does look great on a quarterly slide and makes it into the annual sustainability report without too much pushback. But what if that number is saying less than you think? Measuring sustainability success through rerouted tons, recycling percentages, and recorded weight is convenient because these metrics are easy to compute. They measure for volume rather than value. But volume alone can mask some serious gaps. 

Why Simple Metrics Create False Confidence

Recycling rates or diversion numbers have their place. But when they are the only story a company has to tell about its environmental performance, they begin to obscure more than they illuminate. Here is why:

1. They Measure Activity, Not Outcomes

A study published by ScienceDirect found that mass-based indicators, such as recycling rates, fail to account for environmental outcomes and can produce conclusions that are “misleading and counterproductive.” While a recycling rate can indicate how much material flows through a process, it doesn’t tell you what happened to it downstream.

For instance, downcycling electronics into lower-grade material streams still counts toward diversion. But so does shipping material to a processor that may not recover anywhere near its original value. The metric doesn’t distinguish among these “recycled” materials, whether it was a genuine win or just staying busy.

2. They Flatten the Hierarchy

Refurbishing a laptop and extending its lifecycle for three more years is not the same as shredding it for raw materials. In most diversion reports, they appear the same. They both diverted an equal amount of waste from the landfill. However, the difference in carbon between those two results is huge. One totally avoided the emissions connected with manufacturing a brand-new device, and the other did not. A weight-based measure completely loses that distinction.

3. They Miss the Upstream Story

Some of these metrics measure the tail end of the lifecycle and call it the whole picture. That is because they tell us nothing about what was put into the product in the first place. Nor does it take into account the distance that materials have traveled through reverse logistics to reach a facility. They also avoid the question of whether products could have been designed to be more easily disassembled, repaired, or reused in the first place.

What Better Measurement Looks Like 

More companies need to transition from tracking activity to tracking actual environmental and economic outcomes, which requires different data. Here is what that looks like:

1. Carbon Avoidance Per Unit

Rather than counting the number of “recycled” devices, calculate the CO₂ avoided by refurbishing a device rather than making a replacement. That one metric connects IT asset choices directly to climate impact in a way tons diverted never will.

2. Lifecycle Impact Score

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s 2024 reporting guidance, companies need data beyond downstream performance, such as recycling rates. The report says attention should focus on how upstream decisions, particularly design-related ones, enable or hinder circular economy transitions. That’s a very different question from “how much did we collect?” 

3. Value Retention Rate

Measure economic and material value preserved through reuse and refurbishment compared to value lost through shredding and downcycling. If 80% of your retired IT assets are shredded into commodity materials and 20% are refurbished and resold, your value retention rate tells you what a diversion rate conceals.

How Close the Loop Gets Measurement Right

Gartner predicted that by 2026, most public companies will incorporate sustainability metrics into ROI analysis, shifting sustainability from a risk-management exercise to a returns conversation. However, that shift only works if the metrics you feed into those models actually measure what matters.

Close the Loop’s circular economy programs embed proof in every step. We give sustainability teams serialized tracking and audit-ready compliance reporting. This way, you have the kind of data that stands up to scrutiny. With Close the Loop, every asset is accounted for, from collection through certified data destruction to refurbishment or recycling, with zero landfill. Contact us today to see how we can get started.