Sustainable Retail Barometer: 2025 UK Edition

UK consumers are ready for sustainable retail — operations now determine success

At a time when sustainability ambitions face scrutiny and cost pressures challenge household choices, UK consumers continue to engage with sustainable behaviours, however their actions reveal a widening gap between intention and the practical realities of price and convenience. Sustainability messaging has landed. The challenge now is operational execution that removes the cost and convenience penalty for doing the right thing.

Richard Walters, Sustainability Lead at BearingPoint

UK consumers are highly aware of their environmental impact, increasingly intentional about sustainable choices, yet still heavily constrained by price and convenience. With rising participation in recommerce, donation and repair, but lagging adoption in rental and resale, the UK market presents opportunity for retailers to ramp up their circular capabilities.

The 2025 edition of the Sustainable Retail Barometer surveyed 4000 participants from five European countries – France, Germany, UK, Italy and The Netherlands – including 500 participants from the UK on their consumer sustainability behaviours. Read on for key findings and UK consumer sustainable shopping statistics in 2025.

UK consumers show strong and rising sustainability awareness, but this does not consistently convert into action. Sustainability messaging is not the problem. The bottleneck is the ability to deliver sustainable options at no extra cost or effort.

Premium‑only sustainability strategies will hit a ceiling. Consumers will not consistently pay more simply because a product is more sustainable. Retailers should prioritise operations that simultaneously reduce cost and emissions e.g. materials substitution, supply chain optimisation, waste reduction and circular logistics.

Recommerce is now mainstream, but the UK trails other European countries (70% buy second hand in Italy). C2C resale has become easier than ever and retailers risk losing out on secondary margin pools.

Retailers should consider their resale strategy - whether that’s developing their own recommerce platform or partnering with established marketplaces – as well as reverse logistics, refurbishment capabilities, pricing models and warranty designs.

Repair practices in the UK fell by 10 percentage points in 2025, compared with growth in Europe. Repair is a powerful loyalty lever. UK retailers have an opportunity to differentiate by stepping into a growing gap.

Operationally this means businesses should build parts availability and spare-part supply chains, create SLAs, integrate digital booking systems across channels, and consider in-store capacity or third-party networks for repairs.

In the UK, renting has not gained as much popularity as other sustainable practices or as it has in Europe. While retailers have a chance to expand in this area, they need to be mindful of the complexities involved. Before launching, retailers should analyse the viability of different categories (e.g. fashion occasion wear, DIY tools, baby products, tech), then consider asset tracking, depreciation, cleaning and quality operations, deposit/loss models, reverse logistics and storage.

UK consumers demonstrate significant engagement in bulk purchasing, organic and environmentally labelled products, and local sourcing; however, there is less inclination to substitute animal products. In contrast, reducing animal product consumption is twice as prevalent (42%) among consumers in the Netherlands compared to the UK. 

For food retailers, the implications are clear. Consumers are willing to choose organic, local or bulk options when they are competitively priced. Yet the weakest-performing sustainable behaviour in the UK - reducing animal products - highlights how price sensitivity shapes adoption in categories perceived as ‘costly’ to change. Retailers must therefore focus on cost‑down operational models that make sustainable food choices accessible, while improving transparency and convenience to close the intent–behaviour gap.

Strategic summary for retailers

Sustainability in the UK is shifting from a communications challenge to an operational strategy, requiring retailers to build scalable circular capabilities across all areas of their business. Those who do not invest risk losing secondary margin pools to fast‑growing C2C marketplaces, whereas those who build effective resale and circular models can unlock new revenue streams, increase loyalty and extend customer lifetime value.

Success requires financial discipline, sustainability innovation, and operational efficiency to make sustainable options easy and cost-neutral for consumers, allowing retailers to scale impact without price premiums.

The UK consumer has moved beyond needing to be convinced; they now need sustainability to be as easy and cost‑neutral as the alternatives. Awareness is high, trust in retailers’ sustainable actions exceeds the European average, and intent continues to rise, but without meaningful operational shifts to remove cost and convenience barriers, this intent cannot reliably translate to action.