5 Sustainable Product Trends to Watch in 2025

Consumers care more about sustainable product trends and the environment and want to see that care within their favorite brands. Businesses have an enormous responsibility to translate a genuine dedication to sustainability within their products when consumerism is inherently unsustainable, especially with modern shopping habits.

These priority shifts are making companies get creative. They have to fashion products that maintain quality and value while seeking more eco-friendly methods to source materials, manufacture the item and ship it to customers within their target market’s means. These product trends will be next in the green shopping world in 2025.

More importantly, how have these product trends changed over the years? Compare a trend from the last couple of years and see how it evolved into something more meaningful in 2025.

1. Reusability

Current Trend: Circular Products

Sometimes, being recyclable isn’t enough anymore for the modern customer. They want certainty that the product they buy won’t have a negative impact on the planet. This means the item must be biodegradable and renourish the planet. Or, it must be circular and have as long of a life cycle as possible. At most, it should eliminate the concept of an “end of life” in its cycle assessment.

This means companies are changing everything from packaging to material incorporation. The resources used in the product either need infinite usability or renewability. This could include fixtures like enhanced recycling. For example, the electronics industry thrives on planned obsolescence — the marketing ploy of making customers exchange phones every year or two for a new model. Where does that old model go? It probably goes to landfill.

Circular tech companies are looking at how they assemble their phones. People still want the trade-in, upgrade experience. Therefore, circular trends demand the phone be easy to tear apart and extract its materials for reuse, such as remelting metal or dissolving an adhesive safely.

There was one trend that was the foundation for this concept’s ability to catch on.

Previous Trend: Refillable Products

One of the ways to reduce waste generation and energy consumption is by eliminating aspects of the product — one of the most apparent is the packaging. Businesses can design a product where customers buy the packaging once and purchase refills sans box or bottle — sometimes on a subscription basis.

Sometimes this means changing a product’s formula or composition to become less prone to temperature or exposure influences, like oxidizing skincare. However, companies are willing to invest because customers are more willing to pay top-dollar for eco-friendly companies.

Refillable products reduce a company’s expenditure on container creation and a consumer’s waste disposal. Products include:

• Food items, like reusable mason jars for buying bulk spices.
• Skincare, like using glass containers to top off serums.
• Cleaning agents, like dissolvable cleaning tablets customers drop in water.
• Supplements, like vitamins that come in biodegradable wrapping.

Companies will want to invest in reusable and refillable packaging because it saves them time during manufacturing. Plus, fewer resources go into material extraction, protecting environments from damage and excessive fuel usage.

2. Packaging

Current Trend: Personalized Alongside Packaging

It’s wonderful if a sustainable product comes in a box that won’t go to landfill. However, alongside this eco-friendly mindset is a desire for personalization. Not all products are a one-size-fits-all solution, such as skin care or home tools. Preventing trash from heading to landfill demands companies incorporate customization so the buyer gets exactly what they want so it reduces the chance it goes to landfill.

Personalized packaging plays a huge role in whether a customer will become a repeat or just a single conversion. Many customers formulate an opinion about a product within the first 15 seconds of owning it. This is often their experience with the box and not the product itself. Making these seconds count with something personal, empowering, and eco-friendly simultaneously will help them feel confident about buying sustainable products in the future.

Making it more personal does require a few other sustainable criteria from a previous trend to be incorporated.

Previous Trend: Reimagined Packaging

More companies are switching from plastic or non-recyclable product packaging to biodegradable and compostable options. However, the situation is more complex than it seems for many companies. Several businesses create biodegradable and compostable products, such as toothbrushes and animal waste bags. If consumers aren’t familiar with what these identifiers mean, they misinterpret what happens to the product at its end-of-life phase.

The environment must have the right conditions for these items to break down effectively. Many of these products need industrial facilities to break them down at proper temperatures or require consumers to place them in compost bins themselves — and many don’t have that infrastructure. Awareness of this issue increases, placing more responsibility on companies to make accessible, reimagined packaging.

The product trends are leaning more on corporate responsibility to make products more easily disposed of in environmentally friendly ways while also:

• Using less packaging in general or none at all.
• Removing packing peanuts and using eco-friendly or upcycled alternatives.
• Using fewer adhesives.
• Printing with natural inks.

3. Supply Chain Changes

Current Trend: Resilience

Resilient supply chains are operations that persist despite disruptions of small and large varieties. This could mean international conflict to natural disasters. Research shows supply chain stops over a month long happen every 3.7 years, which could ruin the future of any products — sustainable or not.

Some of the ways supply chains are making their operations more resilient for sustainable products include obtaining materials from diverse suppliers, adopting lean manufacturing to reduce waste, and electrifying transportation to minimize dependence on fossil fuels. These qualities make the life cycle emissions of a sustainable product lower by considering the bigger picture.

The supply chain trend before resilience directly influenced a supply chain’s ability to become resilient.

Previous Trend: Transparency

Though this trend isn’t a product itself, consumers are pressured businesses to explain where their products come from and how they make them with a sustainable model. This falls in line with the eco-social justice movement, as raised environmental awareness reveals the close-knit relationship between ecological care and social justice. 

How are the shoes recycled or the makeup products reusable? Are they made by workforces that are paid well and treated fairly in reasonable working conditions?

Younger generations make sustainability a priority when making purchasing decisions. Companies can lean into this by putting corporate social responsibility initiatives in public view, either on their website or mentioning it in press releases or social media posts.

Consumers don’t just want to see how a company intends to make products greener — they want to see progress. If customers don’t see evidence of the products becoming more eco-friendly and get a hint the business will always strive for better, it can lead people to suspect greenwashing. This trend began a few years ago, but it still maintains relevance today.

4. Not Buying New

Current Trend: Collaborative Consumption and the Sharing Economy

How can you create instead of consume? How can you rent or borrow something instead of buy it? These are the questions many community-focused environmentalists are asking. Obviously, these ideas inevitably translate into business models making revolutions in sustainable product trendsetting. Many come in the form of apps or startups offering these services as their sustainable product. Some examples include:

• Taking hardware from commercial organizations and installing it in those without as new hardware solutions
• A junk pickup service that will sell, donate, and recycle products
• Ride-hailing
• Community fashion-sharing
• Apps connecting people who want food scraps and compost

The only reason this mindset shift about sustainable products was able to arise is because of its origins — thrifting.

Previous Trend: Secondhand Options at Top Retailers

Thrifting has become trendy in recent years as the appeal of fast fashion dies. However, there are separate stores for thrifting, most notably Goodwill. More retailers are also embracing the secondhand aesthetic and offering it as an internal service. Making new products is expensive and some materials to make high-demand items are more scarce.

Everything from clothing to video games is available secondhand via the original seller. Institutions like Gamestop and 2nd & Charles have been taking gently used media for resale for years.

But, new brands like Patagonia and IKEA are launching buyback initiatives to encourage customers to trade in their products for store value. It’s a sustainable option to reduce waste, reinforcing routine purchases because the companies incentivize customers with discounts and credits.

5. Buying Habits

Current Trend: Underconsumption

Sustainable product trends in 2025 go beyond the make and model of an item. It also translate to how people are buying things. Underconsumption core is a trend that went around social media in 2024 and has made people change their tune for 2025. Instead of buying sustainably, some people are considering how not buying things at all is the most sustainable option.

Before this became popular, people were considering what they were buying in a more mindful way. For example, what could they purchase so they don’t have to keep repurchasing other items over and over again?

Previous Trend: Buying New Products to Reduce Waste

Existing products can become greener and businesses can invent new products that eliminate unsustainable habits. A trend like this will reframe how humans purchase products. Instead of buying something new when a product becomes damaged, consumers will find eco-friendly products to revitalize their beloved objects.

Consider how buying a sewing kit may not feel sustainable because you’re still buying something made from resources, but it preserves clothing that would otherwise go to landfill and cause more problems.

Items like area rugs are difficult or impossible to clean, depending on if the home has accessibility to dry cleaners or washing units. A wine stain might encourage that rug to go to a landfill instead of trying to clean it. Examples like this highlight a spending mindset humans adapted that created wasteful side effects — humanity would instead repurchase an item new than try to save what they already have.

The Next Era of Eco-Friendly Products

Sustainable product trends will exceed expectations every year. In 2025, companies will assume more responsibilities to keep consumers content and loyal to their brands. Without the effort, companies risk falling out of the public eye or being accused of greenwashing. 

The companies that value the planet will soar ahead, becoming thought leaders and innovators of the 21st century. Embracing greener making with eco-friendly packaging will entice customers, and transparency about their goals will keep them returning for more.

This post was updated on November 25, 2024, with more updated information.