Sustainability Is Not a Department

A conversation with Agnès Pleincassagne, Director of Sustainable Commercial Transformation at Eutelsat

For many people working in media and technology, sustainability enters the conversation through carbon metrics, efficiency targets, or regulatory pressure. For Agnès Pleincassagne, it began somewhere else entirely.

Almost thirty years ago, early in her career, she accepted what appeared to be a promising international business development role. She left London, relocated to eastern France, and within weeks was asked to dismiss half a sales team, people twice her age, with families and few prospects of reemployment. She refused and left the company shortly after.

That moment, she says, was her first real encounter with sustainability, not as an environmental concept, but as a question of human durability.

“If what you do is fundamentally misaligned with your values,” she explains, “it simply can’t last. Sustainability isn’t only about carbon. It’s also about people, dignity, and the long-term consequences of decisions.”

This broader, more uncomfortable definition runs through everything she does today.

From awareness to legitimacy

Environmental sustainability entered her life later, through a much more ordinary trigger: her car broke down. Instead of replacing it, she chose not to buy another. That decision forced new questions about mobility, habits, and trade-offs, which soon began to intersect with her professional life at Eutelsat.

Customers started asking questions about emissions, carbon footprints, and environmental commitments. The company had answers, but Agnès felt they weren’t enough. More importantly, she didn’t yet feel legitimate speaking on the topic herself.

So, in her early fifties, while continuing a demanding commercial role, she enrolled in an intensive sustainability program at École Polytechnique. For a year, she studied environmental science, systems thinking, and corporate transformation in the evenings and on weekends. Alongside her children, preparing for their own exams, their kitchen table was a studious place. “It mattered to me to understand before I spoke,” she says. “You can’t push this kind of change without credibility.”

After a demanding year of study at the Ecole Polytechnic, Agnès and some of her classmates took on the challenge to reshape their careers.

Creating a role that didn’t exist

When the program ended, she presented her work internally. Not as a CSR initiative, Eutelsat already had a strong one, but as something different: sustainability embedded directly into commercial performance.

The proposal reached the executive committee. Within months, Agnès had created a new role: Director of Sustainable Commercial Transformation.

The distinction matters. Her mission is not compliance or reporting. It is to ensure that sustainability becomes part of how the company sells, positions itself, and competes, across procurement, communications, product strategy, and customer engagement.

She set up a cross-functional twelve-person steering committee with representatives from all the company departments including business units. The goal was alignment and avoiding one of the industry’s most persistent traps.

“Greenwashing often isn’t malicious,” she says. “It’s omission. We measure part of the chain, talk about part of the story, and quietly ignore the rest.”

Re-inserting the satellite into the picture

One omission bothered her more than most: the satellite itself.

Reading reports on sustainable digital infrastructure, she repeatedly noticed that satellite transmission was missing from the analysis. Terrestrial networks were discussed in detail. Devices were scrutinised. Data centres were beginning to be measured. The effect of The space segment, on earth, was mostly absent. “That’s a problem,” she says plainly. “You can’t talk about streaming, telecoms, or digital infrastructure and ignore how the signal is actually delivered.”

This led to collaborative studies, such as the LoCaT Sat study, that includes satellite launch, operations, and lifespans, alongside IPTV, OTT, and terrestrial broadcasting. Not to claim superiority, but to restore completeness. An innovative move that demonstrates the ethos of ESG, Agnès asked Eutelsat’s competitors and system integrators to join the project and work together toward a common goal.

“Sustainability isn’t about saying ‘we’re better’. It’s about comparing real options, transparently.”

One outcome of this work was the presentation of the LoCaT Sat study during the Greening of Streaming GoS Hour at IBC 2025.

Sobriety through sharing instead of expanding

Inside the company, one of the most challenging conversations has been about capacity, in order to serve our partners. GeoSatellite operators, like many network providers, sometimes have unused capacity. The default industry response is expansion. Her approach questions that reflex. “Before launching new satellites,” she says, “we have to ask whether existing resources are being used intelligently.”

That question opens uncomfortable territory: sharing capacity with competitors, rethinking business models, and accepting that growth may come from optimisation rather than expansion. It also aligns closely with the idea of sobriety, a word rarely used in commercial strategy meetings.

This thinking extends to debates about low-Earth orbit versus geostationary satellites, lifespan, launch frequency, debris, and long-term environmental risk. Some data does not yet exist. She is explicit about that, and equally explicit that it must. “Not measuring doesn’t make the impact disappear.”

Resistance and self-critique

The most complex challenge has not been opposition, but overlap.

CSR departments exist to meet regulatory obligations. Her role cuts across functions without owning teams. Early on, she admits she pushed too hard, which created some initial resistance. “I came out of training convinced I knew what had to be done. I wasn’t careful enough in how I introduced it.”

That changed. Today, she describes her work less as persuasion and more as coalition- building. Younger employees, in particular, respond strongly, especially those who already live these questions at home and are relieved to address them at work finally.

Beyond greenwashing: uncomfortable questions

When asked about greenwashing in the broader industry, she is cautious with the word, but not with the critique.

What troubles her most is the absence of safeguards around usage. Ever-heavier content is pushed to users regardless of context. There are incentives to upload and stream without regard to energy cost. Platforms are often largely unaccountable for the systemic consequences of their scale.

“In many cases, we encourage massive data consumption,” she says, “without always asking what it’s for.”

She also points to asymmetry in regulation. European companies are increasingly required to measure and justify their impact, while some global players operate at scale with minimal social, fiscal, or environmental constraints. “That imbalance is not sustainable.”

A personal alignment

At home, the changes are concrete but unremarkable: fewer flights, more trains, reduced meat consumption, simpler packaging choices. No moralising. No perfection. “The point isn’t purity,” she says. “It’s coherence.”

That coherence is what she insists on professionally as well. Sustainability, in her view, cannot be delegated to a department or hidden behind a label. It has to be embodied.

“If you don’t believe it yourself,” she says, “others will feel it immediately.”

What success would look like

Asked what would make her look back on this role with satisfaction, her answer is precise.

“To reinsert the satellite into the telecoms value chain honestly, measurably, and with respect.” Not as a miracle solution. Not as a villain. Simply as one component among others, evaluated on facts rather than assumptions.

It is a modest ambition, and a radical one.

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This article is the first in a series of Sustainability Journeys, exploring the personal, professional, and sometimes uncomfortable paths taken by people working to reshape the media and streaming ecosystem from within. Future conversations will continue to probe progress and its limits without slogans or shortcuts.

Disclaimer: This article reflects a personal professional journey and perspective. The views expressed are those of Agnès Pleinecassagne and do not constitute official positions or statements of Eutelsat.

Interview conducted by Ben Schwarz.