Sustainable blah blah

From TIME:

By 2016, McDonald’s will source only “verified sustainable beef.” The pledge, announced Tuesday, is an effort to make the fast-food chain’s meat production both greener and kinder to the animals whose meat winds up in its burgers. Just one problem: no one knows exactly what sustainable beef is.

Or sustainable anything, for that matter. We have a store near here that sells sustainable kitchenware, to all appearances the exact same items we used to call, in the old days, pots and pans. Maybe they were sustainable back then too but we just didn't know it. Or maybe  "sustainable" has become just another junk word.