In a bid to appear environmentally-friendly, government and companies are keen to proclaim the "sustainability" of anything from the cups in their office drinks machines to new housing estates and transport links, said the 2009 Lexicon of contemporary newspeak published by the Centre for Policy Studies thinktank. But the use of the term is often questionable and it has become robbed of meaning, warned the report's editor Bill Jamieson. It is "a word whose very looseness and lack of clarity makes it a perfect prefix for any activity where approval is sought," he said. But in many cases it is little more than "a vacuous buzzword thrown as an algae-covered bone to the Green lobby to drape an aura of public good around economic change".