Earth Day 2025: Sustainability Tips from Digital Professionals
Happy Earth Day!
Environmental protection and sustainability are important to Cimarron Winter as a company and to our members individually. This year’s theme is “Our Power, Our Planet” with a call to action for “everyone to unite around renewable energy so we can triple clean electricity by 2030.”
We’re joining the organizational effort to educate, advocate, and mobilize by sharing a few of the ways our members make environmentally conscious choices as digital marketing professionals.
“To me, a big element of being an eco-friendly digital professional is lowering my carbon footprint in the way that I work:
Using dark mode in apps
Using lower screen brightness, where possible
Setting devices to go to sleep when not in use
Unplugging devices when not actively charging
Turning off camera during meetings; it’s great to see faces, but once a presentation is being shared, the camera is no longer needed”
“As a designer, how a brand deals with its packaging sustainability is important. Packaging design has come a long way from styrofoam peanuts, plastic carryout takeaway containers and huge plastic blister packs but we have a way to go.
In the past, I have touted social media examples that have done a good job pushing the envelope on sustainable packaging. I’d like to do that more.”
“A lot of people don’t know how much of an environmental impact cloud storage has. Generally, storing data on the cloud uses a significant amount more energy than storing on your personal computer. It goes through your wifi, over a not insubstantial amount of network infrastructure, and into large data centers that use a huge amount of energy (and water and land use).
I try to be very conscious of how I can reduce my digital storage footprint and help lead organizations into smart cloud storage processes and procedures. Cloud storage is crucial for our work, but we can be better stewards of its usage.”
“I like to keep myself educated about generative AI’s big environmental cost, which helps me be more thoughtful about how I use it.
It offers exciting possibilities, and it’s definitely impossible to ignore in the future of digital marketing. But gen-AI has huge electricity and water requirements, which can strain municipal supplies and local ecosystems. I think all of us who use or develop gen-AI tools need to consider what responsible usage means and how we can support sustainable environmental objectives.”
“My partner and I both work from home. We try to keep our waste low and be diligent about reduce, reuse, (and if the other two are just not an option) recycle. When we really need to update office furniture, then we take it to our local reuse center. What styrofoam we can’t avoid, we keep in a spot in our garage until the twice yearly styrofoam pickup from ZeroFoam and the Jane Goodall Foundation.
Having both been in digital careers for 20+ years, we either donate spare electronics (usually monitors) to local schools or take our retiring electronics (phones, hard drives, laptops, printers, etc) to the local electronics resource recovery center. These types of reuse and recycling centers aren’t as well known as your curbside pickup, but they help us reduce our digital footprint.”
Do you have any environmental protection and sustainability tips and tricks that you love? Either as a digital professional or in any other areas of your life? Share with your community for Earth Day 2025!