An open AI skill · v1.1.0 · CC BY 4.0
sustainability.md is a reusable AI skill that integrates
carbon and water analysis, sustainability ROI, and hidden-emissions
detection into experience design, strategy, and operations work. Automatically.
How it works
It will surface sustainability considerations that align with the work you’re already doing.
I’m designing a new onboarding experience for new hires. What are potential stages for the onboarding experience?
The most overlooked stage, and one of the highest-waste periods.
Equipment provisioning is the biggest lever on this list. A new laptop carries roughly 300 kg CO₂e before anyone switches it on — for laptops, manufacturing outweighs use (Circular Computing, mean of 230 models). Across 500 hires a year that is about 150 t CO₂e, or some 370,000 miles of driving (US EPA). Moving to a four-year refresh cycle, refurbished machines, or BYOD shifts more carbon than every other choice here combined. Printed welcome packets are worth catching too, at roughly 25–40 kg CO₂e a year — but that is thousands of times smaller.
The reasoning
Consequences scale more through the experiences we create than through the tools we use to create them.
Turn AI into a sustainability solution. Using AI for design can have a real environmental footprint. But that footprint is small compared to the sustainability impact embedded in the experiences AI helps us build: the onboarding flows, recommendation engines, purchasing pathways, and service designs that shape the daily decisions of millions of people.
Use your leverage for positive impact. CX and UX professionals collectively manage the experience layer: where demand meets supply, where behaviors are shaped, and where markets signal what they want from the systems that serve them. That’s enormous leverage you have to shape parts of work and life to be more sustainable.
What the skill does
When active, the sustainability skill instructs AI to apply four analytical factors to every relevant response, woven into the work you’re already doing.
How to use it
The most effective way to use sustainability.md is to install it
as a persistent system-level instruction in your AI tool of choice. Do this
once and sustainability analysis will be present in every session, no
re-prompting required.
The instruction to paste is the same for every tool:
Apply the sustainability skill from: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/brandonschauer/sustainability.md/main/sustainability.md
Where to paste it — for common tools
Claude Code — install it as a plugin
If you work in Claude Code, there is a fuller option. Rather than pasting an
instruction, install sustainability.md as a plugin: the skill
loads itself whenever the work calls for it, and it brings its knowledge
layer — the conversion factors, reference cases, and cited sources —
along with it.
/plugin marketplace add brandonschauer/sustainability.md /plugin install sustainability@sustainability-md
Send them as two separate prompts, then restart Claude Code. You also get two
commands: /sustainability sets how much it says —
integrated, deep, brief,
suggest, or off — and
/sustainability-review scans a document, plan, or design artifact
for hidden emissions and the one or two changes most worth making.
Authoritative sources
The skill’s knowledge layer draws from these institutions and publications. All are publicly accessible; all are cited in the skill file with direct links.
Full citations with URLs are in the skill file. The source list is versioned and updated monthly. See CHANGELOG.md.
Open collaboration
sustainability.md is released under CC BY 4.0. Use it, adapt
it, redistribute it with attribution. The more organizations that integrate
sustainability into their AI workflows, the greater the cumulative impact
on the experience layer.
Contributions are welcome, especially new authoritative sources, worked examples from additional domains, and updated emissions conversion factors. The skill is versioned semantically; the CHANGELOG is public.