YouTube Green
October–November 2025
Increasing data transparency to lower the carbon footprint of streaming.
Scope:
Context:
Problem Statement
Most people who care about the environment have no idea that watching YouTube is part of their footprint.
That's not a knowledge problem. It's a design problem.
The data exists inside corporate sustainability reports that are dense, technical, and written for investors, not users. The result is a gap between concern and action that no awareness campaign can close on its own.
Goal Statement
Design transparency into YouTube's existing ecosystem so users can see, understand, and act on their streaming impact.
Outcome
95% of users said they'd change their streaming habits once they knew which settings had the greatest impact.
Discover
Sustainability reporting isn't built to be read
The transparency problem
Corporate sustainability reporting is not designed for everyday people. It's made for investors, regulators, and annual reports.
The pattern isn't always deliberate deception. It's structural opacity.
Available data is dense, technical, and formatted for people who already understand it.
YouTube's Role
YouTube sits at a unique intersection of scale and user choice, but its users lack a fundamental understanding of their own contribution to that number.
Crucially, data on the impact of individual features that would provide this understanding is consistently opaque.
Define
Users care. They just have nothing to act on.
To test whether this was a real user problem and not just a systemic one, I surveyed 40+ YouTube users on their awareness, willingness, and perception of the platform's environmental impact.
Before
After
Awareness
Willingness
The survey results indicated that users aren't disengaged, just disconnected. When information is surfaced in a relevant, accessible way, willingness to act follows almost immediately.
Awareness itself incites the desire for action.
How might YouTube align its feature ecosystem with a sustainable future by empowering user choice?
Ideation
Grounding in YouTube's Design System
Insight —> Inspo
User needs pointed the direction. A UI audit provided the raw material, and a prioritization grid narrowed down what was most worth building.
Looking at data visualization treatments, notification formats, and promotional content placements.
Impact vs Feasibility
Mapping the potential impact on user awareness against the difficulty or risk posed from YouTube's perspective as a business.
Features that required paywalled access or significant infrastructure changes were noted but deprioritized.
Design
Layered transparency
YouTube Green introduces three features that work together to make environmental impact visible at the personal, community, and platform level.
Feature 01
Concern without context stays abstract. Personal dashboards translate streaming activity into understandable environmental impact.
Rather than raw emissions data, the dashboard surfaces which behaviors matter most and frames them in relatable contexts.
Feature 02
Conscious Creators
Users need to see that their actions matter. The Conscious Creators initiative partners with creators on activity-based challenges, using community support to drive greater impact and connect individual actions to a collective result.
Early explorations
The first version was a banner underneath the video that ultimately required navigating off the page for context.
The final version removes additional screens and makes awareness and action the same step.
Feature 03
Live Usage Widget
Mindless streaming thrives on invisibility. A customizable nav bar widget keeps streaming impact visible throughout the platform, discouraging mindless usage.
Subtle icons, tooltips, and color changes surface the environmental cost of individual settings inline.
Feature 04
Rollout & onboarding
A feature no one reads is a feature that doesn't exist. A first-visit popup introduces all three features in a zigzag layout to provide the updates in a single pass that orients users before they click away.
Impact
Recovered trust +changed behavior
The dashboard and UI interventions directly fulfill the goal of making streaming's environmental impact visible, relevant, and actionable for the first time.