A Worker-Led Push for Sustainability

Cloudflare’s Impact Week has highlighted the company’s climate commitments and the tools it is building to help customers measure their carbon footprint. But the company also wants to amplify individual efforts. That is the mission behind Greencloud, the employee sustainability working group launched in 2019 that Cloudflare is now publicly introducing.

Greencloud is a cross-functional, global coalition of Cloudflare staffers who want to address the climate crisis from multiple angles. The group’s work falls into three buckets:

  • Awareness: Sharing educational resources on environmental activism, local policy, and community movements with colleagues and the broader public. The group says collective action, rather than consumer choices alone, is the key to a sustainable future.
  • Support: Because membership spans the org chart, Greencloud can help functional teams across Cloudflare on multidisciplinary projects with a sustainability component.
  • Advocacy: Pushing the company to weigh environmental impact in every corporate decision.

The broader vision is to make Cloudflare a clear leader in sustainable tech practices while empowering individual employees to make greener choices in their own lives.

A Baseline, Guides, and Quizzes

Since its 2019 launch, Greencloud has produced both one-off events and recurring resources. Among its first moves was benchmarking Cloudflare’s sustainability practices against peer companies to establish a baseline and collect improvement ideas. The group also curated guides on peer-reviewed content, product recommendations, and simple actions like choosing sustainable 401k plans or going paperless for employee documents.

To keep the conversation lively, Greencloud has hosted trivia nights and similar events that teach practical sustainability techniques. For the 51st Earth Day in April 2021, the group ran a week-long series of activities, some of which are available as reruns on Cloudflare TV.

Earth Week On Cloudflare TV

The Earth Week programming covered infrastructure, policy, personal action, and more:

  • Infrastructure: Michael Aylward, Head of Cloudflare's Network Partners Program, talked about the carbon footprint of internet infrastructure and what tech companies are doing to shrink it.
  • Policy: General Counsel Doug Kramer and Senior Policy Counsel Patrick Day discussed the intersection of sustainability, technology, and public policy, including how Cloudflare works with lawmakers.
  • Cloudflare and the Climate: Francisco Ponce de León interviewed Sagar Aryal, CTO of Plant for the Planet, a youth-led Climate Justice Ambassadors group aiming to plant one trillion trees. Plant for the Planet is a participant in Project Galileo, Cloudflare's free protection program for at-risk public interest groups.
  • Sustainable workplaces: Greencloud Places team lead Amy Bibeau interviewed Cloudflare's Head of Real Estate and Workplace Operations, Caroline Quick, and LinkedIn's Dana Jennings, Senior Project Manager for Global Sustainability. The talk looked at how companies are baking sustainability into post-COVID workplace plans.
  • Personal impact: A panel of Greencloud employees discussed how individual actions stack up against system-level change, and ended the week with an Earth Day-themed edition of Cloudflare TV's Silicon Valley Squares game show.

An Open Invitation

Greencloud’s organizers acknowledge that reversing climate change requires collaboration far beyond any single company or working group. They are inviting other individuals and organizations working on sustainability initiatives to share ideas and join the effort.