Sustainability Policy

Reviewed: September 6, 2025 • Scope: govtok.us • Reference: carbon.txt

GovTok is a small site with a big mission: helping people speak up in government processes. We keep our carbon footprint small by design, but we also believe in transparency about the upstream impacts of the services we use.

What we disclose

We publish a carbon.txt file that points to sustainability disclosures for our site and the upstream services we rely on. This includes Cloudflare’s annual emissions inventory and our open-source sustainability references.

Our infrastructure choices

• Hosting & edge: We run on Cloudflare, which publishes its emissions inventory (opens in a new tab) and commits to efficiency at scale.
• Code & collaboration: Our repositories live on GitHub. We follow their sustainability updates and factor them into our disclosures.
• Design: We keep pages lightweight, limit images/videos, and avoid unnecessary scripts to reduce transfer size and energy use.

Our commitments

• Keep our site’s carbon.txt up to date with disclosures and upstream references
• Review our upstream providers’ climate reports annually
• Build pages that are fast, efficient, and not overloaded with cruft
• Balance transparency with realism: we can’t offset the entire U.S. government, but we can keep our own house in order

Future goals

• Measure estimated carbon intensity per page view and publish it
• Explore open-source tooling for continuous emissions reporting
• Invite feedback from the sustainability and civic tech communities

Get in touch

Have questions or ideas about how GovTok can reduce its footprint further? Email us at sustainability@govtok.us or use our contact form.