I vividly remember standing in front of my TV at about 10 years old, weeping. Bawling. Screaming. Why? Because I was watching a documentary highlighting what we humans were doing to the world. Namely, to our oceans. Despite animal cruelty and mistreatment existing everywhere, the oceans take the cake for the out of sight, out of mind philosophy. As a sustainability copywriter or sustainable copywriter, however you choose to calI it, I dream of giving life and visibility to projects that will not just protect the world around us, but craft a new market and new ways of living and consuming.

But this was just the beginning…

My journey to becoming a sustainability copywriter

Growing up, all I wanted to be was a marine biologist. It was the closest thing, in my mind, to my true deepest desire (being a mermaid, hehe). So how in the world did I ever look to become a sustainability copywriter? I was, and still am, an avid reader and consumer of content and literature on the topic, even if my mind has changed its perspectives over time.

Over time, I realized how the fish and aquarium industry can be extremely destructive and greedy, not being too different from trophy hunting. The aquarium industry seeks animals, often literally kidnapping them from the freedom of their ocean and river homes, and placing them between four or more glass walls for people to see. For me, they were doors to those words I aspired to be a part of. I did not have much money growing up, but fish tanks and the aquarium hobby kept me close to these magical worlds of underwater life. I would wonder at the brightness of colors, the purity, the behavior, the companionship, the natural orders…

Yes, Germán, but how in the world did you become a sustainability copywriter?

Calm down, it is coming.

It was after some years, though, that with perspective I realized not everyone showed the true child-like fascination that I had. Or even more, there were people exploiting the world’s oceans to feed the fascination of people like me. And as pulled into that ocean magic as I was, I could not continue to participate in that system.

Later on, I wanted to come back to the aquarium hobby and perhaps try a more sustainable route, like certain captive bred fish. As horrible as that may sound, captive-bred fish have help revive populations of animals that were otherwise being wiped out of existence by fishing and other human misbehaviors. This is the story of, most famously, the Banggai Cardinalfish, an animal so shy and quiet it was being erased from South East Asia until the demand of the aquarium hobby for its ease of care turned them into a newly frequent sight in their home-place.

But animal sustainability wasn’t the only kind of sustainability I was thinking of, even though it was my priority. Because I’d gotten older and I now had to start thinking about paying bills (something you just don’t do as a child, where everything just seems to appear and come magically) –I started to think:

Oh, now this will add up to my electricity bill.

Far from this being a simple home ec. subject, my thought process continued:

How much energy does something like an aquarium cost?

And then,

Where is all this energy coming from?

And thus, I continued to fall down the rabbit hole of how we make our energy. I started to think about how amazing it would be if fish tanks became self sufficient, or at least fully reliable on renewable energies. This wasn’t my first incursion into the topic, having thoroughly read about the multiple ways we harmed the environment (and our own health) with the ways we produce energy. Yet now, I had a first hand encounter with a topic I knew well, with a certain power of choice I had (to not participate in this particular game), which we don’t have in our daily lives (we can’t just not participate in cooking, heating our homes, personal hygiene…

And then, my most significant yet thought came up:

I wish everybody had the power and the possibility to choose better options.

Coming right after discovering copywriting as a means to make a living with my passion for writing and psychology, this gave me the push I needed to choose a niche: I need to work in projects that are actually shaping the world to be a better one for all. And thus, I became a sustainability copywriter, working with top name brands from upcycling high streetwear like RUBEARTH, to one of the top 20 financial innovation labs in the world, Beta-i Portugal.

My experience with the latter helped me acquire the term I often interchange with sustainable copywriter, which is innovation copywriter. As less than ideal as this can be for my SEO (trust me, I have done the research and broken my own head trying to figure this one out), I ended up feeling like not all innovation centers around what sustainability is expected to be. Sometimes, innovation is setting a better ground for a specific cause, which in turn sets the stage for sustainability to happen.

In fact, did you know that sustainability marketing is sometimes more definitively shaped by consumer perceptions rather than science and innovation? Recently, the international packaging community (see Earth.org and other sources) are discussing how customer perception is causing companies to be unable to deflect from using paper or cardboard, that is deemed more sustainable, when in reality plastic might be a more intelligent choice for specific packaging. Customer misinformation, paired with our inability to trust a lot of sources and our bias towards certain items and brand attitudes, is causing sustainability marketing to be in a little bit of a rut.

So, I became a sustainable copywriter, among my main niches

I want to help bring presence and visibility to the projects that actually crafting a better world. Because I am a defender of proactivity, I not only want to work with those who claim to be passively addressing climate and environmental concerns, but also with those who are actively building better ways of doing things. I want to empower those who are changing the landscape for everyone, challenging the status quo of how things are supposed to be done. Because without them, we would still live in caves.

Do I practice what I preach as a sustainability copywriter?

Other than working with and supporting businesses changing the world, from international innovation consultants to green fashion and beauty clients, I donate at least 1% of my earnings towards organizations that are rebuilding our world. I hope to dedicate more space to bring them into the spotlight :)

Behind The Job of a Sustainability Copywriter