Limecraft – Turning Ambition into Action: Limecraft’s No-Nonsense Approach to Sustainability
Maarten Verwaest, Limecraft
In media technology, sustainability is often treated as a glossy feature — a paragraph in an annual report, a promise about “future targets,” or a thin coat of greenwashing. At Limecraft, we don’t believe in that. For us, sustainability is not about appearances. It’s about measurable, verifiable action that changes how we operate as a business and how we help our customers reduce their own footprint.
That mindset has recently been recognised on several fronts. Limecraft is proud to be a finalist in the Corporate Star Awards in the category Game Changer: Sustainable Product Innovation. We’ve also been nominated for the IABM Impact Award, which celebrates real-world progress toward a more sustainable industry. And last year, the Digital Production Partnership (DPP) renewed our certification as Committed to Sustainability, formally acknowledging that we walk the talk.
Together, these recognitions are not trophies to polish, but validation of a deliberate strategy: embed sustainability into the core of our technology, our operations, and our partnerships.
Beyond Carbon Offsets: Operational Sustainability
We became carbon neutral as of 2023, not by buying our way out with offsets, but by systematically reducing our emissions and use of resources. From office management to data centre usage, each decision is measured against its environmental impact.
For example, we have consolidated our cloud infrastructure to eliminate wasteful duplication. Instead of maintaining idle capacity “just in case,” we optimised our workloads, reducing energy consumption while improving performance. On the supply side, we’ve ensured that our hosting partners are powered by renewable energy.
Within our own teams, we apply the same discipline. Business travel has been cut to the minimum, replaced by effective remote collaboration. Even our product roadmap is designed with sustainability in mind: rather than adding features for the sake of appearances, we focus on automation and workflow efficiency — because making processes leaner and smarter means using fewer resources across the board.
Building Sustainability Into the Product
Where Limecraft truly makes a difference, however, is in how the technology enables customers to reduce their environmental impact.
Take our Delivery Workspaces, for example. Traditionally, programme delivery has relied on FTP transfers, endless emails, repeated QC, and redundant copies of the same assets. That process isn’t just slow and expensive — it’s environmentally wasteful. Every unnecessary transfer means additional storage, compute cycles, and energy.
By standardising the content delivery process in a shared workspace, we eliminate duplication and avoid errors before they happen. Assets are uploaded once, verified automatically, and distributed directly to where they need to be. The result: faster turnaround, lower costs, and a leaner footprint. In many cases, we’ve demonstrated a reduction of up to 80% in resource use per asset. That’s sustainability in action.
The same principle applies to subtitling and localisation workflows. Instead of bouncing files back and forth between producers, language vendors, and broadcasters, Limecraft enables integrated collaboration on a single platform. That saves time, but it also cuts down on redundant encoding, storage, and transfer — small efficiencies that add up to a big difference when scaled across an entire industry.
We apply the same “fit for purpose” philosophy when it comes to AI. Too often, AI is positioned as the default solution to every problem, but in practice it is excessively resource-hungry and unsustainable if used indiscriminately. At Limecraft, we believe the most responsible use of AI is often to not use it at all. If a process can be automated or streamlined more effectively through proper metadata management and structured workflows, that is the better route — more accurate, less wasteful, and more sustainable. In our experience, this foundation often delivers better results than AI applied as a blanket fix — while avoiding unnecessary computational overhead.
No Nonsense, No Greenwashing
It’s easy to talk about sustainability; harder to prove it. That’s why we embrace external validation.
The DPP Committed to Sustainability programme provides an independent framework for measuring progress, from energy use to supply chain policies. Achieving that recognition wasn’t a marketing exercise — it required evidence, data, and ongoing reporting.
Similarly, the Corporate Star Awards and IABM Impact Award don’t reward vague promises. They require demonstrable action. Being recognised by these bodies shows that our approach stands up to scrutiny.
Our stance on AI is another example of our no-nonsense approach. Rather than chasing hype, we adopt AI responsibly. Where structured metadata and workflow discipline provide a better solution, we don’t hesitate to say: “AI isn’t needed here.” That’s not the easiest message in a market driven by buzzwords, but it is the most honest — and the most sustainable.
But most importantly, we don’t treat sustainability as a side project. It’s part of how we design our software, how we serve our customers, and how we run the company.
Driving Change Across the Industry
The media industry is characterised by complex supply chains. Producers, broadcasters, distributors, and service providers are all interconnected, and inefficiency in one part ripples across the whole. That’s why sustainability isn’t just be a singular initiative — it has to be embedded across the ecosystem.
By offering shared infrastructure, Limecraft reduces duplication not only within one company, but between companies. By integrating online collaboration, localisation, and QC into a single workflow, we reduce the need for multiple third parties to copy files and repeat the same tasks. By providing transparency through metadata, we reduce the risk of errors that lead to rework.
The knock-on result is impressive: less wasted storage, fewer redundant file transfers, and a smoother path from production to audience. In short, we have been able to demonstrate that efficiency and sustainability are closely intertwined.
Looking Ahead
Sustainability doesn’t have a finish line; it’s an act of continuous improvement. Standards will tighten, customer expectations will rise, and the cost of negligence will grow. For Limecraft, that’s not a threat but an opportunity. Every regulation — from the European Accessibility Act to upcoming carbon reporting requirements — pushes the industry toward smarter, more efficient workflows. That’s exactly what we build.
Our mission is simple: help content teams do more with less. Less manual work, less duplication, less energy wasted. More collaboration, more automation, more value extracted from every minute of human creativity.
In a sector that often hides behind buzzwords, Limecraft stands for measurable action. Sustainability isn’t a slogan on a website. It’s built into the way we work, the tools we provide, and the results our customers achieve.
Awards are nice. Recognition is appreciated. But what matters is impact. At Limecraft, sustainability is not about polishing credentials — it’s about making the media supply chain smarter, leaner, and greener.
