The explosive growth of connected mobile devices and data-heavy applications running on these devices is pushing wireless networks to their limits, posing a critical challenge: achieving high spectral efficiency (SE) while minimizing energy consumption. Conventional systems transmit every bit of raw data, even when much of it is irrelevant to the actual task, wasting precious spectrum, power, and time – problems that will only intensify in 6G networks. This paper proposes a effective solution by integrating semantic communication with device-to-device (D2D) links. Semantic communication extracts and transmits only the task-critical meaning of the data, dramatically reducing redundant bits and overall traffic. D2D enables nearby devices to communicate directly, shortening transmission distances, cutting path loss, latency, and energy use even further. Extensive simulations across a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) reveal that both energy efficiency (EE) and SE improve markedly with increasing SNR, primarily because of fewer errors and retransmissions. However, beyond a SNR threshold, gains taper off and saturated, reflecting the classic EE-SE tradeoff. By intelligently combining semantic transmission and D2D, proposed approach achieve greener, more efficient networks without compromising reliability which makes this approach highly promising for sustainable 6G ecosystems where spectrum and energy will be severely constrained.