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🔎 Green SEO? Not the most widespread concept in the sustainability field. Still, seasoned web designers and developers know it well: folks in charge of SEO often have the final say when it comes to content, design and even sometimes technical choices. And on top of this influence, SEO practices also carry their own environmental footprint being very data hungry. 🎙️ In this episode, Gaël DUEZ invites two seasoned SEO practitioners and pillars of BrightonSEO - one of the world’s top conferences on the topic - Stuart Davies, founder of the Ethical Agency Creative Bloom, and Nathalie Arney, an SEO Consultant with a knack for sustainability to explore Green SEO.Some Takeaways:↔️ the transversality of SEO functions,💻 the alignment of the core web vitals with sustainability goals,🌐 The importance of choosing sustainable hosting providers,♻️ Practical sustainable SEO practices, and much more.
❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss our episode, every two Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO Paris is on December 4th and 5th 2024 --> use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket! Learn more about our guest and connect: * Nathalie Arney’s LinkedIn * Stuart Davies' LinkedIn * Green IO website * Gaël's website

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Natalie and Stuart's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* Search Engine Land’s interesting study among SEO folks * GreenSEO * Jean-Christophe Chouinard’s blog * Core web vitals * Green Web Foundation * Screaming Frog SEO Spider Update – Version 20.0 * GreenSEO Meet-Up Green SEO

Transcript Gael Duez00:00
Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO! I’m Gael Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the Tech sector and beyond, to boost Digital Sustainability.
And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform, and, of course, on our website greenio.tech.
Green SEO, I had never heard the word before last year when I started discussing the topic with Jean-Christophe Chouinard who happened to be one of the thought leaders on this concept. He reminded me something that I actually experienced many many times in my past years as a CTO: folks in charge of S E O often have the final say when it comes to content, design and even sometimes technical choices.
And on top of this influence, SEO practices also carry their own environmental footprint being very data hungry.
Hence to investigate more this angle, I invited 2 pillars of BrightonSEO, one of the top conferences worldwide on the topic, who are also actively launching a fringe event called the GreenSEO Meet-Up on October 2nd Stuart Davies and Natalie Arney. Both are seasoned practitioners in the SEO industry with a more technical angle for Stuart, who Stu founded the Ethical Agency Creative Bloom in 2014 and is also a passionate surfer. And with a focus more on content for Natalie who has been freelancing for 5 years and is also a singer in the Brighton-based community choir. And I must admit this hit a soft spot for me having spent a wonderful year in Brighton when studying at the University of Sussex in … well shall I say this … in 1998. That's quite a long time ago. Hello, Natalie. Hello Stuart. It's great to have you on the show today.

Stuart Davies02:26
Good morning.

Natalie Arney02:27
Thanks for having us. Morning.

Gael Duez02:30
So, as I said, I think I've never realized the pivotal role that SEO could have in enhancing green IT practices. I just wanted maybe to kickstart our discussion with a very simple question, why should we care about Green SEO at all? And maybe, Stuart, if you could share some ideas on it.

Stuart Davies02:54
Okay, thanks. Thanks, Gael. It's great to be here. So, Green SEO, it's two funny words to put together. In 2012, I commissioned some of my team to do some research on to the impact of websites and digital content on the Internet, and I had an itch back then, the vocabulary sustainable net digital sustainability started to permeate a little bit towards me, but it hadn't quite resonated. Obviously, I run an ethical agency. I've always worked with the green and the good and the good local businesses. So it felt that by helping them with their mission, we were helping to do something positive, but we didn't really have a good handle on the impact that we were making. And I think that research to me was a real eye opener. It was a game changer, it was a significant impact. I think there was one stats which really blew my mind. I think at the time there was a study done by a gentleman and he calculated the carbon impact of the Internet to work out that currently he thinks it's a 7th. If it was a country, the Internet was a country, it would be the 7th largest emitter of carbon emissions on the planet and it's on track to be the second of the United States. So it's quite significant what we're doing. So it felt important that SEOs, because we often, I think, as you said, SEOs sit across the divide of digital often. So we sit against digital strategy, we sit against content, we sit against technical, there are many other facets and rings that we actually kind of sit against and we can help influence a much, many factors as well as SEO itself. So it felt like there was a space for a conversation and a space for learnings to be given and a space for open resource tool sets, and here's how to do your jobs. And that's the place that Green SEO is doing. So we're at the beginning of the discovery curve in terms of SEOs and digital sustainability. But that was the point of Green SEO. It started with three of us, initially in Brighton, and those three have grown to 30, of which Natalie Arney is one of our brilliant speakers in our April BrightonSEO meetup. And we're planning to make that 100 next time. That's our plan.

Gael Duez05:24
That's a good, healthy, sustainable growth, the one we want. And what about you, Natalie? What brought you to this concept of Green SEO?

Natalie Arney05:35
I think I've always been into making the world at a better place in lots of different ways. And obviously, as I've kind of changed my lifestyle to better suit the way that I do things in every part of my life, obviously, work is one of those things that I haven't always been able to control. But now, as a freelancer, I'm able to do that a lot more, from client choices to things like helping them improve the impact of their websites and their marketing activity on the rest of the web, so that we're able to be good examples for other people.

Gael Duez06:23
Your clients, Natalie, are they aware of these topics? How do you bring the topic of, hey, I'm an SEO expert and I'd also like to discuss the sustainability angle. How do you kickstart the conversation with them?

Natalie Arney06:39
So some of them have already got it on their KPI's and things. So a lot of the brands that I do work with will have targets. So, for example, at the moment, one of my clients actually is being audited to see by a graduate. They're being audited to check every element of their business because what they don't want to do is obviously promote and preach themselves as being a sustainable business and driving all of their activity without doing it in the best way that they can. Some of them, it's part of their brand, as in, we are an e-commerce site that sells things like sells products… It's an interesting one. For example, one of my clients is an e-commerce site, and they dissuade people from buying things.

Gael Duez07:40
Wow.

Natalie Arney07:43
So, yeah, so obviously it's being able to be a kind of, if you need something, if you really need something, buy it from them and buy the best option. But if you don't, just don't buy it. And it's funny, you know, having worked for agencies in the past where everything's like, “We've got to sell as much as possible and we've got to hit all of these targets.” And it's actually like, well, and I've had a couple of clients that have got this Simmons, like, the same attitude now. It's like, well, actually, we only really want people who really need the product. And rather than driving this kind of high consumption, we all know of Shein and Temu and those kinds of sites, but it's not just them heavy consumers that's obviously then driving waste, driving, overconsumption, driving unsustainable working practices, child labor, so many different things that the impact is beyond the world or beyond the environment is the world rather than just the environment. And, yeah, being able to kind of work with businesses like that is great, but we don't always have the choice to do so. So it's working with people like that when I can, and then when I'm not, it's looking to see, “Okay, what can I do with my brands to help them become better in terms of, you know, accessibility, security, site speed, anything.” And then a lot of the SEO best practices do then feed into, you know, best practices on the sustainability side. But, yeah, it's kind of slowly and surely with some brands and then with others, it's from day one, as soon as you have your kind of call with them, you know exactly what you're going to be doing with them. So it is quite varied. And not everyone has the benefit of being able to say yes or no, whether they're, you know, agency leaders like Stu or freelancers like myself, we both have a lot more control over who we can work with. Whereas if you're an exec and you're just starting out in your career or you're a couple of years in, you don't always have that ability to do that. So obviously taking, getting involved in maybe company projects and things like that, or seeing what you can do internally and attending meetups like GreenSEO can really help as well because you're skilling the team up on understanding and being able to communicate it. Because if you're working with B-Corps, if you're working with businesses that's got all these big goals, you're going to have to be able to work with them anyway and understand and feed it in and it can help get things signed off as well. It's always nice to get an extra thing, an extra ticket signed off just because it's got a green impact, as well as improving keyword rankings, for example.

Gael Duez10:41
If we go a little more concrete now, I'd like both of you to explain what are, according to you, the techniques, the SEO techniques that help reduce the environmental footprint of a website, digital services, etcetera. And maybe a bit later we will talk about what is specifically related to SEO. But I mean, we've heard about the size of a website, image management, etcetera, but I'd like you to cover the different angles, not necessarily all of them, but with this extra question, is this aligned or not aligned with what Google expects from us… because eventually they are the big moneymaker here with their ranking.

Stuart Davies11:34
As Natalie has touched on, I think that some of the core principles or the big ticket items that you could do for sustainability to make your site cleaner do align with the principles of, say, core web vitals and site speed and performance and up to date relevant content rather than content for content's sake. And these kind of big factors which can impact the website. How much of it is Google? I mean, it's quite interesting. During the last GreenSEO, we did post a post, a tweet, no, an x, as it is now, to all of the search engines asking would they consider applying sustainable digital factors in their ranking algorithms? We're yet to have a response, but we will be reminding them of that question again in October.
So if, you know, one of probably the biggest things you could do is find an accredited renewable energy data host. Okay, so somewhere where your, your website is going to be, it's because that's the problem. It's energy use. And if you can, at least the minimum requirement I think, is if you can find, and you can find accredited green energy hosts on the greenfoundation.org website, there's some really good resources on there. You can find yourself a green energy host and you're moving, you know, from potentially a fossil fuel held data center to a potentially green energy accredited data center. I think that's one of the biggest things like the number one impact. Number one things that a lot of organizations can do. Whether or not that doesn't impact, that's not going to impact the front end of the website, the design or kind of the strategy. And this is just where the website is held. Obviously you need to be able to have the same requirements you need for your hosting and the developers will need to get around that. But that feels for me like a good win. If one thing that people would maybe take away from this, that they're not sure where to hit first, that's one of the big ticket items for me.

Gael Duez13:45
First things first, make sure you are sustainably hosted. Now once we've got this basic layout, you mentioned that most of the best practices are aligned with the core web vitals. And by core web vitals I guess you refer to the set of best practices that has been pushed by Google as the best way to get good ranking because the information will be easily accessible and as transparent as possible.

Stuart Davies14:16
It's also how the website loads, how the website renders, how it responds to people who are coming back, how the images are served, how the layout of the pages moves around with the user or doesn't, how certain features react on desktop and mobile. So all of this is starting to go into the world of design and user experience. The core web vitals does hit into that as well. How fast your website loads, obviously, and what's behind it and how that content actually loads to the users as well. So that's some of the core principles of core web vitals and SEO 101.

Gael Duez14:56
And SEO experts will be fully aligned with sustainably or green IT experts on most of these vitals. Could you maybe name the top three top five that are the no-brainer that as an SEO expert, as someone taking care of the SEO ranking of the website because you don't necessarily hire experts all the time in every company. What will be the top three top five things to keep in mind to make sure that you've got both a good ranking and the lowest possible environmental footprint.

Stuart Davies15:35
So with core web vitals again, I didn't come up with this word. We use a lot of jargon in our industry and I'm not a techie jargon. Some of the people who work for me and work with me, I call this “make the website quick”. So there, as I know there are three major, three major areas. One is called LCP, Largest Contentful Paint, and that's how quickly the most important content on the page loads. Okay, so you know the banner of the image, however, so you know developers can do things to make that quick. That should occur within 2.5 seconds. That's Google's recommendation for SEO ranking factors. And then that also creates a quickly loaded, presentable website. You then have something called First Input Delay, and that measures how long it takes for a site to respond to a user's first click. Again, these should be very quick metrics and these are some of the things that designers and developers can, can focus on. And then you've got something called CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift. So that measures the page's visual stability as well. So it's about reserving space for images, videos, iframes and optimizing fonts. LCP, Largest Contentful Paint, is all about how to look, how, how you prioritize loading resources, making files smaller, the host resources on the same server and feed. First Input Delay is about reducing the amount of JavaScript and where you can use web workers.

Gael Duez17:21
And Natalie maybe more on the content side and the philosophy of searching data, are there any things that you'd like to add on these three biggest topics that Stu just covered?

Natalie Arney17:37
So on the content side, I think a lot of it's to do with graphics when we talk about core web vitals, but also JavaScript. So a lot of people will use JavaScript to load menus and add little fun things to navigate content. And alongside that, some people might even just use JavaScript across their whole site. Now that can be really great in some ways. However, the web is still built on HTML and CSS and that's what search engines usually crawl. They have got better at crawling and rendering JavaScript. However, it's not always as efficient as it should be. So usually they go to the HTML first. So making sure that there's fallbacks is really, really important, not just from, from a search engine point of view and a search perspective and having an impact on the core web vitals, but again, like adding in additional layers to that is good for accessibility as well. So it allows people to navigate content, whether they're, no matter what device they're using, wherever they are, they're able to access that content. So rather than having JavaScript disabled on certain browsers, or just not wanting to have things load as fast, and some people will use stripped out browsers, for example, being able to actually access that content is so, so important. And yet not using as much JavaScript or at least having a fallback is super important because yeah, as Stu's mentioned before, not only is that load time having an impact on things like core web vitals, but it frustrates the user as well and then it increases bounce rate and decreases the value of the content and then there's, there's lots of other impact from there onwards.

Gael Duez19:33
And so if I kind of gather your point of view, there is one aspect which is basically the size, size, size, size, which is very much aligned with the sustainability angle because the bigger, the more resources, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's a complex story. It's not linear, obviously. Absolutely not linear. But eventually, when we multiply by dozens more times the size of websites since a decade, as brilliantly proven in the Web Almanac Sustainably Chapter, I really encourage anyone to read this chapter because it's kind of mind blowing to see the average size of a web page just exponentially growing over just a decade. So it's really about reducing the size. But Natalie, what you'll see advocating, it's also a technical choice, like not using that much JavaScript. It's not just the question of size, but also some choices that could make this website more difficult to load or reduce user experience. And before I ask the elephant in the room question, I've got a final one which is regarding when everything is well aligned. Did you already see some website size decreasing? Like did you manage to reduce the size of web pages and websites? Or is it still very, very hard to reverse the trend that we are seeing in our industry at the moment?

Natalie Arney21:07
Oh, from my point of view. So it's an interesting one because obviously from the content side of things, my talk when I spoke at BrightonSEO in April was all to do with how content audits can really play a massive part, not just on the SEO side, but environmentally as well because obviously there are so many sites and so many brands that are continuing to believe that the more content you have on your site, the better you're going to rank. And we see on a daily basis in the SEO world, people saying how they're going to scale the content on their website. And oh, we've seen these great exponential growth in all of these places and we've driven traffic so, so high now. Like, you know, we've ten x'ed it, we've hundred x'ed it, we've done all of this. And then it's like, well, is that, has that content got any use to the user? What is the environmental impact of that content? How much time and effort has that content made? If you've not got a team creating that content, how are you creating it? Are you using an LLM? And obviously then there's the impact of the use of LLMs from the environmental footprint side of things, but also from the ethical standpoint as well. And then we've also got the fact that you can have loads and loads of pieces of content that are just not getting any traffic or not getting any decent traffic. So although you might be driving a lot of traffic to your website, the pages might have high bounce rates, they might have, you know, really irrelevant keyword rankings, but obviously being able to use and target more detailed keywords, driving prospective customers rather than general browsers, that really is key for a lot of SEOs now. I guess it's a growing trend that people are like, well, we can make charts go up, we know how to do that, but it's going from driving traffic to driving valuable traffic from the commercial side, but also from the environmental side. And there was, I remember reading a case study a while back of a food waste company, and they basically created a new website. And by creating their new website design and kind of narrowing down the user journey and stripping back their content and ignoring those vanity metrics of increasing traffic, they were then able to save over 500 kilos of carbon emissions a year. So I think it was over two and a half thousand miles of air travel a year. Just by just giving their website a little bit of a sort out, running a content audit, really trimming down their design and making sure that it was just really fast, really simple, really impactful. And yeah, the content actually helped people rather than just driving lots of irrelevant traffic.

Gael Duez24:07
I'd like to pause here and to share a personal anecdote. When I started my position as a CTO at Solojet, obviously I kind of self audited briefly the website just to understand what was on it. And I ended up discussing with the teams roughly, we've got between five and twelve main pages. Like the pages, like the homepage, the one describing an ad, et cetera, et cetera. But eventually I asked them the question, but how many pages do we have on the website for real? And the answer was more than 1 million and a half. Because for SEO purpose only that amount of pages was and maybe still is created because you basically have one page for every single address in France. Because it is a website based in France. But the same happened in Germany, Israel, Belgium, UK, wherever I worked with a property portal, the same drill and I was shocked like, wow, we are maintaining more than 1 million and a half page. What is the traffic on it? What is the use? I mean, we could get rid of it. Are you really sure? And the answer was always yes. But think about the long tail. It doesn't cost that much. And whenever someone will hit, you know, mostly what is the price for a property in this specific street, in this specific town, etcetera. We want our websites to be ranked super high if possible, number one. So we need to think about the long tail and we need to maintain then 1 million and a half in a highly automated way. And we were not even using LLM back in those days. So this is my personal feedback from a very wasteful behavior. But still, business wise, it makes sense. What would be both of you, your point of view on this? Do you really believe, or is it really the case that the long tail works that well and requires that amount of resources? Or is it a misconception or is it a way between, I would say.

Stuart Davies26:16
I mean, with long tail content, I have an agreement with most of my clients, but my clients are the green and the good. These are people who are early adopters. The challenge is bringing some of these principles to the mass market. But we've got an agreement where we've got a one in, one out on the website. So it's okay, we'll put in, we'll put in a piece of content, but we're going to take some of it off. And that's how we manage our long tail content strategies. So yes, there is a place for it, because often you are answering useful information, a question that someone wants to ask about your product or service, that it is useful to have or to provide that on your website, but it can go so crazy. And what we found was it kept the size of the website lean and lo and behold, it also kept their content strategy lean and really did their rankings quite well. So that's how we've approached that particular thorny subject.

Natalie Arney27:13
So I keep going back to it, but my bright and SEO talk, so basically the name of my talk was “Reduce, reuse, recycle your way to content success.” And basically what that involves is obviously content audits. And I really believe in having really impactful, useful content audits on a regular basis, I would say at least every year. And from that side of things, you always need to keep a grasp on which pieces of content are driving traffic and which are getting good engagements. Like I said, with a case study, having that impactful content that drives conversions, that drives kind of meaningful traffic, rather than just making the graph go up, is so, so important. I think looking at what you can consolidate and what you can improve in terms of content is so important. You might have some really useful content from years ago that just needs a refresh. That could drive a lot more traffic through better keyword rankings. It could be that you have got some outdated information, for example, on an article, and you can just go in and tweak it rather than creating a whole new article. Or it might be that you go back and you've been working on a client for a couple of years and you find some content from about five to ten years ago that could be relevant to you now. And instead of creating a whole brand new article in your content calendar, you could consolidate all of that content together and get rid of additional pages and put everything in one new piece of content. And it's making sure that your content strategy isn't just creating more content and targeting the long tail, it's being able to do it in an effective way. And that's not just from an environmental point of view, but also from an SEO point of view. Years ago, people would create pages upon pages to answer every single query. And obviously, because Google's semantic, it groups content together. Well, in theory, it groups content together by theme and by topic anyway, so you might have pieces of content that might not mention a keyword or a theme, but are related to that keyword or a theme, then ranking for those related terms. And it's like, well, they might be ranking low, but Google and Bing can see that you're trying to kind of target that. It's almost giving you hints when you look at it and go, oh, well, actually, I could work that into that article. And it's looking at that content and saying, well, actually, what have we got now? What do we need? And can we fulfill what we need with what we've already got? And then moving on to creating that new content. So you might have articles, you might have landing pages, and see what you can consolidate, what you can improve before then going on and making brand new content. If it's more kind of on an evergreen side, if it's more trend led, then obviously it's creating that content there and then being able to do that. But where you specifically got really kind of evergreen content, it is so, so important to have your regular content audits, content refreshes and it can work. I had a client last year and it's one piece of content. It was getting less than 300 visits a month and we basically went through, gave some recommendations. It was a couple of paragraphs worth of text that needed to be added and a few headings that needed to be moved around. Within six months, that content was getting over 3000 visits a month. Just for that one piece of content. It was the top piece of content on the site. So it's really, really important to refresh that content because you never know what you might be missing out on and obviously who you're missing out on as well, without then having to create lots and lots of new content, which then has the impact on the hosting, this page, speed and everything else.

Gael Duez31:06
And if I'm following you there, what I hear is two main messages, which are first of all, chase the right metrics, get rid of vanity metrics. After all, even if you're an e-commerce website, you don't want people to spend 1 hour on your website, you want them to spend 10 seconds and then, you know, live their life after having buy your items, obviously. And the second one is the issue is more about stewardship, about caring about your content, recycling your content than just adding new one.

Stuart Davies31:40
There's another issue here as well, Gael, and this might segue us nicely into SEO specific green SEO strategies and tactics. This applies certainly for bigger websites, those with thousands, tens of thousands, some have hundreds of thousands, some have millions of pages and it's managing the bots or managing the crawlers. So out there you've got lots of web crawlers, you've got Google, you've got Bing, you've got so many different kinds of SEO tools. You've got ChatGPT coming into websites now and all of the various permutations of AI tools coming in, there's a lot of malicious stuff coming in the spam. There's a huge amount of now that creates resources as well, that creates resource drain and energy use as well every time a crawler comes into your website. And what SEOs can do specifically is they can use the robots txt file. So it's a file where we can instruct website crawlers what to do and what part of the website to look at. So, you know, if we think at scale, we've got a huge, huge, massive website with lots of archive material. I know Will Barnes from Reed Pop. He works for a gaming company. So they have lots and lots and lots and lots of archive website material which they want to keep but not rank. So they will use their robots txt file to say, this is just our archive. We might pull out some of them. But I don't want you to come in and crawl this anymore because you're, you know, I want you to focus on the bit of the site I want you to do. Or you could have lots of FAQs sections on your site which are just for readers. It's not useful for search because you might just have one FAQ page. You can also block the search engine from using that. So on a one page basis it might not feel like much. But when you start adding this stuff at scale, it does become important and it creates less load on the servers. We can also block AI, ChatGPT. It's yet to be quantified. What the impact of that is on website loads, but I imagine it is quite significant. But what we're doing at GreenSEO is we are going to produce a file SEOs and digital marketers can use to put on their robots txt files. That's the file that controls the search engine which blocks all of the bad bots. So it's saying these are definitely ones which will come into your website that you do not want anywhere near it. And then again, sir, that's going to be open source on the greenseo.org website. And that's really going to help with the server load and the resource use on websites as well.

Gael Duez34:30
Yeah, because obviously it drains resources. It creates data which has to be stored and analyzed sometimes, et cetera, et cetera. But it also drains resources from the owner of the website because they need to enter these bots. Okay, got it.

Stuart Davies34:45
So it's like we're all littering and someone's coming up to your property and leaving their litter and you didn't ask them to.

Gael Duez34:53
I think it's a great example and I love the idea of creating some sort of open source community where everyone will share. Okay, bad bots file, like the Dark Web Foundation repository, like you've got the Green Web Foundation, like not dark web, maybe gray Web, whatever. Yeah, that's definitely a great idea. And something that I didn't consider because I was more considering the robot text.

Stuart Davies35:22
The robots that text.

Gael Duez35:23
Yeah. As you know, something that you don't want data to be produced when it's not needed. But actually, yes, obviously it can drain a lot of resources from your own hosting solutions.

Stuart Davies35:37
It's a good place to start, especially for big websites, websites at scale, e-commerce websites, anyone with a huge footprint, again, that can really help.

Gael Duez35:46
And as an SEO expert, or not expert necessarily, but an SEO practitioner, do I have things to change specifically in the way I work or new tools to embrace to help me with having a more sustainable way of working?

Stuart Davies36:02
So the GreenSEO website, greenseo.org, is a repository and a toolset and it has the playbooks of here are the things that can help you do your job, here are the tools that you can use to address speed, page weight design, here are the other people who are talking about it, such as sustainable design resources, such as pointing to whole grain, digital, Green Web Foundation and a sustainable web, all of those resources as well. And we've also put on there from our learnings some of the playbooks in terms of how you can go about introducing a sustainable web into a large organization that doesn't necessarily have it at the core of its values. And we expect that to grow. It's going to be open source and it's for anyone who's got a story, anyone who's done something to contribute to this. The whole thing about it is just getting it out and saying, “Here you go, here are tools to do your job and here are some of the learnings and here's what we've done and here's what's worked.” So that's a good place to start.

Natalie Arney37:05
So one of the things that most SEOs have got in our toolkits is a crawler. And the two main crawlers that I use are Screaming Frog and Sitebulb. And one of the things that Stu's managed to and the GreenSEO team have managed to arrange with Screaming Frog is that in the Screaming Frog crawlers now you can get the carbon impact of certain pages and elements in the auditing tool, which is fantastic. So when you are auditing a site and if you want to add in as part of your website auditing process or a separate process altogether, it might be, say, feeding into a consultant like one of my clients has got at the moment where they're auditing everything on the site and not everything to do with the business is, yeah, you can use that and that's fantastic. And thank you to Screaming Frog for doing that because it's going to help a lot of us do our job a little bit more effectively. And then obviously when you're using your crawlers, you can switch them into dark mode as well, which is always handy too. So yeah, always switch your crawlers into dark mode.

Gael Duez38:13
I reckoned integrated the CO2 GS library to calculate the website carbon. Am I right or is it something to check?

Stuart Davies38:23
Yes, I believe that is correct. Yes.

Gael Duez38:27
And actually, Natalie, you touched upon something interesting as well, which is the amount of data that is produced by each SEO practitioner. That sounds to be quite significant. When you crawl and crawl and crawl over, is there anything also that you, or Stu, you want to tell us in terms of best practices and how to reduce our own environmental footprint?

Natalie Arney38:54
Go on, Stu, I think you're fair.

Stuart Davies38:57
Okay. Right. So I'll go first. So yes, SEOs and digital marketers use a lot of analytics tools and we use a lot of software for SEO for conversion rate optimization, for UX, for example. Heat mapping is a very good example. So they'll get used on 1% of the website, on a project that might run over one month and they'll put scripts and recordings onto the website. And then generally tools like that are then left to run. Also all of the various kinds of plugins that are active on browsers. And so things like this, again, it's our own kind of personal imprint as well. So what digital marketers and SEOs can do is make sure that if they're using any analytics tools and crawlers as well, like setting regular crawls and all of those things is take the scripts off of the website once they've been used or make sure that you're not littering. Make sure you're only using things and switching things on when you need to use them. I think there's like so many software tools that go into people's websites and crawling because someone set off a project on a website crawler at some point and it's just sitting there doing it, it's not being used and it's just taking data and things like that. So we personally can do that. So I'd say that someone would want to check what's running on their website and also personally, what have you got running in the background on your own machine that's on all the time or not on all the time, and think very carefully about, you know, what tools you use and also maybe check out the credentials of the tools that you're using. You know, you could run their website through a carbon metric and see how that stacks up. Or you could even better write to them and ask them and introduce the conversation to them. So there's definitely things that we can do individually.

Gael Duez40:51
Yeah, I think Holly Cummins that coined the word cloud zombie, you know, in the DevOps words that you kick start an instance or a server, et cetera, and you don't pay attention because it costs not that much money because the load is so low, et cetera. So maybe in the SEO world there is something like crawl zombies or optimizing tool zombies that we should pay attention to. But that's so true. I mean, I've audited websites and some pages where I had countless ads on that were not used anymore. And a bit of JavaScript here and a bit of JavaScript there and oh, it used to be for this media campaign that we ran like one year ago. I was like, what the hell? We don't need that anymore. But we tend to forget. Yeah, that's absolutely true. So we covered a lot of techniques and how to make SEO practices greener. Maybe one of you could share a practical example. I mean, do you have a client, even if you cannot name it, who actively embraced a GreenSEO approach and where you could share what worked well, what didn't work that well, what are the main pain points? Like if someone wants to kickstart a conversation in his or her company or clients, what should be the best first steps based on these use cases that one of you could share?

Stuart Davies42:28
I'm happy to share one. I can't name the company. What I can do is say that one of the Co-Founders of GreenSEO is involved with this company and it is an extremely large international global tech firm with an extremely large footprint and extremely complex change management IT barriers, getting things done. So this was very example, so this is an example of a super huge company, super huge corporation, and then somebody trying to introduce some of the principles of GreenSEO digital web and what we call this is planting seeds, I think, and this is the right lot, people can take this away is this is a big subject, but what you can do is plant a seed and watch it grow. And so what the person did is he decided to go after dark mode. Okay, so wanted to do something. Dark mode reduces the energy use of the person, browsing the screen on the load, et cetera, et cetera. And so you wanted to introduce dark mode on the sustainability section of the website. Okay, got there. So what he had to do initially was get buy-in. So he went and tapped on the shoulder of the sustainability person and he also got user polls. He did user polls internal and external to get some stats behind the change as well. So he was starting to push out. But what is really important is you've got to contextualize the argument. So what this person did was measure the carbon weight of the pages and then say, measure it what it would be like in dark mode and say, well, this could be the impact. And wouldn't this be great as part of our CSR reporting that we've actually done something to actually clean our own pages? Okay. So the sustainability team got really interested. Okay. He then actually, then spoke to some of the developers, got buy-in from his management. He had to do a presentation, internal presentation. He had to get find some friends and they all went for it. And so he had the development team in there, he had the change team, the branding team. Everybody loved it. That was kind of the key learning here. Everybody loved it and nobody put in a barrier of obstacles. The only thing they asked for is that the dark mode would be a toggle that users could switch on and off just to satisfy any kind of jittery stuff. And then the DevOps team just put it through. They just went, oh yeah, we've just put it, we've just done it. So they didn't have to go through the big change stack as well. So this was like immediately there was one page and then suddenly a week or so later, the sustainability team from one of the other countries got in touch saying, what have you done there? Can we get that as well? And then suddenly other sections from the website, because it's quite siloed, start getting in touch saying, what have you done there? Can we do this? And then as a result of that, one of the sub-sites of this massive technology firm, which has a footprint of say, 100,000 pages, it's going to do the entire subdomain on dark mode toggle. So that's, that's how and that's extremely impactful. So that's going to save a huge amount of carbon. I haven't quantified it, but that just shows you how you plant one seed and you can start small, can suddenly grow off and take mode and, you know, it's what we call marginal gains. You know, there is a marginal gains strategy to SEO and there is a lot of… can't talk about it, but also marginal gains to sustainability because it is such a big subject and it can be quite scary for large organizations to do something which is going to impact their strategies. But these kinds of small seeds that can be planted seem to sprout. So I think that was a really good, really good case.

Gael Duez46:12
At least on my island, you can see quite often that a plant will break a rock after just a few years. So at the pore of seed, definitely. Maybe, Natalie, from your perspective, going the absolute opposite direction with a very small company, if you had to advertise like a small or medium sized company running a basic website, maybe a small e-commerce activity, or, I don't know, a small media activity like greenio.tech, which is not optimized for SEO as well. I know I need to pay attention to it, but I didn't have time. So anyway, what will be the main steps? Knowing that it's less a question of seeds that I guess budget and having the time to start something?

Natalie Arney47:04
Yeah, I think as you mentioned earlier, I think it's really important to think about your hosting, first of all, because it has so much of an impact. Obviously, my talk at GreenSEO is about greenwashing and there are hosts that do greenwash. So it's really, really important not just for the environment, but also for your brand reputation, is to work with partners that don't greenwash and that actually, you know, that work really well. And there are some really great companies out there that do some great, great things on top of having a greener hosting and legitimately greener hosting. So I would say start there. Always think about from an SEO point of view, but also from a sustainability point of view, think about the value and the use of the content that you're creating. Really, really important. And do you always need that extra bit of JavaScript or is it just to make the user or the client and not even impress the user? Is it there to impress your boss or the client, or is it there to be actually helpful for the user? Because obviously at the end of the day, everything that we're doing is for the user, whether that's to make their web experience better or to make sure that their children and grandchildren have got a nice place to live in a few years time. So it's kind of encompassing all of that together, I would say, yeah, if you've got a small website, think about the hosting, double check kind of sense check what you're doing to the site. And yeah, see if you can get, if you're say, on WordPress, it's pretty easy to get your core web vitals scores as close to 100% as possible. Obviously using different technologies is a little more difficult, especially out of the box. And obviously a lot of SMEs use things out of the box like Wix and Squarespace and things like that. But yeah, and then I think, yeah, I think about hosting, think about platform, think about content, think about load speed, and they're there. The fundamentals, not just from the environmental point of view, but it's SEO best practices as well.

Gael Duez49:20
And maybe before we close the session, is there a situation where what Google expects from us is not aligned with a more sustainable approach?

Natalie Arney49:36
I guess it depends on what your position is about SEO tactics, because there's a lot of different types of people in the SEO world. There are people who will flood the Internet with garbage and obviously that floods the environment with garbage and they don't care about that. And then there are people who care about good quality content that actually serves the user's needs. And without going into too much detail and discussion about Google and the changes that have happened in the last few years in particular, at the end of the day, Google wants to be able to serve the best results for the user and to keep people on their platform as much as possible. So it's thinking about what is going to be useful for you and your users, because depending on what happens with all kinds of monopoly, breakups and business related corporation things to do with the search engines and to do with potential competition on the horizon from other companies that may or may not be just doing it to inflate their stock prices and investments, it's really, really important to think that obviously we don't just get traffic from search or we don't just get traffic from Google. People are moving away slightly, maybe using alternatives for lots of different reasons. But yeah, I think it depends on what… I hate being as SEO and saying it depends, but it does depend on what kind of SEO you are, whether you're one that kind of cares and does kind of as best practice as possible, whether that's against Google's conditions or not. It's what impacts you and your site and your users, or whether you just don't care and you're just going to continue to flood the Internet. We've got absolute, and I mean garbage. There are other terms that I did use in my brain, SEO talk about that. And you know, Ed Zitron and Co will talk about that a lot more in their kind of publications and podcasts about the changes that have been made, particularly at Google. But I think, yes, it's important to kind of consider what kind of SEOs people are first and then go from there.

Gael Duez52:07
Got it about the garbage. I think we've all experienced this kind of website or content.

Stuart Davies52:13
I mean, I thoroughly believe that the principles of GreenSEO are aligned to good SEO. So there's nothing in there at all that I would see that is going to impact your rankings. It might upset some brand designers when it's kind of, you're starting to sort of move into the design things when you talk about fonts and images and videos and sort of things like this. But there's nothing I have seen so far in terms of tactics for GreenSEO or green web that I think would significantly impact rankings. In fact, I think it really complements it in most cases.

Gael Duez52:53
Okay, so not such a hard sell to do with clients or executives.

Stuart Davies53:00
The hard sell is around behavior. It's ingrained behavior. It's ingrained behavior that this is how our website needs to look. It's ingrained behavior that this is how the marketing team creates content and churns it out. It's those ingrained behaviors like, oh, this is how we know this weird digital environment works. You know, we have our big glossy websites with lots of resources on and we know that works. And we know if we produce lots of content, we know that worked. And what we're saying is we're starting to see case studies where that's not the case, but it's those behaviors and that's the cell and because the data is still coming out, which is why it's very important to contextualize the debate and maybe to start small. So we go actually, well, we're going to tackle one section of the website. Let me try this one section of the website and we'll see what happens with it. So that's how I think people can start to make inroads into that ingrained behavior.

Gael Duez53:58
Okay, thanks a lot, both of you. Before we close the podcast, you mentioned it several times, but do you want to pitch one last time the GreenSEO Meetup in Brighton? Why should people attend and what kind of people should attend?

Stuart Davies54:20
Well, you should attend because it's hosted by us and we're really lovely people. And it's a community starting to come together of digital marketers and SEOs who care about the environment and have either a story to tell or have done something or have found some way to help clean up the environment or help them do their job. And it's part of BrightonSEO, which is one of the world's biggest search marketing conferences, I think. And they're really, really great and they've given us the platform as part of their conference to be able to have this fringe side event really focused on sustainability. We've got Screaming Frog as our sponsor. They are demonstrable impact in helping SEOs do their job to be able to do carbon audits. And we've got three great speakers lined up as well, which Nat was one of ours in the last time. It's free. There's going to be drinks, soft and other types of drinks as well. Just 2 hours. So if anyone is in Brighton and you're there as part of the BrightonSEO conference, just pop in the GreenSEO BrightonSEO event and you can just sign up for a ticket and come straight along. It's just a couple of hours and we will most probably go to a pub afterwards. There we go. Sold it.

Stuart Davies55:46
We like a good pub called Gael.

Stuart Davies55:57
Now we're going to the pub.

Stuart Davies56:03
I know, I know, I know.

Gael Duez56:14
Okay, great. It was really great to have both of you on the podcast. Best wishes for GreenSEO Brighton and hope to see you maybe in Green IO London as well. Thanks again for joining. Have a nice day.

Natalie Arney56:27
Thank you.

Stuart Davies56:28
Thank you very much.

Gael Duez56:30
Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode! If you enjoyed it, share it, and give us 5 stars on Apple or Spotify. It will make a lot of difference to help us find new responsible technologists.
In our next episode, we will welcome the Bonnie and Clyde of Azure to talk about Microsoft Cloud Solution, its carbon footprint and the dilemma cloud providers face when it comes to sustainability choices. Holy and William Alpine will tell us more about their past experiences as Azure employees and the quite harsh articles they recently wrote about it.
Stay tuned.
Green IO is a podcast and much more, so visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. The next one is in Paris on December 4th and 5th. And you can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP, just make sure to have one before they’re all gone. I’m looking forward to meeting you there, to help you - fellow responsible technologists - build a greener digital world.

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In the early 2020s, companies started facing a big question: how could they be more responsible in the digital world? Could something similar to CSR exist for this virtual and yet highly materialized world? Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) was coined to offer some much-needed guidance.🎙️ To explore its ramification, Gaël DUEZ chats with two renowned experts in CDR: Aiste Rugeviciute, co-author of “B.A.-BA du Numérique Responsable” and now pursuing a PhD in the socio-ecological impacts of CDR strategies, and Rob Price, a key player in developing an international CDR framework. Rob also hosts the “A New Responsibility” podcast, diving deep into CDR's role in business.Some Takeaways: 🔑 the CDR framework in a nutshell, 🌿 the importance of embracing a balanced approach to CDR in most companies, and 🛠️ a sneak peek to the newly-released CDR maturity model.
❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss our episode, every two Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO Paris is on December 4th and 5th 2024 --> use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket! Learn more about our guest and connect: * Aiste's LinkedIn * Rob’s LinkedIn * Green IO website * Gaël's website

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Aiste and Rob's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* CDR Manifesto * B.A.-BA du Numérique Responsable * A New Responsibility * Maturity Model * Ethos Foundation * Global action plan for a sustainable planet in the digital age

Transcript
Intro00:00
To change, we have to think about how organizations or governments incentivize change in an economy and how that helps businesses to do the things that need to be done better.

Gael Duez00:25
Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO with Gael Duez - that’s me! In this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the Tech sector and beyond, to boost Digital Sustainability.

One of my more esteemed peers in Digital Sustainability, and a good friend, who’s now CSO of a large digital tech company used to work before in the garment industry. Sometimes, well quite often, she goes ballistic about the infant level of the digital industry in sustainability compared to other industries. The very idea that digital technology produces products as does the garment industry with clothes and that these products have a footprint both environmental and societal is not that widespread. And when Tech executives become aware of it they often lack the frameworks, the best practices and the metrics to steer the sustainability angle of their company. And answer this pivotal question in an industry, which has just a touch of ego and hubris: how good am I compared with others? And eventually, how good am I with keeping our planet habitable for the human race. Am I being too sarcastic here? Well let’s go back to a more action-drive mindset then.

Since the beginning of the 20’s, a concept has started to emerge embracing these questions and providing some framework for companies with a significant use of digital technology: the idea of their CDR. Full disclosure, I am using this approach with clients when I do consulting gigs so I might be a bit biased. As usual, question and double check everything that is said in this episode. All the references will be put in the show notes on greenio.tech and on your favorite podcast platform. Transparency and Accessibility remain in the DNA of the Green IO podcast. To deep dive in CDR, I have the pleasure to welcome 2 of the best experts we can find on the topic.

Aiste Rugeviciute who graduated in both computer sciences and Sustainable Development and Social Business and has worked for several years on the intersection of Tech and sustainability, she co-wrote the hands-on book "B.A.-BA du Numérique Responsable" in French and she is now doing a PhD on Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) strategies and their socio-ecological impacts.

Rob Price is one of the core members of the international group of academics, corporate practitioners and published authors who collaborated in 2021 to aggregate their existing body of work into a single, international definition of the set of principles supporting Corporate Digital Responsibility. He’s also a fellow podcaster with the “A new responsibility” podcast which covered during 5 seasons the use of CDR in companies. He gave a much listened talk to Green IO London last year. And btw this year Aiste will be the one giving a talk on her CDR Maturity Matrix. So make sure to get your tickets for this great gathering of responsible technologists on September 19th.
And without further notice, Welcome Aiste and Rob. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.

Rob Price03:55
Thank you.

Aiste Rugeviciute03:56
Hi, thanks for having us.

Gael Duez03:59
You're more than welcome, both of you. I have a terribly complicated question to start. Could you define CDR in two sentences maximum?

Aiste Rugeviciute04:12
Well, it is a complicated question because there is actually no one definition, at least between the academics. Everybody comes up with their own definitions. But in a nutshell, I would say there are two main ideas. So the first idea is, of course, about responsibility. So what are companies' responsibilities with respect to digitalization, or the way they use digitalization? And the second one is trying to maximize the positive effects of digitalization while reducing the negative ones. So that's kind of the two main ideas combined. Rob, what do you think?

Rob Price04:57
Well, I mean, it goes back to the introduction, really, doesn't it? So in 2021, that was the question we asked ourselves, and we wanted one sentence that described CDR in the context of all the definitions that the variety of us had created at the time. So, I mean, reading that corporate digital responsibility is a set of practices and behaviors that help an organization use data and digital technologies in ways that are perceived as socially, economically, and environmentally responsible. I think the key thing for us was, at the time, trying to think of something that provided a framework and guidance to help organizations be aware of the consequential impact of the things that they were doing. And no doubt, through the conversation, we'll talk more about finding the right balance in terms of framework versus measurement criteria versus a method, if you like, in terms of organizations doing those things.

Aiste Rugeviciute05:57
I think also one of the key things, what Rob just said, it's about the perceived value. What's in line with the so-called reference points in the society. That's kind of a key thing when corporations, organizations think in general about their responsibilities, and when it comes to digitalization, aligning with societal social expectations and all the idea, you know, if it's contributing to reducing climate change or any other negative impact, it's all about in line with what right? In line with what expectations and whose expectations. That's where the question of responsibility comes in place.

Rob Price06:48
And can I build on that very briefly, which is, I'm very conscious of talking about CDR in multiple countries around the world. I think it's very difficult to be really tightly defined, because you have to be conscious that different countries, different political systems, different cultures, there would be pushback if you kind of introduced CDR as a mechanism that you had to follow. Literally. It's important to be conscious of the environment in which you're asking organizations and governments to think about the way in which they operate. Even if they take some of those aspects, that's better than all of those or none of those.

Gael Duez07:31
So it's really a question of contextualizing the approach, and still we reach some kind of agreement around the world and I guess some principles, some guidelines, as both of you mentioned. Could you maybe elaborate what are the main guidelines, the main items that have reached some sort of consensus that, yes, we should pay attention to this aspect and this aspect and this aspect.

Rob Price08:02
So, in a sense, the blank sheet of paper that we did start with in the past was probably between about 2016 and 2020. A number of definitions of CDR did appear. Some of those were written from business points of view, or government points of view, or academic points of view. But when we did an analysis of them, I would say that 80% of them were pretty similar. Maybe some were focused more around sustainability, some were more focused around trust and inclusion, but 80% was common. And the purpose of the work that we did at that time, with all of those parties bringing together those definitions, was to try and find a common framework that actually was inclusive of everything. So we defined a framework of three intersecting circles, which gave us seven principles. If you think of each of those sections, at the heart of everything was trust and purpose was beginning to be talked about more commonly. So, purpose and trust, fair and equitable access for all. So that's around equity, diversity, inclusion, and more societal well being. Thinking about the impact on people, one of the things that I almost enjoy is when I'm talking to organizations asking if their products and services are predicated on addiction to drive advertising rates, it's always an uncomfortable question. But nonetheless, thinking about the impact on people, considering some of the economic impact, I think is interesting. The fourth principle, economic and societal impact, and probably one of the hard ones. But it's beginning to think about some of the things around algorithms, fair share of outcomes, of benefits, the way in which you value things that you're delivering through digital technologies. Talk about the impact economy in principle five. So, thinking around, or beginning to think about that intersection with the economic and the sustainable side of things, and goes into more detail about supply chain and green tech, and some of the ways in which you can use digital services to directly impact, innovate around sustainability. And the final two, very much focused around sustainability. I'll start with seven. Seven, reducing the tech impact on the climate. You're thinking about what is happening with my data centers. Am I using renewable energy? Is it really renewable energy? Etcetera? And then six, we talked very briefly at the start around innovation, thinking about how I can use these technologies to innovate and solve the world's biggest problems, especially around sustainability. So I think this is a really important one. I want to explore it later. We talk a lot around impact of AI, for example, which clearly has massive energy use, massive water use, in terms of data centers. That's something to measure principle seven. But it's really important to think about principle six in terms of how I can use that technology to create positive impact and benefit on those very things that I'm worried about negatively impacting. And it's a balanced scale. So those are the seven principles. They go into far more detail through the manifesto. There have been other definitions that have emerged since, but I can track them all back to those seven principles. I haven't yet seen something appear that's new, a new concept that doesn't fit into that framework. And of course, we do continue to look at those definitions to determine how we continue to evolve, because I don't think any of us said when we created this back in 21, right. That's it. We've cracked it. Nobody could ever improve on that. It's always evolving, always a living thing, and then it's how people bring that to life, which is probably a perfect position to hand over to Aiste, in terms of the work that you've been doing.

Aiste Rugeviciute12:05
Yeah. If I might just add or more generalize. So those seven principles, they are a little bit in more detail, but if we take a step back, basically, we can summarize that it's about the environmental and social side. So we have both sides, and that's what Rob was talking about. Right. So there are social, societal questions and there are environmental questions at the same place. Why I'm underlying it, because sometimes especially, I don't know why, especially in Germany, when they used to speak about corporate digital responsibilities, they completely ignored, or they tend to ignore the environmental side. So they tend to look only on the social, societal side and especially concentrate on the data questions. Now, it's shifting a little bit, but at the beginning, I remember when I was reading it, I was surprised to find it because it was completely the other way around. In France, everybody, whenever they were talking, they were talking only about environmental questions. And the social societal questions were put aside and that was being dealt with by more, way more engaged people or very niche, niche people in certain NGOs. Currently, I can see that the discourse is becoming more balanced, which is nice. So it takes into account two sides. So as I said, the environmental and social, societal side. But it's also the question of technologies perceived as a solution or as a problem. So that's we have both technology or digitalization. So we have to generalize two dimensions. So there is one environmental, social, societal side, and then is it good or bad, or again, it should be balanced discourse, but that's the attitude as well.

Gael Duez14:09
And I have one small question just to clarify. The principle number seven, which is the impact on. Rob, you mentioned impact on climate. Is it only climate or is it all kind of environmental footprint?

Rob Price14:25
Yeah, no, it's reduced tech. Impact on climate and the environment is the actual words that it says. So it is that consequential impact on everything that you have directly or in the supply chain, on the climate and the environment, planet, etcetera. And I think I wanted to just add something to the thing, the description ack, because it is absolutely about people, communities, society, planet in its entirety. I don't want to forget what I think is probably the hardest part of it to think about sometimes, which is the economic kind of angle, if it changes. We have to think about how organizations or governments incentivize change in an economy, in their geography, in their region of responsibility, if you like, and how that helps businesses to do the things that need to be done better, whether through incentive or whether through regulation. So it's that intersection of all aspects of that. I think it's complex. It's not easy. I mean, we've seen that over the past few years. Many organizations that I speak to, they're not trying to solve everything. At the same time, that's not realistic. It's about understanding the consequence of the things they're doing and honing in on some things that would make a difference, that are important because it positively impacts what they're doing or the way in which they're seen in the market, the respect they're given, if you like, the ability to better place product or service because of those things that they're doing. So it is a finely tuned thing engine that you need to kind of understand how we can nudge it in the right direction to be better in terms of the impact it has on the environment and everything around that. If we were talking seven for example.

Gael Duez16:26
And now that we kind of lay the ground with the main concepts and the subtle equilibrium between them in the intersection and the kind of systemic interaction that we can see between the seven of them. If I'm listening to this episode, and I'm convinced that, ooh, this framework sounds very interesting, how do I go from the academic and conceptual approach that helps me to better understand what I should pay attention to, to something a bit more concrete for me or actionable for me? And my main question actually will be, Aiste, do you believe that the CDF principles can become actionable?

Aiste Rugeviciute17:12
I would very much hope so.

Aiste Rugeviciute17:17
There are different steps before they become concretely actionable. Right. So the first question is, I think to ask, why do you want to do that? And then to ask, what do you want to do? So why? I think it's an important question, which, especially in the organization corporation environment, sometimes it's forgotten by the practitioners and then they are being asked by their managers, you know, and they're like, yeah, but why? What's the purpose? Right. So the question why is very important because most of the time the response is money, is to make profit, to respond to the stakeholders. Right, sorry, shareholders actually. But beyond that, we have other requirements. And that's where I come back to the same notion of responsibility. So the why could be because there are legal requirements, there are risks associated, there are opportunities, there are myriad of stakeholders who suddenly have shifted expectations. So your direct clients, it might be your B2B clients, right? It might be the societal legitimacy for you to stay active in a region, in a state, in a country. It might be simple because you want to benchmark yourself with others, so there are reputational damages, et cetera, et cetera. So the first question is, actually why do you want to do that? Is it because you want to go back to reduce risks, take some opportunity, go beyond your legal requirements and so on. Once you kind of clarify the idea why you want to engage in the CDR, it's going to be way easier going forward to structure your actions and approach towards these guidelines. So let's imagine that you are B Corp, for example, and your idea that you want to do CDR because you want actually to contribute to creating a better society. And you consider that yourself as an organization corporation. That's one of your responsibilities.

Gael Duez19:55
By B Corp, you mean the label that some companies get.

Aiste Rugeviciute20:00
Yeah, sorry, I put the label because I know that in the US, when you get a B Corp label, it's much easier to act in line with societal expectations, and not only with your shareholders, because in the US there's a lot of shareholder pressure to get profits, monetary profits. But once you have a B Corp label, they change status in their corporation, legal, something with legal things that in that case, corporations are expected or are allowed way more freedom in order to act in accordance with societal expectations.

Gael Duez20:48
Thanks for the clarification. And let's go back to what you were saying previously.

Aiste Rugeviciute20:55
Yes. So once the company decides why they want to do that, the next stage is to understand where they are now, right? So maybe you are already doing very well and your corporate digital responsibilities. So once you clarify your responsibilities, the question is, okay, what is our current state? And once we evaluate the current state, once we reflect on what we are doing now, then we can look at how we can improve ourselves, where we can go in order to go to our objectives as well. A question is, objectives, is it a continuous objective? Is it very concrete that you want to, I don't know, reduce your CO2 consumption by your information systems, or you want to reduce the digital divide in the society? So digital divide in the society, you know, you can have very concrete milestones, but it's a continuous action, right? It's not going to be at some point completely achieved over. So that's basically the three steps. So the first question is why you want to do it. Second one is analysis, understanding where you are now. And the third one is putting the milestones, objectives, priorities. Because as Rob mentioned, you can't do everything at the same time, especially as an organization, you have so many things on your plate. So, you know, you have those seven principles which Rob mentioned, but between the seven principles, maybe some of them have higher priority because of where you work, because of your industry, because of your stakeholders, because of the whole context.

Rob Price22:42
Completely agree with that. And just, it's a really important point, I don't think, when everyone who fed into that work was never saying there was an equal balance, or needed to be equal investment to address and mitigate each of those separate principles. It's a framework, and the framework is then applied to the organization. I think very few times has an organization ever come to me and said, we've decided we want to implement CDR, how do we do that? Most times it will be they're worried about reputational damage, or they know that they need to improve something around their impact on the environment, or how do they get trust, because they're worried about reputational damage. So it's more around applying it as a framework to help that organization resolve the concern. Or maybe there's been an incident that's highlighted a problem that is perceived across that organization, and it's how they begin to find a pathway to make an improvement that improves the thing that they're concerned about.

Aiste Rugeviciute23:52
Always some kind of entry point towards that CDR, as Rob said. So it might be reputational, it might be very often a regulation, currently at least what we observe in France. So you have regulations which ask you to reduce your electricity consumption, energy consumption, and reduce your CO2. So that's an entry point. So companies say, oh, I need to reduce my CO2 somehow. So let's try to find all possible leverages. And then when they start looking and they say, okay, well, I might reduce my CO2, for example, or environmental footprint by reducing the number of screens we have per collaborator. So my overall footprint, environmental footprint is going to go reduced, but then that's going to affect productivity levels of my collaborators. So wait a second, that's kind of related to something else, right? And then it might still mean, oh, it's very complicated, the digitalization as a problem itself, it's a systematic problem, and there are different impacts which are very much linked with each other and they're not necessarily going in the same direction. If you reduce one, it can be at the cost of the other. And I think that's where the structured approach of CDR, reflecting on it, allows organizations to take into consideration more things which are more important to them and their stakeholders and the challenges they are trying to respond to.

Gael Duez25:29
Rob Aiste just shared a very concrete example on this kind of trade off and multidimensional approach. Could you share an example of a client? You can name it or not. You might be under an NDA that started with you. A journey, I would say, toward CDR, and to see the few steps that were taken and how a bit more concretely than some actions were taken.

Rob Price25:58
I'll use a couple of examples that are not my clients, but they're well discussed, well documented, and in the public domain, if that works, which is probably, and they're both, well, both international organizations. So the first one is Merck and the work of Dr. Jean Enno Charton, who's head of bioethics and digital ethics at Merck. And I think, why do I start with that? A large organization, I think 60,000 people, something of that order around the world, but working in a space that's clearly got strong insight around regulation and controls because of the nature of what they do already. So there's almost a lot they would be, I think, one of the first types of organizations to start thinking about broader CDR and digital ethics in the wider round. And therefore they've focused in and put people and built a small team to build out a framework that takes the best in terms of some of the guidance that's around and early thinking around digital ethics boards and mechanisms and frameworks, and created something that they believe is right in their organization. And I've seen that build and progress. I've presented with Jean Enno in the past, and it is a very thorough process that they've gone through. The last conversation I had with him was interesting because having got that framework in place, that's right for them, it's then how do you communicate it across multiple countries, thousands of people, and effectively get that complete change on boarded and maybe enabling people to say, hey, this, this thing that I've spotted over here, the other side of the world, is something that's different. And maybe that's my introduction to the leader and the work that they did, which again, is one of the early pieces of work, as far as I was concerned, around CDR and led by Jakob Versner. And again, he put in place an explicit CDR. They had CDR principles that they defined for them. I think there were 14 separate areas that they identified. It was driven around digital transformation. So their starting point was every project that has a business case to progress anywhere across the business, we're going to interject, and this is the framework by which we'll analyze the consequential impact and look across the supply chain, very focused around sustainability and local community impact in terms of the societies, the farms, kind of in whichever countries, in whichever parts of the supply chain. And one of the things that I loved about that was that whistleblowing aspect. It was saying, look, there is no problem with being able to say, hey, I've spotted something we need to look at this. And I think that's such an important part of culture and maybe going back to the early conversation of transparency, giving people the confidence in an organization to feel that they have a voice. And I know we've put in this kind of marketing kind of brochure that we're net zero and compliant, but actually kind of, actually the proof points that we think we're quoting aren't quite right. I think it's important for people to be able to say that. So, I mean, there are many other organizations and much work that's been done, but I think both of those two examples are the ones that I'd give as well established on their journey using CDR and digital principles and continuing to evolve and build out over the last several years, rather than somebody just starting today.

Aiste Rugeviciute30:05
If you are a smaller company, if you do not have 40,000 people and a lot of experts who can contribute with their knowledge and plan how CDR is relevant for you, that's a different challenge, right? For the smaller companies when they want to do something, but they don't know how to get going there. And currently, unfortunately, we are lacking tools or there's not that many frameworks which can provide. I emphasize a structured approach because let's be honest, people like to be structured. You know, they like to think in terms of some kind of systems and being clear about the steps which they need to do in order to get to the next stage.

Gael Duez30:54
As you said, in a big company, you can indulge yourself to have a dedicated team working on this topic and elaborating fine tuned principles, thinking about how to deploy it, and bringing the leaders. But if you're a medium sized company, mostly it's a one person show most of the time and it's not even a full time job. So having a structured approach will definitely help. And this is exactly why I was very much interested in your maturity model. So the floor is entirely yours now to talk about it.

Aiste Rugeviciute31:32
Yes. So CDR maturity models. So it's a proposition. It's not a normative thing, but it's a proposition which is a result of academic collaboration and work with different people, different organizations. And thank you, Gael and Rob, you were part of that for all the disclosure, as much as there were others around. In total, I would say 30 people who were involved in contributing with their knowledge, ideas, giving feedback at the different stages. So the maturity model, what I'm talking about, it's fully available online. There's an academic paper I still need to write, actually a more down to earth paper, practical explaining, because I understand that academic papers are not very easily readable by most people, especially those who want to go just quickly and apply it. But the idea of this CDR maturity model is actually very simple. It's a model which allows at the current stage, to look into the scope or help to define the scope at which an organization should look in order to analyze their CDR strategy or analyze their actions, currently, actions being taken inside of the organization. The model, as I said, currently is descriptive, so it's not very normative. It does have six maturity levels. So the idea is that you go from nothing at all. There are no actions being taken up to the six, which if you're exceeding, you are the innovator. You are at the front of this whole CDR movement. There are five dimensions, and within five dimensions we have 18 sub dimensions or 18 focus areas. So we have CDR governance that kind of stands itself clear and underlying there are three sub dimensions. And to be honest, CDR governance, it was one of the most easier dimensions to get consensus on. Almost everybody, all the participants, you know, they were, we do need that. We need actions, rules against the CDR, governments and strategy and all the planning. So that's the first dimension. The second dimension is the ecosystems, which means that as an organization, you should be doing something to contribute to the wider discussions of CDR or in general, digital sustainability. It could be through your relationships with your suppliers, it could be through participation in different external think tanks, groups, open source projects, etcetera. Then we have a workplace and culture. So that digitalization is implying, well, very rarely we will have an organization currently without technology in place, without having their collaborators being exposed to technology, and collaborators can be empowered with the technology. So one of the examples, you know, generative AI, it has a lot of potential to empower people, but it also comes with risks. So that's the whole coming back to the principles that technology can bring positive and negative impact. So I have a workplace and culture, you know, at what point people recognize the risks and opportunities and do they know how to act upon them? Then the fourth one is digital services or solutions. So it's all about dev teams. So internally, what kind of applications we're using, how we're developing, what are the processes in place, if it's relevant for a given organization. And then the fifth one, which is the most difficult, I would say, and this one still needs to be, I think, further developed, is infrastructure or IT assets. So everybody agrees that we do need to think about how we are dealing with data centers. What about our equipment? So IT assets are very much thinking about concrete hardware. But, and that's where the more complicated discussions. Cloud, for example, where does that fit in? Is it fitting in your infrastructure? Is it a more digital solution? Or is it an ecosystem? Because it's actually your provider? Right? So currently it's put in the model. It's under infrastructure, but the model is supposed to be a living model. So the model is there helping, hopefully helping practitioners, helping academics to structure the conversations about CDR. What's the scope? How do we evaluate the current state of our actions, in what areas? So they can be called capability areas. But we don't really give in to that model. We don't really give advice on how to reach the next level. So that would be a more normative model. So I hope that somebody will take it, you know, and as I said, it's a living model. It's supposed to be criticized, it's supposed to be, you know, people should hopefully engage with that model, propose next steps, evolutions, how we can apply it in order to plan the strategies more effectively.

Gael Duez37:45
Okay, thanks a lot. And I must admit that I'm happy that the cloud was kept in infrastructure because I was a strong advocate of it and I had the opportunity to use it with a client. And actually I was kind of exactly what you've described. It's not necessarily super normative, but it was at the very early stage of consulting on green IT strategy. That was how it was labeled. And I remember I needed something to provide them structured feedback on the, I think it was 20 or 30 interviews I ran with their key actors. And it was pretty useful just to drop the visual representation and say, you know, as far as I understood with those discussions, here is where the main impacts are today. So it makes total sense because you're building digital services to pay attention here and here and that, etcetera. And it was a very loose assessment. It was not super structured with the metrics, etcetera. But still, it went straight to the point with my clients and the executives, like, okay, we got the big picture and then let's investigate a bit more on it. Which actually leads me to another aspect that both of you, you've been advocating quite a lot, is talking versus acting. I think it's very easy to get lost with a high level of conceptualization. And the CDR approach can help actually to get lost somehow if you deep dive into the details and you say, okay, and we should structure like this, and then create a substructure and then another substructure, and for each substructure we should get metrics and goals, etc, etcetera. And like ten years later, you've got a beautiful paper, maybe a white paper or an academic paper, but not that much action being done. And I know that both of you have got strong opinions about it. Maybe, Rob, you wanted to start, like, how do you use the CDR principles and the CDR approach to literally drive actions rather than discussion?

Rob Price39:48
I think it's fascinating to actually kind of look at what is different, what is happening around the world and to understand relatively kind of the way in which change happens. I mean, the thing that I would say is organizations love to measure things. I mean, can they love to measure things from a financial point of view. But actually just over the last 20 years, I think many organizations, unless you can measure it, you can't possibly then do anything to change it. So I think it's really important to have some sort of model that enables organizations to assess where they might be. I just don't think that the answer is that everything needs to be 100. It comes back to choosing where to make the impact, because you've seen an assessment and a chart that suggests that there's weaknesses in certain areas and then for what you do about them, if I can talk briefly about the approach that I see in Switzerland. So Ethos, who were kind of involved in one of the early definitions back in 2020, I mean, they started measuring the top hundred or whatever number it is of Swiss businesses on a CDR index that they've defined. And of course, the first time they did it, everyone scored appallingly because it was a new concept. It wasn't the way that they'd been managing their business, if you like, but when somebody with a voice, and in the Ethos case, because of their involvement in pension funds and they've got a financial voice, if you like, in Switzerland, then organizations then think, well, we don't want to be scoring so badly next time, so how can we do some things to ensure that the score is better?

So the first point is, measurement's key because that's what organizations get. Understanding the influence for change, whether it's government regulation, whether it's consumer behavior, whether it's somebody who's got an involvement in the investment decisions, in your long term sustainability as an organization, Ethos, as an example, there are different patterns as to why people choose to change, but then the question is, what do you do? And the answer in terms of what you do is in many cases do the things that are in the discrete area. I mean, if we're talking about the technology in a data center or in cloud CDR isn't inventing some different path that changes what you do? I mean, that's straightforward digital transformation. It's just trying to shine a light on is it being done in the right way? And I'm sure if, I mean, Gael, I remember Mark's session at the conference last year where he was talking about what is your true energy source? So it's about shining a light on you might have thought you were doing things in a way, but had you considered X, Y and Z? Because they're negative, consequential impacts that you just weren't thinking about, because you were just looking at it through the lens of head of IT, or head of compliance or GDPR, legal perspective, whichever one it is. But in each of those areas, there are things that can be done. So I almost see CDR as a pane of glass that you put across your organization that enables you to think about all that in connectivity between the things that are being done. Because what I see in organizations is people don't do that. People focus on the thing that they are responsible for, they know about, their passion is about, rather than that holistic view.

Aiste Rugeviciute43:35
And I think that holistic view is also coming to the obsession with the measurement or the lack of holistic view is obsession with a measurement. Well, you gave a lot of different cultural examples, Rob. I come from France, or my current experience is very much in France, and here the measurement is very much obsessed, being a thing of people involved in IT. And I think it's almost a characteristic trait, you know, oh, we can measure how much cpu usage is this, we can measure how much this code is more effective than the other code. And all that measurement ends up being some kind of performance indicator, right? We can express the measurement in terms of money, we can express measurement in terms of energy consumption, in terms of maybe how many people we trained on CDR issues. But what actual value do those performances generate? That's the question which is often missing from the discussion. And I think that's exactly when you talk about the holistic view, we often forget that measurement or performance is not equal to the value. And what exactly we're talking to whom, you know, the value. So the value to the collaborators, the value to the future generations, value to your clients or your shareholders is not necessarily the same either.

Rob Price45:11
I had a conversation a couple of years ago with an initiative that had put a framework and measurement in place. It wasn't a CDR, but it was very close to it. And I asked the question of how it is actually measured then? And the answer was a four month audit. And an organization is not going to do that as in what we're trying to do here. We're trying to impact the planet. We want every business, every organization, every government to be conscious about the way in which they use digital technologies. It can't be complex for every organization if we want everybody to do it, to do it. So how can we use it? I mean, I'm going to go back, maybe I am wearing my technologist hat here at this point, but finding ways to automate the measurement of those things that we're looking to assess. So that something can be done almost immediately with confidence as opposed to kind of misreporting, I think is critical to any of these succeeding.

Gael Duez46:20
And is it also a question of accepting proxy metrics instead of final metrics?

Aiste Rugeviciute46:27
This is the key, you know, to what granularity you need to measure things, right? Because you can get so obsessed and so you know what you're going to do with 400 KPI's. At the end of the day, you can measure very precisely how, how much of the resources your code uses. But if you do know that your code is creating, I don't know, negative impacts or creating addiction on a larger scale, well, all those metrics, they're not going to help you to actually make an impact or achieve something different, right? So I think sometimes we forget that experts or people working in the company can very quickly and for a pretty low price, I would say evaluate or estimate the impacts themselves. You know, they can. You just, you do need to provide some certain framework, you do need some certain performance indicators because otherwise people love it, you know, and that's how they measure the success of their company. So it could be a proxy used as money is often used as a proxy for any kind of indicators. But in order to act, well, you need to know priorities, you need to know the magnitude of the problem, but you don't need to know the exact numbers. If you know that you're using thousands of computers, but you don't develop or, you know, your website is just very rarely used, but clearly that the impact is more of your hardware, of the usage of the computers, instead of concentrating on eco design of your website. If it's not used by anybody or if it doesn't bring a lot of value, neither to your collaborators nor to your clients. And you don't need a very precise indicator for these to take action in this respect.

Gael Duez48:30
That's why I love using the OKR framework because I think it sets two different levels and I use it almost all the time in sustainability consulting. Remember, what are the goals? Like the kind of medium term aspirational goals and this is really what you want to do. And then, yeah, well, you've got key results, but you can try to track them over a longer period to see if you're aiming in the right direction. But first have several of them, because unambitious goals usually should be measured in several different ways. And not, please do not use a north star, that is the worst possible thing to do, like having just one metric to understand the world, how stupid this is. And then and then also acknowledge, exactly as you did Aiste that, yeah, at some point we might drop a metric to keep another one and not end up with 20 or 30 different key results or KPI, to try to understand actually the real true goal that we have. We could be reducing carbons, we could be reducing water consumption, we could be having a positive impact on some kind of very significant social issues, etcetera, etcetera. But yeah, the question of measuring, and I know that it's especially true in France, but to be honest, it's quite also a very strong cultural trait in the US as well. And they love measurement. Just watch a basketball game and you will have statistics on everything. I'd like to drift a bit away from the implementation itself of CDR and to put on the table the topic of innovation. Because if we go back to the definitions that both of you gave at the very beginning, it was really the definition of CDR, I mean, it was really this idea of trade off that we need to know how much we impact the world, to know how much good net we bring to the world, and not just saying we're saving the world. So let us build ten data centers per week. But that's connected also with the fact that most of the time, with digitalization comes some sort of innovation. So what would be your stance on innovation and sustainability? Are they opposite most of the time opposite or are they complementary or is it a bit more complex?

Rob Price51:03
I think something that a number of us were involved in, which was the Codes Initiative and the 22 report global action plan for a sustainable planet in the digital age. And the very simple part of that was it talked about three shifts that were important. I think the thing that was so important to me in the code conversations was that there was such synergy between everything that people were talking about there and CDR. It wasn't called CDR. I mean, CDR is in the report, but actually the conversations were the same and the three shifts put the enablers in place. So collect the data, collect the information, understand the impacts that we're going to be having. Protecting. Second, protect from harms, mitigate negative effects. Third one was to innovate to solve the world's biggest problems. In essence, those were the three things. Now, why have I said that, organizations, in my experience, don't like being told not to do something, and when they are told not to do something, then they don't want to spend any money on not doing that thing or to do something in a way that they're supposed to, as opposed to the way that they do do. And it comes back to if your model is based on addiction to maximize advertising revenue, because that's your entire kind of way in which you operate and live, then you're not going to suddenly stop that, are you? I mean, it's just not going to be there. So I think one of the things I hear a lot at the moment, and I'm firmly at the heart of the generative AI world and using those technologies is people focused around obsessing about quite recently harms, native facts. It is just doing things not very helpful or impacting people's jobs, etcetera, but forgetting about, because they obsess about that, forgetting about the potential power of those technologies, generative AI, AI machine learning, data science, etc, to solve the world's biggest problem. And we need that. The world has lots of problems at the moment. I mean, it's not just climate change, but finding a way to, I mean, just aging demographics is going to be a problem in terms of long term sustainability of organizations. I mean, sustainability in the largest sense. People can't get access to the people they need, etcetera. So we have to innovate. We need to innovate with a very conscious focus around minimizing negative effects and being aware of harms and all those things. But let's try and focus on positive impact. And I know from experience, impact measuring impact on people and communities is notoriously difficult to do. But let's be conscious of those things and absolutely focus on innovating because we have to. But with that consciousness about doing it in the right way, consistent with regulations, consistent in terms of, or thinking about the impact on people. But I am very firmly, I mean, you mentioned, I think at one point, Gael, that you've seen maybe an evolution in my thinking over the last two years, and I have, I am firmly in the, we have to use these technologies to innovate to solve some of the biggest problems that we've got, but with a very conscious awareness of some of the harms that could be caused. And yes, to think about how we kind of mitigate those.

Aiste Rugeviciute54:40
I think this is the biggest challenge, how to innovate thinking about the system, about the global system, about the whole other potential impacts. Because if you look at the current strategist policy strategies or even within companies, right. All the strategies about sustainability, sustainable development, right. They are made in one line and then digitalization strategies are made in the other line and they're not really talking with each other. If you look, honestly, if even, I think the newest UNEP report on digitalization, they all talk how digital technology is going to empower and allow to achieve the digital development, sustainable development goals for sustainable development, you know, reduce some problems and so on, but they do not really talk about the potential negative effects that come with a digitalization. So currently in a lot of discourse, and that's what was really underlined in a digital reset paper report, which was published, I think, at last, in 2022. The policies do not talk with each other, and we need them to talk with each other. We need to ensure that digital transformations are aligned with sustainable development goals of sustainable development trajectories. And one of the things they are talking about in their report is exactly that. System innovations. That's what Rob was mentioning. So, innovations, first of all, I don't think that innovation should replace the word progress, which currently often is used instead of the progress we are using innovation. We used to talk a lot about advancing some progress and so on within the companies, and now it somehow got replaced by innovation, which is not exactly the same thing. Right? Whereas innovation, if we're using it as a definition, in order to come up with something new, in order to respond to the global challenges and global crisis, and we have a lot of those crisis currently. And I do believe as well, that technology has a lot of power, but it does have a lot of risks, associated risks. And we need to develop that capacity on different levels, on politics, on corporations, on individual levels, recognizing that technology is not neutral. We've been told, you know, oh, the technology is not neutral. No, it's not. Technology comes by itself with a negative environmental impact. I think one of the good examples is that because of the big data, because of the development in the algorithms, we have way more accelerated our knowledge of climate change. We actually can model things. We can understand it better because of the advances in it. So that's a positive thing. But now we know the problem is there. Now we understand very clearly where we are going. So it's time to shift and to use it differently and not to continue running huge calculations on something which we're not able or we don't have capacities to act upon. So I think that it's a very difficult change in mindset, because we don't like to think on a global scale. Right. It's difficult, I think, for us to think about positive and negative impacts at the same time.

Rob Price58:39
20 25 years, nearly ago, I did some research around disruptive innovation, and I seem to remember a definition from that time that innovation was invention through commercialization. So innovation was nothing unless you found a way to make money from the thing that was being invented. And maybe we need to add with purpose or with an eye on doing it the right way to that definition. So it's not just invention through commercialization, but it's invention through commercialization with purpose.

Gael Duez59:13
That's a beautiful definition. Well, thanks a lot, both of you. That was a very, very interesting discussion, especially at the end around innovation. I think we could have done another episode entirely on this topic, but I need to let you go to your regular life. So thanks a lot for joining. Thanks a lot for highlighting this very multiple aspect of a CDR. So thanks a lot and hope to see you in London in a few weeks.

Aiste Rugeviciute59:45
Thank you.

Rob Price59:46
Great. Thanks.

Gael Duez59:49
Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it and give us five stars on Apple or Spotify. We are an independent media relying solely on you to get more listeners. In our next episode we will talk about SEO, Search Engine Optimization and Sustainability. Does it sound like a long stretch? But I discovered Jean-Christophe Chouinard’s work 2 years ago and more recently the Green SEO meetup - a fringe event of the huge global convention BrightonSEO which seems to be to the SEO industry what Cannes festival is to the movie industry. It must be something related to the seashore… Anyway, I jumped on the occasion and invited 2 pillars of this Green SEO community Stuart Davies and Nathalie Arney. And I got great insights on how SEO practitioners should incorporate sustainability in their day to day job.

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💭Fueled by the ongoing artificial intelligence boom, data centers are popping up around the world like mushrooms after a good rain raising serious sustainability concerns. Hence a pressing question: can the data center industry become circular?

🎙️To get some answers, Gaël Duez welcomes a veteran in Circular Economy and Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment, Prof. Deborah Andrews, from Imperial College London, the founder and academic lead for CEDaCI. Some Takeaways:💡 how the CEDaCI Compass tool can help data center being equipped more sustainably,♻️ current inadequacies in recycling infrastructure for electronic waste, and⚡ concerns about the rapid development of AI and its energy demands
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📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Deborah's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* CEDaCI Project * CEDaCI Compass * Investment in clean energy this year is set to be twice the amount going to fossil fuels * Deforestation-free supply chains * Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) – Everything you need to know * Tantalum is mined in Central Africa, mainly in DRC * Interreg NWE * European Regional Development Fund

TranscriptIntro 00:00
There's a real need to shift thinking and business models and possibly, rather than selling it, equipment actually to sell services. So companies own equipment, so then they're responsible for maintenance and for what happens, either for extending life, which would be very much to their advantage, or for recycling, ending life.

Gael Duez 00:37
Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO with Gael Duez - that’s me! In this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the Tech sector and beyond, to boost Digital Sustainability.

And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform, and, of course, on our website greenio.tech.

Can the data center industry become circular? Simple question, very complex answers.

Fueled by the ongoing artificial intelligence boom, data centers are popping up around the world like mushrooms after a good rain. For an industry which is more and more under scrutiny due to its environmental footprint, the sustainability angle cannot be overlooked anymore. Still, the main hurdle remains data, as many guests already stated in this podcast. Hence, my wish today to get insights from the program leader of an initiative which has managed to build high quality primary data on the data center industry. The CEDaCI project sounds like a Dan Brown book title, CEDaCI code to unveil all the mysterious power beneath our almighty data center industry. And to some extent, it's quite the plot. But I will let Deborah Andrews, professor at the Imperial College of London and a two decades long veteran in Circular Economy and Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment reveal all of it.
Hi, Deborah. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.

Deborah Andrews 02:32
Thank you very much for inviting me.

Gael Duez 02:35
It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. And I have a very direct question to ask you to kick start our discussion. Did you start the CEDaCI project out of frustration somehow?

Deborah Andrews 02:49
Okay, well, first of all, thank you for calling CEDaCI. That's the Italian interpretation. We normally describe it as CEDaCI, but hey ho, it's an acronym for the Circular Economy for the Data Center Industry. And yes, there was an element of frustration. I had worked with researchers and operators and so forth in the data center industry on a number of research projects from about 2010, 2012, and was acutely aware that the sector was very fragmented. There was the most phenomenal amount of expertise in the sector, but people worked in silos and didn't connect with each other. And consequently, there wasn't a sort of whole systems approach to the challenge of sustainability. And the industry experts in each of the sectors were doing the best that they could for their particular sub sector, but there was no consideration of the impact that those actions had in their sector. What the impact on other parts of the industry were? So it was absolutely apparent that there was a need for a whole systems approach. And it was very timely in, you know, having spoken to people who subsequently became partners in the project, that they were also acutely aware of this challenge. But being in academia, I was very lucky, being sort of slightly outside the industry, to be able to bring various representatives, stakeholders, etcetera, from the sub sectors together without having any bias.

Gael Duez 04:38
And Deborah just could you illustrate, maybe with a few examples, what silos are you referring to?

Deborah Andrews 04:45
So, one of the first things that we did in the project was to carry out a very critical appraisal of the state of the art. In other words, we did a scoping review of what was going on in the industry, and we identified eleven key sub sectors, key players within the industry, starting with suppliers and then going through design, manufacturing, etcetera. But what we did was linked the silos, or found evidence that these silos actually were related to all the different lifecycle stages of data center equipment.

Now, we focused on electrical and electronic equipment, because based on prior studies with a very extensive PhD that we ran in conjunction with HP, we found that the hotspot, if you like, the environmental hotspot, and this was looking at a whole data center. So the building or the services, M&E, etcetera. The key area of environmental impact was IT equipment, partly because of the embodied materials, the energy consumption, but also the short life of products, and in particular of servers. We found that they have ordered center equipment, and this was also reflected in a big EU report that informed lot nine that servers had the highest environmental impact. So that was the focus of the CEDaCI project. But coming back to the life cycle stages and so forth, and the various silos, then we have the installation phase. And use, of course, is incredibly important. Operational energy transport, taking stuff to and from data centers, perhaps taking to secondary market operators or recycling plants. Then we have data destruction, which could be through mechanical means, shredding, etcetera, or it could be more digital with software. And then ultimately we move on to the end of life. And we could say end of first Life, which leads to secondary market and reuse. This includes refurbishment and remanufacture. Ultimately, though, whether you send your equipment to secondary market suppliers or straight on for recycling, eventually all equipment ends up with end of life processes.

Now, ideally as much of the product should be recycled as possible. But what tends to happen is that the low hanging fruit, things like the casings and so forth, as their steel and obviously external, those recycled and the majority of the PCBs aren't, they end up in landfill. There's a real need for a shift in thinking practice to manage end of life equipment. In this CEDaCI project, one of the key things, one of our USPs, was to bring together representatives, stakeholders from these various subsectors. But one of the points that came up, because we organized co-creation workshops as part of the project, to identify what stakeholders felt they wanted, whether what they wanted was in line with what we felt would benefit them, which was a tool to aid decision making about to help with the sustainability profiling companies and so forth. But one of the USPs brought together these people, and then invariably they commented how much they had learned through the co-creation workshops, because they didn't talk to people who worked in other sub sectors. So this, again, you know, from a sort of academic or life cycle thinking perspective, you need an absolutely whole systems approach to the challenge of whatever industry you're working in to develop a circular economy. Because every action at every life cycle stage, etcetera, has caused an effect. It has an impact on all other life cycle stages.

Gael Duez 09:27
Okay, so there are so many things to unpack here from systemic thinking and your systemic approach, like the benefits of co-creation, and also what you've mentioned on e-waste. And if you, if you indulge me, I'd like to deep dive about this end of life differentiation that you just made. The first end of life, and then the second and eventually the final end of life, which is when the electronic equipment becomes e-waste. It's very important because I see today in sustainability criteria applied for RFP or bid, etcetera, or auditing the data center industry, or auditing hyperscalers, that more and more they kind of tick the box of all servers are donated to charity. All servers go to the second hand market. And so we're good, job done. I think it's a bit more complicated than that, because if the server is donated, but one year later, it ends up in a landfill somewhere in Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, or even Europe, that's not really a solution to the problem. So my question is, how important is this distinction between the first end of life and second end of life? And is it today enough taken into consideration on how to assess the sustainability of the data center industry?

Deborah Andrews 11:02
Okay, so let's think about equipment, and in particular, servers, which I've said have the highest embodied impact of data or data center equipment. And the technology, obviously, whether it's memory, processing speed, whatever, is developing incredibly rapidly. We won't even mention AI at the minute, but the sub-technical change means that an awful lot of equipment is replaced while it is still working. You know, it's functioning very, very well. Can understand, in a way, why hyperscalers and other bodies may want to have the latest, fastest, best memory, etc, equipment. But what on earth happens to the stuff that comes out of hyperscale and other centers when it's still working? Why would you want to recycle anything, take something out of service, recycle it when it still functions very well? So there's obviously a very key concern is memory and disks, be they hard drives or solid state drives. What happens to the data? We'll come back to that in a minute. But there are initiatives to encourage use of second life products, products that are still very serviceable. I mean, that's, I suppose, quite a nice analogy, in a way is, and let's assume they're all electric vehicles rather than fossil fuel driven. But, you know, maybe the hyperscalers want Ferraris, when actually many other industries would… something like Fiat Cinquecento or VW Polo will meet their transport needs. Okay, so there are drives. And certainly, I know in the UK, government and organizations like the NHS are really encouraged to use secondary market products, which one of our partners, Techbuyer, a company that is linked to them, interactive, they did a massive amount of research for their own business, but also the research fed into the CEDaCI project, they found that there were a lot of myths around the performance, particularly to do with operational energy, the performance of old, within three years old, and brand new products. If the equipment is set up correctly, then the difference in energy consumption is negligible. Obviously, it depends what compute activities you're engaged in, but like for like, energy consumption, the level is negligible. The OEMs, of course, want everybody to buy new equipment, so they're always saying, “Oh, it's better, you know, it's faster, it's more efficient, blah, blah, blah.” So coming back to the car analogy, an awful lot of public bodies in the UK, and probably in the EU as well, are being encouraged to use second life products which meet their technical needs without any problem whatsoever. But the good thing about this is the secondary market, we should have the products there, and this is a key element within the circular economy as well, of course, because it's not just about recycling at the end of life, it's about extending product life. As I said previously, why would you want to take a product out of service that is still functioning and can fulfill somebody's requirements? I think the key statement around reuse is keeping something in service for as long as technically and economically viable. That's really, really important. So the secondary market is various companies have been set up to collaborate with big hyperscale operators or smaller operators and are promoting good practice, I think, in terms of circularity and economics and resource efficiency, there are some challenges there to do with legislation and ensuring that second life products have the same warranties and so forth, and also to do with data security. Ideally, we should simply wipe drives, be they solid state or hard disk whatever, and reuse them. But there's a lot of anxiety about data security. So organizations like banks, for example, insist that drives are shredded on premise. They don't leave the bank once they're there, they come in as new products and they end up leaving as bags of tiny little bits of metal. They're shredded on site to ensure data security. But I think, and again, there are a number of really good research projects ongoing looking at data security and performance of either software wiping, whatever, so that hardware, HDDs and SDDs, SSDs can be reused.

Gael Duez 16:25
Are you optimistic about the fact that even for highly secured working environments like banks or even the military, software wiping will prevail at some point?

Deborah Andrews 16:38
I'd like to think so. I mean, I'm not an expert in this, but I would like to think so. And I think the more really robust and empirical research that can be carried out to reassure end users that software wiping or equivalent is safe as shredding, the better, really. So, yeah, fingers crossed.

Gael Duez 17:05
And Deborah, you were mentioning that there are a number of companies that have been set up to meet this new market. Could you share with us some trends? Is it still marginal, or are we witnessing a boom in the second hand market of professional IT equipment?

Deborah Andrews 17:23
It's really interesting. I think it depends very much on time, place, circumstance, etcetera. So it was interesting. During COVID for example, there was a marked increase in demand for second life products, partly because of the increase in demand for data center industry services due to homeschooling and home working, for example, but also because there were supply chain issues. And if you remember, there were all sorts of problems with chips, etcetera. So once we got over Covid and the industry really kicked off again, back to normal business as usual practices. I'll give you a little anecdote here. Okay. There was a bit of an issue around the secondary market because some manufacturers had lots of new equipment in stock before COVID but they hadn't, for various reasons sold it on.

So when there was a sort of shift in business practice generally around the world, a lot of the big manufacturers suddenly decided to flood the market with new equipment. And the price difference between that and reused equipment was negligible. So of course people wanted all purchasers, procurement teams wanted new equipment. So that had a really adverse impact on the secondary market for some companies. I'm not saying all, and it ist anecdotal, but I think it looks as though new and secondary markets are very subject to influence from external factors. You know, they're not as consistent, as stable as certainly the secondary market as we would like it to be.

Gael Duez 19:28
Did you explore with the CEDaCI project, the potential lifespan of servers if the second hand market were to be a very well functioning market? Because I've seen some colocation service providers starting to claim, and I congratulate them for this, that they keep their server for seven, sometimes eight, sometimes even nine years. But can we do better? Can we imagine a world where a server would last for 20 or 30 years? Or would it make any sense?

Deborah Andrews 20:04
First of all, if your server, and it's like, you know, your car, your Polo, your Fiat Cinquecento, whatever, even your Ferrari, if it's working well, then you should be able to keep it in service, in life or operation for a long time. The big challenge is when things, parts start to wear out or break, for whatever reason, they fail, you need to replace them. And a lot of manufacturers don't keep parts. In fact, I think legislation at the moment stipulates that manufacturers only have to supply parts for up to eight years. So if you have a ten year old server, where are you going to get the parts? It could be that you go to, say, a secondary market supplier and they have parts, but it becomes increasingly difficult over time to replace components. So that's a big challenge. The other thing is looking at changes in compute capability. We know that, for instance, there's all sorts of issues around whether you go for air cooling, to go for liquid cooling, is liquid cooling more efficient, etcetera. And AI increases the operating temperature of components. So that may well mean that we have to redesign service to manage factors like that. As compute changes, we actually need to reconfigure either layout, or if you are going for air cooling, then the number and type of fans that you have or you switch to liquid, whatever is most appropriate. So in theory, if we had modular servers that you could take out certain components of and replace with upgraded components that had common connectors and, you know, the box, the space required to house them was the same, then it seems you should be able to keep servers. You know, even if you end up with everything, all the internals, the guts of the server being replaced, the chassis, you should in theory, be able to keep reusing that for perpetuity. But whether that's feasible or not, because of changes in shift from expert liquid cooling, whatever is, we need to think about that.

Gael Duez 22:40
And before talking about the main results of the CEDaCI project, and as you mentioned, what all the stakeholders learned from each other, I've got one final clarification question. Because you were very assertive that the embodied environmental footprint within equipment is by far the biggest share of the overall environmental footprint of a data center. And if this position is not a debate at all when it comes to end user equipment or devices at home, whether it's laptop, smartphone, etcetera, etcetera, I heard some different opinions where it's more like 50-50, because professional equipment lasts longer. Some people advocate that actually the use phase, and especially the energy consumption during the use phase is far from being negligible. And for some of them, it's even the majority of the environmental footprint. So maybe could you clarify whether you were mentioning only the carbon or other environmental impacts, or even maybe the carbon. Your calculations make it clear that embodied carbon is even bigger than energy consumption, GHG emission. I was looking for a bit of a clarification here where you stand on this debate.

Deborah Andrews 23:59
Okay. So when we said that in our calculations that the largest impact in the data center was the IT equipment, when we said that the largest impact was the IT equipment, we based our model on a data center that lasted for 60 years. The actual infrastructure, the building, some of the M&E, was replaced after 20 years, etcetera. But the IT product life was based on three to five years, okay? And that's for hyperscalers, that's a long, long time. Although Google now says that they're going to keep servers in life for five years, we'll see about that.
So coming back to... So i if you decide to pull your data center down after 20 years and build a new one, then that ratio of impact from IT to building will change. But just be clear about that, okay. The second thing to be really, really clear about is the kind of metrics you use when you are looking at impact. So carbon, obviously, and carbon equivalent, it could be methane or other hydrocarbons. Carbon is only one metric, carbon and carbon equivalents. And you exclude a whole array in fact, thousands of other impacts and outputs, inputs, etc. And impacts, when you only look at carbon and carbon equivalent. So you're not thinking about the impact of water, the impact of gold mining, for example, which is incredibly toxic, the tailings can be, may have one of the highest environmental impacts, etcetera. And the impact is not just environmental impact, it can be very detrimental to ecosystems. So toxic substances, mercury, arsenic, etcetera, used in mining processes will obviously have an impact on people living in the area if they get into the water supply and into soil and so forth. So if you're looking at carbon, you exclude all of those factors. I'm not 100% against carbon assessment. I just think we have to think about it in relation to everything else. It was really, it was the original sort of metric linked to life cycle assessment dating from the 1960s. So when LCA first began, it just considered energy, be it operational or embodied. And that's where the linked carbon assessment comes from. It's incredibly important when we're thinking about climate change. We can't underestimate its significance. However, we do need to think about all the other impacts as well. So we carried out some studies of exactly the same piece of equipment, one looking at carbon, operational and embodied carbon, and the other looking at a comprehensive life cycle assessment, which looked at and included thousands of inputs and outputs. But just on a carbon study, we found that operational energy, when you're looking at lifespan, let's say five years, operational energy accounted for 85% of impact, or the carbon in the operational energy, 85% of impact, and embodied in energy was only 15. Okay, so with the newer equipment, that ratio shifted a bit and the sort of makeup shifted to 20% for embodied impact, and 80% for operational impact over a five year life. So it's no wonder that when the data center industry is being guided by, you know, the need to reduce carbon, be it embodied, operational, it's no wonder that you focus, the industry focused on operational energy initially, and also I think it's easier to manage to make change. So now we see, you know, more use of renewables, etcetera. And also improved operating efficiency of equipment itself.

When we look at comprehensive life cycle assessment, we've got a couple of surprises. We didn't think that the difference between carbon and full LCA would be so significant. So the same piece of equipment or two pieces of equipment. The first was, as I said, a really old server, and the ratio of operational to embodied impact was about 80:20 for carbon assessment, and again, it was lower. It was, I can't remember something like 75:25. But what, this is the really, really, really key finding. When we looked at the comparatively new piece of equipment, which was from about 2017, we found that the embodied and operational impacts were about the same. It was about a 50:50 split. So that was really, that means, that was a real surprise. And it really highlights the necessity of examining, measuring, monitoring, you know, improving the physical resource efficiency, increasing use of recycled materials, increasing recycling processes, and building a decent infrastructure to do that, changing practice with things like encouraging, if you can't reuse a whole piece of equipment, can we harvest components and reuse a individual components, etcetera. So that was a very revelationary, very revealing study.

Gael Duez 30:15
This shift from 80:20 to 50:50 was mostly due to energy savings, energy optimization of newer equipment, or was it also, as you said, because of lower cost of building equipment, thanks to the use of recycling materials, etcetera, etcetera.

Deborah Andrews 30:36
Okay, so this 50:50 split, it was a lot to do with improved operational energy. When you're looking at the full life cycle assessment, you are considering things like what happens during mining processes. It's not just the energy or the toxicity, etcetera, and also things like what percentage. Well, now we should be thinking about the percentage of recycled materials included, that, in theory, should reduce environmental impact.

Gael Duez 31:14
So now that we laid the ground for a better understanding of all this environmental footprint, etcetera, let's go back to the actual findings of the CEDaCI project, both for the stakeholders, but also for an average, I would say, data center operator. What are the findings he or she should be aware of? And what about this tool that you developed called the compass?

Deborah Andrews 31:38
The CEDaCI Compass, the circular data center compass. That was a key output from the CEDaCI project. And the majority of the research that we did underpinned the development of this digital tool. It's free to use. You can find it, access it via the project website at cedaci.org. The idea was that we wanted to help people working in the industry to make informed decisions about how to support their transition to sustainability and circularity. And one of the things that we are very keen to do well, apart from being absolutely objective, it's completely non judgmental. We don't offer any, you know, this is right, this is wrong. We just present the results. One of the things that we did as well was to separate out the three sorts of tenets or pillars of sustainability. So you put your information into the tool, or you select various criteria, and then when you see the results, comparing two different servers, you can compare the environmental impact, the social impact, the economic impact, so that, you know, it could be, as an operator, you're more concerned about social factors than environmental, so you base your decision on that. Or I would imagine most people think about economics as their priority driver. But, you know, being aware of the other criteria is really important. If you lump together, you know, these three key tenets of sustainability, you get slightly inaccurate results, you know, you don't know what I mean. It could be the social impact of one server is very high, but its environmental, adverse environmental impact is very low, or the other way around. So that's why we separated those points out. The other thing that we included was a criticality indicator. Now the EU and, well, UK to a certain extent, but certainly the EU has become increasingly conscious of resource efficiency and has identified, now, 30 materials that are what they define as critical. This is because of the amount of resource that is as yet unmined in the surface, the amount of material that is currently recycled. And I would like to include as well the possibility of substitution. But the other really, really important is the geopolitical factors, where on earth is the material located? Because that has a very significant impact on availability. So the critical raw materials are basically defined as those that are of major technical and economic significance to the EU and UK. So we included a criticality indicator to raise awareness of these materials. The use of these materials in data center equipment, all electronic equipment, uses some critical raw materials of some type. We cannot make, for example, mobile phones without tantalum, which is essential for capacitors. Tantalum is mined in Central Africa, mainly in DRC, Congo, where mining practices are eye wateringly horrific. They are environmentally and socially damaging. So we wanted to raise awareness of those sort of issues as well, to encourage better practice. So the compass was developed. As I said, it's a free to access online tool. And it was basically to inform potential end users about the impact of their choices. The other thing that was really, really important at the moment, we don't have anything like the scale of recycling infrastructure that we need to manage all the equipment that's currently in circulation, let alone all the electrical and electronic equipment that will come into the waste stream imminently. We've got a huge problem with this. There's a collection globally and it does depend where you are based globally and as does reuse. Incidentally, people with less expendable income tend to be more frugal by necessity rather than intent, I think or wish. Overall, the collection rate of e-waste is less than 20% globally. And that includes consumer as well as commercial products. But we don't have anything like the infrastructure that we need to recycle this anyway. The recycling processes at the moment, they focus on anything with iron in it. So steel, copper, aluminum, and gold. And there's not very much gold, you know, by mass, it's comparatively little gold in electronic equipment. But of course, its inherent economic value makes it attractive to recycle it. So there are masses and masses of materials, many of which are critical on the critical raw materials list, which aren't recycled. Unless we get our act together and develop a proper recycling infrastructure, there's significant potential for disruption to supply chains.

Gael Duez 38:54
But do you believe it is possible? My understanding of the chipmaking industry, or even slightly less complicated part of the IT industry, the design itself is so complicated, is so… the different metals are melted together to create alloy. You've got ceramic, etcetera, that I don't even know if it's feasible to recycle the way I would say the average John do understands it, which is we will extract to reuse it the same way. And it's more down cycling or it's even. I mean, I honestly wonder if recycling is really the way forward. So don't get me wrong, instead of being able to reuse for super long period of time, as you previously mentioned, having components that are interoperable on open standard etcetera, and saying, okay, you know, this memory card might be 20 years old, so it's ridiculous the amount of data you've got. But hey, I've still got half a billion of them. And if I've put them in some racks, it's still a decent, you know, decent enough, or whatever. But my point is, I think we are fighting an uphill battle if we really want to recycle, like extracting the tantalum you were mentioning, or the cobalt or whatever, rather than redesigning our industrial process and making also sure that the warranty period is so big that so long, that actually we shift the burden of recycling to producer, which are eventually, ultimately responsible for putting things on the market that are absolutely not recyclable. And that would end up being e-waste in a matter of years rather than decades. And when you see the environmental footprint of everything that you describe, we should talk in decades rather than in years. But that's a personal opinion. Sorry, but my point. What do you think about the feasibility of recycling? Or are we talking about a slightly different approach in the recycling industry for the IT equipment?

Deborah Andrews 41:05
I think we need to have all of those things, really. I don't think there's not one size fits all solution. I think there are some really massive challenges with electronic components, for example, because of the way that they function. You're looking at atomic levels, the way that if you're creating signals, etcetera, the way that atoms and the subatomic particles behave. So that is obviously going to limit the way in which components are designed and manufactured at the moment. Maybe in the future they will discover different approaches to data transfer or signaling, switching, whatever it may be. I don't know too much about quantum, and I don't know how this is going to change things, if at all, if we exchange one set of problems for another. I don't know, but I'd certainly like to find out an awful lot more about it.

But coming back to your question about end of life and so forth, I absolutely agree that we need a different approach to the manufacture of many products. I think we need to really focus on the things that can be upgraded, swapped, repaired, etcetera. Again, most or many electronic components, it's nothing. You know, they're so tiny, it's impossible to repair them. So focus on the stuff that we can repair and upgrade and keep in service for as long as possible. The other stuff, we need to certainly develop better recycling capability. But there's an argument that's put forward that some of the materials, the economic value is fine if you have a kilo of stuff, but by mass per component, the mass in individual components and in servers as a whole is very low. So the economic value of any particular materials reclaimed from the server will be low. So we need critical mass to make development of recycling and reclamation technologies for particular materials economically viable. That's going to be the driver. The other big challenge we've got with recycling is sometimes the processes, and we're not. You know, there are lots of ways of doing this. One of the partners in this CEDaCI project, a company called TND or Terra Nova Developments, they developed some new recycling processes to reclaim materials that aren't commonly reclaimed. And they use a mix of thermal and chemical processes. And because you're using more than one process, of course, that increases cost. But, you know, if you have critical mass of stuff coming through the system, it does become economically viable eventually.

Deborah Andrews 44:23
One of the big challenges is very often, but if you have a printed circuit board with a huge number of materials, embodied materials, you're processing to reclaim one or two or three, those processes can damage other materials, and so you can't reclaim those. So, you know, I think at the moment, it's impossible to reclaim all of the materials in PCBs, which are the biggest challenge for recycling. So I think we need to think about when we're designing, not just designing for here now and in use to design, thinking about how can these things be easily disassembled to facilitate, if not, you know, chucking the material into a smelter to recycle it, but actually being able to reuse the materials in the… as soon as we take them off one product, we can put them on another.

Gael Duez 45:22
Do IT equipment manufacturers today start to tackle the issue? Or are they still mostly in the business as usual approach and not at all incorporating, as you said, a repairability aspect when the design sinks, even a bit of a recycling aspect?

Deborah Andrews 45:45
I think there's, and I'm not going to highlight particular companies, but I think there's quite a lot of smoke and mirrors and greenwashing. And this, again, it's anecdotal from personal experience of, you know, I worked through this CEDaCI project. They all still want to sell new equipment, and certain companies say that they have a kind of closed loop, but it's a very open closed loop, shall we say? They're not responsible. They do take equipment, but then they sell it onto secondary market agencies. They're no longer responsible for that equipment once they've sold it on. There's a real need to shift thinking and business models and possibly, rather than selling IT equipment actually to sell services. So, you know, you rent, I don't know whether you do it by compute capability or operating time or whatever. So then they're responsible for maintenance and for what happens, either for extending life, which would be very much to their advantage, or for recycling at the end of life.

Gael Duez 47:00
Which is what is slightly happening with the big three hyperscalers because they've started designing their own servers. And I could bet that they thought about the fact that even from a financial perspective, the longer you keep this equipment, which is on your own cost base, the better it is for your bottom line. And I have a final question for you, because you're privileged witness of the data center industry for almost a decade, two decades almost now, and there is a bit of an elephant in the room that you actually, you teased us several times during the interview about AI and more generally, I would say, about the trends. And I would like to share with you an anecdote while I was recording this very enlightening episode with Professor PS Lee in Singapore, who's one of the best experts in the water cooling techniques and more generally on building energy efficient data centers, especially in tropical climates. We had a really fruitful discussion, and he's a big advocate of technical optimization, and he knows a lot about these topics, etcetera. And at some point in our discussion, he posed, and he had this kind of overwhelmed moment, you know, when you've got just too much weight on your shoulders. He was like, but you know, Gael, at some point we will have to ask also the question of the level of consumption of compute that we want in our society. Because despite all the efforts that I'm doing to reduce energy consumption, the current trends, and especially the AI boom, I don't see how I can make it. And it was this kind of face, like, I simply don't know how I will be able to manage such an exponential consumption in energy, even if overnight all data centers in the world would switch to water cooling, super efficient water cooling techniques and whatnot. And it kind of struck me like even someone within the tech industry and such a strong advocate of technical optimization saying, wow, but the trend is really worrisome. Is it something that you're aligned on, or are you a bit more optimistic about the current trend in the data center industry?

Deborah Andrews 49:29
I think it's really scary. Forget about the ethics and what AI can and can't do. Forget about that. I think it's really scary because it seems that the industry is racing, racing forwards to develop either new data centers, new equipment to manage AI, etcetera. But my feeling is that some of the, what we've learned, good practice, etcetera, is forgotten in that race. So it's a business as usual approach. Build, install, run, replace, run. It's very worrying because the physical resources and energy required to manage AI operate, even the simplest operation, the demand for energy, is astronomical. So there are arguments saying, oh, well, AI is going to measure this, that and the other, and improve, you know, this, that and the other, but, or improve the operational efficiency of this, that and the other. But I don't think we've done any kind of calculations at all to see whether the benefits of running an AI software or, you know, program activity, whatever, to assess resource efficiency, whether the benefits achieved through the resource efficiency or more significant than the impact of running the AI operation. We need to really, and it's not going to happen, but it would be great to pause for a year and just to sort of examine some of these factors and to see where the benefits of AI really lie. So if we do carry on business as usual, and I know there are various regulations coming in from, you know, digital sustainability and so forth in the EU, but I don't think they're going to have a massive impact on, certainly the speed of development of AI is far faster than the implementation of these new regulations. But the other thing that's worrying, if there are constraints of operating in the EU, for example, does it simply mean that providers will go elsewhere, they'll build in locations where the regulations don't apply. And so we move our problems to another part of the world. In effect, you know, more buildings in Africa, Asia, South America.

Gael Duez 52:05
And from a cold financial perspective, do you think that the current trend of building data centers everywhere in increasing compute capacity is sustainable? Or do you foresee some bottleneck or even some forced pose because of resource exhaustion?

Deborah Andrews 52:25
There may be a quantity crunch, unless we think about extending product life, as we've already mentioned, and recycling, reclaiming more materials, changing business practice, business thinking. I think that there's potential for quantity crunch, but whether operators will start to charge for access to digital services. I mean, at the moment, you know, you buy your phone, you have a package, and you can contact anywhere in the world whenever you want. Okay, you pay for apps and so forth, but actually you're not really paying very much for the digital services that enable those apps to function. And a lot of things are free anyway. So will we have to pay for digital services? Is that one way of monitoring or constraining digital activity or not? That's one question. But the other thing is, is it ethical? You know, if we think we're in a luxurious position in Western Europe in terms of economics, although there are people in digital poverty, but, you know, generally, as a child or a university student, if you don't have computing equipment at home, you can go to your study institution and access digital technology there. But that's not the case in many populations in developing countries where digital tech is a luxury for the upper echelons of society. And yet we can see how access to a phone, not smartphone, just an ordinary old fashioned phone, has empowered women, for example, helping them to set up businesses and so forth. Is it right to charge them for data or do we make data charging… is it sort of socially stratified or according to income bracket? I don't know. I think we need to be a lot more visionary, look forwards and be proactive and anticipate problems and design them out before they happen. Now, whether that's… I think that's possible with some equipment, but whether it's possible for, you know, in terms of human behaviour and so forth, there's a whole other matter altogether.

Gael Duez 54:18
It makes total sense. Thanks a lot, Deborah, for joining. That was very enlightening and a unique perspective on the data center industry, environmental footprint and what could be done to reduce it. So thanks a lot. Once again, it was a pleasure to see you and hope to see you to Green IO London as well.

Deborah Andrews 54:36
Thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

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💭 How can a country defining itself as an high-tech spearheader can embrace IT sustainability? Japan is a fascinating example of both the contradictions and the synergies that such a journey creates.🎙️ In this episode, Gael Duez welcomes two long-time Japan-based experts: Paul Beddie, VP and Sustainability Lead at Capgemini, and Trista Bridges, the co-author of Leading Sustainably, and a member of EcoVadis' Purpose Committee. Their exchange on IT sustainability initiatives in Japan led to many takeaways including:🤝 the stakeholder-oriented nature of Japanese society,🌱 the emergence of Japanese startups focusing on sustainability, ⚖️ the role of regulations in driving sustainability efforts in Japan, And much more.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conference is in London on September 19th Learn more about our guest and connect: * Trista’s LinkedIn * Paul’s LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Trista and Paul's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* Digital Sustainably * Capgemini * EcoVadis * Japan PM Suga vows goal of net zero emissions by 2050 * Together for Action: Japan’s Initiatives for Achieving the Common Goal of Net Zero by 2050 * JERA ends ammonia co-firing trial at coal power station with positive results * JERA and ExxonMobil to Develop Low Carbon Hydrogen and Ammonia Production Project

TranscriptGael Duez 00:00
Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world one byte at a time. Every two Tuesdays, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.
I must admit that this episode is a kind of a treat for me. I had such a big shock when I was a teenager and I started to discover Japanese culture. My first exposition being with the manga Akira, like many of people of my age, and that was pretty crazy back in the old days. But anyway, regarding sustainability and technology, actually, I started to realize a few years ago that I was wondering how a country which has built its reputation about being always the cutting edge innovator when it comes to high-tech, robotic, etcetera, etcetera, would be able to manage the wave or it's not necessarily a U-turn, but at least a significant change when embracing sustainability and approach things like low-carbon technology, or even sometimes low-tech or wise-tech or you name it the way you want. I'd rather prefer wise-tech as a combination of high-tech, low-tech and no-tech. So, I wanted to explore how this country is embracing sustainability and more specifically, IT sustainability. But to be honest, this won't be a very technical episode, it's more a geographical exploration.

And for this to happen, I'm delighted to have two experts on Japan on the show. The first one is Paul Beddie. He's actually one of the most vocal voices in Japan on sustainability at large. Not necessarily only IT sustainability, I think he publishes every day or every two days on LinkedIn. He's got crazy numbers of followers and he's well respected for this. But he also has an impressive track record holding executive positions in several IT companies such as Peoplesoft, Genpact, SAP, and now Capgemini, where he's now Vice President, Global Client Partner, and most importantly, Sustainability Lead.
Trista Bridges is the co-author of Leading Sustainably with Donald Eubank, and she has been in Japan for over ten years now, advising SME and startup about sustainability. She's also a member of the purpose committee of the EcoVadis, a famous ESG platform. So both guests are pretty knowledgeable in sustainability and in Japan. This is why I'm so delighted to have them today. Welcome, Trista. Welcome, Paul.

Paul Beddie 02:54
Thank you.

Trista Bridges 02:55
Hi. Thank you for having us.

Gael Duez 02:58
That's a pleasure. I think my first question for both of you will be exactly as I stated in the introduction, how is Japan embracing sustainability today? Maybe, Trista, you want to start?

Trista Bridges 03:13
It's a very interesting question because I've been looking at this topic for the last probably eight years or so. I kind of started writing the book with my co-author, Donald, about, gosh, it was about eight years ago now. And at that time, it was right after the SDGs were launched. And we kind of wrote the book because we were pretty fascinated with why we kept seeing the SDGs everywhere in Japan. But not used in a kind of, I think I would say in a serious way, but used in a very frivolous way in the beginning, right. You'd see, like, little posters and cutesy things and these types of things. But people really seemed to like the SDGs, which kind of stood in contrast to my home country, the US, where nobody really paid much attention. My adopted home country, France and Europe, where people respected it, but maybe weren't kind of living by it as kind of the code of sustainability, per se. And so at that time, you know, Japan really wasn't doing that much. Although I would say that the lifestyle of Japan in some ways incorporates a lot of elements of sustainability, right? You know, it's a chain of islands who for a long time don't have any resources, so have always had to kind of look at things like recycling, for example. There's a very kind of sophisticated recycling system, for example. But, you know, if you looked at a lot of the elements of the SDGs, whether it be climate or other things, you know, Japan was definitely not kind of at the forefront of those things. But then that started to change, and you probably remember, you may or may not remember, there was a prime minister, Prime Minister Suga. He basically committed to net-zero for Japan, 2050, I think that was in 2021, perhaps. And then we had Prime Minister Kushida, who came in and he kind of continued in that same vein. And you started to see in the last, I'd say, two or three years or so, you're seeing a lot of momentum around this topic, particularly around ESG and we can talk later about different regulations and these types of things that are kind of coming into play. But I'd say at the moment, Japan, there's a lot of momentum around this topic. But does Japan have a long way to go? Absolutely. And there's a lot of different structural and historical reasons for that that we can dig into during the discussion.

Gael Duez 05:31
Oh, and we will. Paul, you might want to bounce back on this.

Paul Beddie 05:37
Sure. I'll add a little bit more color as to what Trista just said, by the way. It's great to be on with you, Trista. I know when I came back to Japan for the third time in 2020 from China, your book, and you and Donald were some of the first people I met when I came back to Japan to plug into the sustainability community here. So, it's great to be on the call with you. Some of the things that I know, I mean, in Japan, we have the SGD train. Some of the subways are totally plastered. SDGs. SDGs. Everybody in Japan is wearing the beautiful multicolored pen. They're saying, look, we're all for the SGDs. You go to every construction site around Tokyo, they've all got a huge billboard out in front of the building that they're building, the 40-storey steel ginormous building with tons of concrete, that they're very concerned about SGDs, and they knocked down perfectly good buildings to build those. So it's a really interesting place. They give a lot of lip service but I have to say, I'm not sure that Japan really understands what it needs to do to really become sustainable. The odds of it actually hitting the goals that the government's put out by 2030, in my opinion, are very low. But it's interesting. I actually came to Japan initially in 1991, and worked for a very large Japanese engineering company. Very unusual experience. I was the only foreigner in their global sales development group, in their inaugural environmental business development company, selling scrubbers to coal fired power plants. And when it comes to hardware, and this is really typical for Japan, their hardware excels. This is a country of mechanical civil engineers. And they love products. They love making things that they can really engineer the heck out of. And so it was really interesting early on in my career to experience from a power generation. How do they actually look at technology to reduce emissions while burning coal? Here we are nearly 35 years later, and the companies here are still burning coal. A lot of it. They're the world's largest consumer and user and buyer and trader of LNG, Liquefied Natural Gas, which is a marketing coup to call methane natural gas. And in fact, one of the major utilities here, power generators, a company called JERA, just this week started the first ever ammonia co-firing of a coal-fired power plant anywhere in the world. And they've also recently just, this is obviously public information, they're in discussions with ExxonMobil to get 5,000 tons of ammonia a year out of the US, ship it to Japan so they can try to get 20% to 30% of volume for their thermal power plants from ammonia versus coal. So, from a technology perspective, and this is probably a lot more than just IT, Japan is definitely advanced in trying to go hydrogen, trying to go ammonia, and trying to do things that not necessarily the rest of the world has bought into yet. I don't think at the G7 meeting, anyone besides MHI was excited, Mitsubishi Heavy that is, was excited by the current prime minister's announcement that they were going to be going ammonia co-firing for power.

Gael Duez 09:00
Yeah, maybe we'll jump to the IT part later, because I'd like to unpack a bit what both of you say. It seems that on one hand, the Japanese way of living is pretty sustainable and it comes with cultural roots that I would actually love Trista to elaborate a bit on. But on the other hand, it also seems that they've got not a fully systemic understanding of what is going on and the need to shift, and they're more like adjusting with engineering prowess to fine tune what is going on, but not necessarily embracing the systemic vision that, hey, something has basically to stop. And so maybe, Trista, on the first part of what I understood of what you described with Japan, what are, according to you, the cultural roots and maybe historical roots that explain that Japan is so open to the sustainability idea?

Trista Bridges 09:54
Yeah. So I think that there's a few things that are really important part of this story. So, first of all, I'll come back to the recycling point in a moment and kind of use of resources and limited natural resources. But there's a general understanding in Japan of the concept of a stakeholder. Right. And, you know, that kind of comes from Japan's history. You probably know a lot about, you know, the Japanese desire to have collaboration for different parties to kind of come at the table. And there's a concept called “Sanpo Yoshi”, which is kind of what's good for the company is good for all. So they've always had this stakeholder oriented approach. And the fact is, with sustainability, if you want to be a sustainable society, if you care about that, then you have to care about stakeholders as opposed to just shareholders. Right. So I think that's actually a really important part of Japanese society that helps. Right. People are very concerned in Japan about how their actions affect another person in a way that they are not, you know, in kind of other countries. Right. The countries that we come from, maybe we used to be a little bit that way, but we've gotten a bit less that way over time. Okay. So I think that's an important point.
The second point is, you know, absolutely, with natural resources, when you don't actually produce certain things you have to figure out how to repurpose and reuse those things or perhaps use less of them in some way. Right. And there are also, as you know, the history of Japan. I am not a Japanese historian. I don't know Japan's history kind of an extensive way. But one thing that many of us know is that for periods of time, Japan was completely closed. Right. Nobody came in, nobody came out. Right. And that's why probably during the COVID period, it was so easy for the country in some ways to shut itself down because it had done this before. Right. So when you shut yourself down like that, you have to figure out how do we make use of what we have. And I would say that Japan has gotten pretty good at that. That being said, however, since the war, since World War II, which kind of really transformed Japanese society in many ways. It became a very much a consumerist place. So with that comes consumption, with that comes waste and plastic usage and buying stuff and throwing it away. So Japan is, and I don't have the figures, I apologize. But Japan is probably within Asia, probably one of the biggest producers of trash that has been shipped elsewhere. Right. Not all of it is perfectly recycled.

Paul Beddie 12:27
We also have a lot of municipal power generation here that's a lot of meticulously separated trash into different components. All goes into the same furnace.

Trista Bridges 12:41
Very good point. And I think in all of our societies, we have elements of them that make sustainability possible, right? But it's like a puzzle. They don't have all the pieces, clearly. Right. And Paul and I, we'll talk about this a little bit, but we talk about. We'll come back to the IT pieces. I know we come back to it, but one of the other parts of this is really important is this kind of hardware versus software dynamic in Japan. And Japan is not great at software. Right. And part of sustainability management is data, is having good analytics is all that type of thing. And we can talk about that later. But that's something, for example, that Japan never really kind of got on the train with. It caused a lot of issues.

Paul Beddie 13:24
Very challenging for Japan on the analytic side and on any type of business software to identify the data and get to the data. It's definitely, Japan, is definitely a laggard from that perspective, certainly compared to what's happening in Europe, although there's certainly a lot of startups in Japan now that are trying to build software solutions. But it's definitely an area where they're going to have to look outside more and more to find solutions that the homegrown solutions, from a software perspective, just are having difficulty getting to where they need to be from an efficacy perspective, as well as from just getting market share and getting an understanding from users on what's the value of doing it.

Gael Duez 14:10
And how do you explain this, Paul? Because this is an engineering country, because this is a hardware country, as you stated?

Paul Beddie 14:18
I think, so just today, I got to go visit a brand new ship brought out by Maersk. It was built in South Korea. It's on its maiden voyage. It's in Yokohama. It's the world's second green methanol-powered transportation ship supply chain component. It's a huge ship. And this is the type of thing that Japan's really excited about because it's a big ship and it's got a lot of engineering, and it has a ginormous engine in it, and it uses tens of thousands of tons of methanol. But they don't really know anything about the software. But I was talking to some of the representatives of the company, and back at headquarters in Europe, of course, they have all this great tracking software that they can provide to the car companies in Japan and to the various manufacturers of things in Japan so they can track their Scope 1 when it comes to supply chain. But I think a lot of Japanese companies are still struggling to understand, well, why would I do that? What's the point? You know, how does software actually help me reduce my environmental footprint? So that is something a lot of big organizations in Japan struggle with, for sure. I mean, the Mitsubishi’s, the Nissan’s, the Toyota’s, I mean, there's certain areas where they do, and certainly overseas, those big companies, their European operations are very much plugged into what's happening in Europe and very much aware. But when I talk to headquarters in Osaka or Tokyo of these same companies, they're absolutely blind to what their colleagues in Düsseldorfor in Paris or in London are doing to comply. It's just not on their radar.

Trista Bridges 15:57
Can I say one thing, too, just quickly, about the software piece? Just very quickly. And in digital technology, I think most people would, you know, you have to kind of look at what happened to China over the last 30 years, you know, after the bubble burst. It was kind of traumatic, frankly, for the company country. Sorry. And it kind of missed, like, there's some Internet companies here, right? There's Rakuten, there's some other Yahoo. Kind of branched off. You have Yahoo Japan. But in many ways, it kind of missed, like the biggest technological revolution that the world has known over the last 35 years. Right. First that being software, second being the Internet and digital technology and everything that came out of that. So, now Japan is really investing much more in the last few years to try to catch up with that. Right.
So we have two trends here which you hear people talk about. One is DX, and that's very much in Paul's wheel. Paul's wheelhouse is probably both of these things, but definitely that DX digital transformation that people like, you know, these kind of terms kind of helps people understand. And the other is GX, the green transformation. And these two things kind of fit together, if you will. You can't really do one. It's hard definitely do the GX without DX. It's almost, I would argue it's probably impossible, you know, and then maybe it's starting to get hard to do DX without GX too. Right. Without kind of thinking about sustainability as well. So that's just to give a little bit of historical context. And I think it's a fascinating story, right? If you look at Japan over the last 35 years, it's really interesting, actually, what's happened in this country and its challenges around this.

Gael Duez 17:37
And thanks a lot, because just before deep diving into more the tech side of things, I might try some kind of very sociology, ground level or sociology for dummies question. But do you think that this lagging when it comes to software, which is mostly powered by data and data is somehow power? Do you think it is connected to the fact that Japanese culture is very hierarchical and you don't share power that easily, and actually data and handling data is poor, and you don't share data that easily and you don't manage or handle data that easily. Do you see a connection or is it me just going completely wild?

Paul Beddie 18:20
In Japan, I've been on so many big projects where the IT department is driving the big transformation project, and they tell the business, you know, a year later, oh, by the way, we've changed everything. They don't necessarily get the businesses’ buy in before they do it. And so, the IT guys kind of sit back in their cubicles and think, well, how should we do this? And they start building it without asking the business. And for that reason, you get IT that doesn't necessarily give the business what they want, but because the IT budget is completely owned by it and they don't need sign off from the business, you end up with spending tons of money building IT systems that don't necessarily deliver what the business is actually hoping to achieve. And so, I see that's being one of the reasons why the digital transformation here has been slow is because they're not necessarily looking at it from a business perspective. They tend to look at it more from a hardware and an engineering perspective. Change is hard everywhere, but change is particularly difficult in Japan. Most organizations around the world do a big IT transformation project. They use IT as the special sauce to drive transformation. Japan still uses IT to spend a lot of money and buy more hardware. It's interesting. Half the world's remaining mainframes actually are in Japan. So there's still a long, long way to go in terms of how to digitize the country in a way that makes sense. And it's also that makes it the whole concept of this kind of idea of green IT, is also difficult because the Japanese are very slow to move things to the cloud. And as you move things to the cloud, you get more control over. So, what's the power source that's running all those servers? And so it's still very slow to uptake on some of these things. Now, having said that, from a data center perspective, they're building all kinds of new data centers in Hokkaido because it's so cold that they realize they don't have to heat as much. So there's certain components of sustainability that they're thinking about. But are they really thinking about it because of sustainability, or is there some other factor as to why they're doing what they're doing?

Gael Duez 20:49
And now, going back more specifically to the IT/Tech sector, you seem to say, Paul, that you gave the example of the data centers that things are moving forward, but that the concept of green IT has been slow to take off because actually the concept of digitization has been slow to take off. And let's put aside my awkward question on the connection between data and power and stay way more pragmatic. How do you see, both of you I would say, the state of green IT in Japan?

Trista Bridges 21:22
So, I know my kind of wheelhouse is more the kind of startup world, right. And technologies that are kind of coming online to kind of tackle this problem, new companies, right? And I think one of the most interesting things that I've seen is first of all, how long it took just pretty basic carbon accounting software to come to Japan, right. You know, we have in Europe, in the US, even other countries, Australia, South America, et cetera, just hundreds of these things now, right, where we can basically just, you know, enter our information and we could track it. And it's basically a kind of a SaaS type tool, right. And everybody can access it. And I ask other people for information and we share information back and forth. And it took a really, really, really long time for that to come here. And it started in the last couple years and actually it's accelerating. And I would say that, you know, if you can kind of crack the Japanese market, you do really well, right. Because it was just kind of a completely open space. And for me, that's very kind of rudimentary technology, right? That's not anything super, super sophisticated, right? It'd be something better than I could build because I'm not a trusted technologist. But, it's kind of like the bare minimum you need, I think, to be able to manage this issue of, you know, every element of sustainability. So we're starting to see more startups doing that kind of stuff, and that's really software. And so we're starting to see innovation around that. Japanese companies, not just EcoVadis which you mentioned earlier. EcoVadis, which I have some affiliation with, is doing really well in Japan, recently came to Japan and it's a really strong market for them. And it's great, but it's also a market that didn't really have much, right? So, and there's just thousands of companies here. Like, I think that's another thing people forget is, you know, in the west, we really have kind of like hollowed out a lot of our companies in a lot of ways. We have these kind of, you know, matriarchal organizations. We've, you know, really kind of downsized them quite extensively. In Japan, you know, companies don't really die here in the same way that they die in the west. So you have just tons of companies. Right? So if you have a good product and these companies feel that they have to do it, you can absolutely do extremely well here. And so the first movers to the market, especially on the software side, are doing well. There's some more sophisticated technologies that you just don't really find here yet dealing with sustainability that you find much more abroad, like carbon capture. I have seen some more battery production technology here recently, which is kind of exciting. But yeah, I think the kind of early stuff is starting to happen. The latter stuff, even though you would think because it is very kind of industrialized country, that you would have more of that if they're kind of late to the game with that. But that stuff is starting to happen. But we don't have, for example, even in the investment sector, the size of the investment sector that we have in Europe and particularly in the US, we don't really have tons of, for example, green venture capital funds, right? They invest in carbon technology only. So there's a lot of work. But at least in kind of the startup space, things are starting to happen. But oh, my goodness, there's so much opportunity and room to improve and innovate here.

Paul Beddie 24:45
You're right, there's so much opportunity. And on the investment side, you know, it made me think of Japan's pension system is one of the biggest pensions in the world. I forget how many trillions, tens of trillions of dollars they have under management in the system. They have a mandate to allocate a certain point of that part of that to sustainability projects. And my understanding is 90 some odd percent of what they invest in for sustainability is outside of Japan because they can't find bankable projects to invest in in Japan, so they have to go outside. You know, I, in my role, I work with Japan's top 100 companies. So these are really, these are the household name companies everybody in the world's heard of. And a number of them are my customers. When I work with their operations in Europe or North America, there's a high awareness and high desire to do something with, you know, how do we make our IT more green? What are we, what are the solutions? What are your credentials to us as Capgemini? What are your credentials to provide green IT solutions? We don't get those questions in Japan. And in fact, we find it quite difficult to sell some of the solutions to Japan. The customers generally just aren't aware of them. But interestingly, what we're doing right now is we're kind of reverse engineering our way into helping customers identify. So here's some sustainability benefits of the project that you've just done. You didn't ask for this to be done, but we're doing it because we're a French-headquartered company. We have lots of stuff we've committed to in France as a global company as to how we're going to help our customers decarbonize and whatnot. And we have to actually do the work here and reverse engineer. Okay, so we took you from an on prem solution to a cloud solution. All right? We're going to help you calculate what the difference is in the carbon impact of that. We're taking you off a mainframe. We're putting you on to other types of software. So we're trying to push the needle. And I know most of the big consulting companies are doing the same. This is not unique to our company. All the big, famous consulting companies that operate in Japan, all of them are trying to build a sustainability practice. But I think everyone is still struggling to get the big companies to say, “Yes, we will spend the money to reduce our carbon footprint.” They're still not thinking that way. They'll spend the money to do the projects. But you said, well, if you add on a little bit more, we can track everything and we can go green and like, no, I don't want to do that.

Gael Duez 27:16
How come that the level of awareness is so low when it comes to the environmental impact of IT and electronic equipment in general?

Paul Beddie 27:25
I'd say it comes back to what we were saying earlier on the hardware versus software. The mentality here is engineering. I want to engineer big physical goods that generally can't see that, or they haven't been exposed to it. And again, it's also the hierarchical situation in Japan. Until you're about 45, you don't get any decision making power in a big company here. So that means these people, they're all still analog. The digital natives have yet to come into positions of power in any of these big companies. So there's a generation, it will come eventually, but it's still not there yet.

Trista Bridges 28:04
Absolutely. If you kind of look at the kind of the things that the Japanese have built, and they're very proud of having built. Cars, automobiles. I remember growing up when Toyota came to the US, that is kind of giving my age away a little bit, but incredible. Getting a car with that kind of low gas mileage that doesn't break down regularly, that's very fuel efficient. It's like a marketing marvel. The Sony Walkman. I think probably the best thing that's close to software they ever built is gaming. Right? The gaming sector, right. Which they're incredible in. My sister works for Nintendo. What a company, you know? But this is kind of like when you've done these wonderful things and also even electronics, right? All the electronic devices, television sets, you know, all these things for years that the Japanese used to make. So if you make stuff, right, you make stuff like that, how can you even really conceive that the idea of this stuff might be a problem? You know, if you're even just talking about the physical, those physical items, right. That, like, maybe people don't need these things and maybe we need to repurpose them, and they're actually kind of good at that. So if there's an area called Akihabara, I don't know if you had a chance to go when you were here, which, you know, they take devices, they repurpose them, they resell them just because people like to tinkle, tinker with things. And like I said before, right. People kind of have this history of reusing what they have and that, you know, that's something they should own, right? They should absolutely own that. They built the stuff. They should know how to kind of repurpose it and use it and that should be their first instinct. But unfortunately, and that's on the consumer side, right. That's not necessarily on the corporate side, but I think that that's kind of, it's kind of hard to let go, right. It's hard to let go of what you did so well, right. And then of course to do all that you need the energy. You needed energy to be able to do that.
We didn't talk about the great earthquake here in 2011, which was pretty pivotal in this story too, which you should say, you know, this was a nuclear powered country for a long time. You had this absolute tragedy in 2011 and the nuclear reactors were shut off. So, what's the response? Coal. So you need the energy, right. So, the only way that I think they could have gotten out that differently was if they completely changed their lifestyle and that wasn't going to happen.

Paul Beddie 30:23
For 12 to 18 months, they were providing incredible feed in tariffs for anyone who was willing to put a solar panel out in their field. And there are definitely a number of people that won the lottery by putting up very quickly some solar farms in Japan that caught huge feed in tariffs but it didn't last very long and they pivoted away and said no, no, it's really hard for Mitsubishi or Mitsui or Sumitomo, these ginormous Japanese companies to keep making big money. If you've got all these cottage people building little small one two megawatt solar farms, we don't want that to happen. Let's go get another 20 year supply contract for 10 billion gas from Qatar.

Gael Duez 31:07
Yeah, well actually that connects pretty well with the question I wanted to ask. Where do you believe the change will come from? Is it more civil society, a general rise in the level of awareness? Because I also know that NGOs are very active and powerful in Japan. There are not only big corporations. Or do you believe that it will more come from the stick side, I would say. And that some legislation one way or the other will have to be rolled out for things to start moving, starting with just measuring things and then being able to act on them.

Trista Bridges 31:44
So, the regulation side which is actually super interesting, because the Financial Services Agency, the FSA, has actually been quite ambitious on this, I would say. So, they rolled out about 18 months ago sustainability reporting criteria and they're going to be adopting what's called ISSB, which is kind of the International Sustainability Standards Board, which is the standards that we're trying to develop is principally around climate-related type things, and they believe that that should be the standard. That's another cultural thing that's actually really important in Japan, which is consensus, which is agreeing to do something together as the international community doing something here. Like, I talked about the SDGs and the UN and the respect for the UN. So, they're very much kind of supporters of that. And Ikeda-san is the gentleman at the FSA who kind of manages these kinds of questions and regulations around sustainability, amongst other things. And they really want to adopt that here. So, they're planning to bring that into effect. And that requires things like aligning with TCFD. That requires, you know, I think Scope 1, Scope 2 reporting, I think Scope 3 as well. So, these are things that are going to absolutely transform Japan. And I say that only because people follow the rules, right? So, if the government says you got to do this thing, you know, and so now people are starting to scramble to do it, it works in a way like, you know, that would not be the American instinct, right. The American instinct would be to, which is what's happening, right. To push back against it, to get a bunch of lobbies to use the state, right. To challenge it in Japan, they're like, oh, we have to do this thing. So you have to have here that top down kind of rule. I think the rulemaking is really important here. It's not the whole story, but it is important. And it's a bit of a stick. There is a bit of carrot in it in a way because if you do a good job at it, then you look like a better company, right. To stakeholders, to the government, to the people who matter.

Gael Duez 33:56
Trista, does it really matter to look good on sustainability in Japan?

Trista Bridges 34:01
I think that it matters to look good to the people who matter, right. So I think you want to be in the good graces of the people, you know, of the circle, right. Whatever. However, you define who's in that circle, right. The public is different, right. I don't think that's really a concern here, right. I don't think companies are overly concerned around, you know, looking great for the public per se. Right? But I do think there is kind of this concept of, you know, we want to seem like a responsible company, especially to the people who make decisions here, especially to the people who matter. We don't want to be a bad student. We don't want to be the outlier or the one who kind of screws up and then it's public that we screwed up.

Paul Beddie 34:45
But there is a tremendous amount of marketing efforts going on, initiatives by big Japanese companies touting their green credentials.

Trista Bridges 34:54
That's true.

Paul Beddie 34:55
People understand it's a problem. People want to see things done. But if Mitsubishi says they're doing it, then probably people think, “Oh, then it's all under control, I don't need to worry about it. Mitsubishi says they're taking care of it, so it's all good.” And I just used Mitsubishi as a, I mean you can place whatever Japanese company name you want to put in there. And people think because they trust these large organizations, following the rules and trust are two big things that you have in Japan. So, if they say they're doing it, then okay, then it's taken care of. I don't need to worry about it. And I think a lot of people would be probably, the Japanese people, would probably be surprised to understand some of the things that really happen on a sustainability or emissions perspective isn't necessarily going the way that they're being told it's going.

Trista Bridges 35:42
And I'd say that the public here doesn't challenge the corporate establishment in the same way that we do in our countries, right? Like we're absolutely, it's been like nothing but nonstop, like chaos probably since the financial crisis in 2008, right, in terms of people's relationship with established businesses. So, it's very different here.

Gael Duez 36:03
Paul, how do you believe the big corporate world where you, which you're pretty familiar with, will react to this new regulation? So there is, as Trista says, the good student effect but will they embrace it as a new business opportunity or just as, okay, some new rules to follow? That's how it should be and that's it.

Paul Beddie 36:27
I think if the legislation comes down, then they will do it. The other thing that, you know, it's still, it's not nearly as an export-oriented economy as it used to be, say 20 years ago, but exports are still a big component of what happens in Japan. And I think the external influence, particularly from Europe, on some of the regulations around supply chain, around certification, on what is green, what is the footprint of the products you're importing. I forget now that the timelines went up, but it's something like any company that has more than 200 employees or does more than $400 million a year worth of business in the EU has to comply with all the EU rules and regulations?

Trista Bridges 37:08
Yes, another few years. I think it's another few years out, but that'll come in the blanket of an eye. Right?

Paul Beddie 37:13
Cool. But as it stands right now, could Sony continue exporting whatever products they manufacture in Japan to Europe after those regulations kick in? The way things stand right now, no, they won't be able to. They won't be able to get through the new regulations simply because they can't actually get the green power to run the factory that they're manufacturing in. But those things pragmatically will make changes here, or they'll just continue shifting more of the manufacturing capacity to countries where they're actually able to get access to the green inputs.

Gael Duez 37:49
And that's something I'd like to ask you about because I had this pretty amazing interview with Professor PS Lee from Singapore. He's a data center expert, and he was explaining that no matter how hard they try, the Singapore state will not be able to go 100% renewable energy. So the way they do it is actually they're importing, as he said, green electron from neighboring countries to manage their energy transition. Because even if they cover the entire island with solar panels, which is something that they're actually doing, it won't be enough because they're so energy- intensive for many, many different reasons. The big harbor, I think they've got 10% of the entire Southeast Asia data centers just located in Singapore. So, it's a bit crazy over there. And it's very linked to the comment you made, Paul, about, hey, if I cannot manufacture using renewable energy, in that manufacturing things, using renewable energy has become more and more a standard around part of the world where I've got a lot of consumers, how will I deal with it? And so you suggested one solution, which is outsourcing the production in low carbon country or more environmental friendly standard country, which could be option one. But option two, is there any attempt to truly go full speed on renewable, maybe also coming from abroad?

Paul Beddie 39:20
I think the answer to that is yes. There's definitely some companies, big companies in Japan, that are basically trying to buy credits because they can't get off the thermal power generation or the fossil fuel-based energy production in Japan fast enough. So, instead they're investing massively in renewable energy in other markets around the world. In Europe, in China, in the United States, partly as a way to try to offset what they are unable to do in Japan. And the whole renewable energy discussion in Japan is quite a tricky one because there's a lot of factions that wouldn't seem to have a lot of political power, but that in reality, have huge amounts of political power in the countryside. Fishermen's associations, Onsen associations, businesses that would seem to be not necessarily the juggernauts of the economy, have a way to actually stop progress and innovation from happening because they don't, you know, it's not in my backyard. The Onsen Association is scared to death of geothermal power because they're scared that they're going to take away their hot water. They're taking hot water from a couple hundred feet down. Modern day geothermal goes 7, 12, 15,000 ft down to look for its heat. So, there should be no issue with the onsen being able to keep pumping up their wonderful hot water. But they don't see it that way, and they continue to block those things. And the whole discussion around wind turbines here, it's very, you know. Europe is blessed, from a wind turbine perspective, and that you've got a lot of shallow, big bodies of water right close to Europe. You know, the North Sea is not very deep. The Mediterranean is not that deep. You go not too far off the coast of Japan, and, you know, it drops 3 miles to the bottom of the ocean. So, there's all kinds of new technology for floating turbines and whatnot that are required. There's all kinds of new infrastructure that needs to be put in on the ports that want to handle something besides fish. There's challenges here to Japan having the political will to disrupt its harmony that it's got with some very long traditional components of the society in order to become more green while still maintaining modern 21st century economy.

Trista Bridges 41:53
Yeah, I think there's two things there. Topography is not always on Japan's side, I'd say, in terms of it's a huge challenge. And then also it's like the flip side of what I was saying before about the stakeholder management. Sometimes, it can be to the point where it's almost paralyzing, right. If you have all these different blocks that you're trying to kind of respond to. And, you know, again, our kind of response in the west would just be to sue them or to do basically try to stamp them out or move them out of the way, right. But that in Japan, you know, that can happen, and it's good that that doesn't always happen, right. But it can be something that's tricky to manage.

Gael Duez 42:29
And I would go for a final question. If you walk into main Tokyo streets, you will be literally surrounded by gigantic screens promoting Muslim mass consumption. Do you see, and Japan is deeply rooted in what we call Global North, highly emitting countries with a high standard of living and taking a huge toll on the global carbon budget of the entire planet and entire humankind. Do you see any discussions, any move toward some sort of sobriety or reducing these consumptions or not at all at the moment?

Trista Bridges 43:09
I think you see some very small kinds of movements, right? So, you have like Hippie movement. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, there are some things like, you know, there's some really important kinds of initiatives and innovations that have happened here that might seem very kind of simple to other people, but actually kind of a big deal. So, there's one called Mymizu, which is, you know, basically a social innovation organization who got restaurants to allow people to refill water bottles, right? And the water bottles are kind of reusable bottles of water. And you would think this is, well, that seems like normal, right? In Europe, you go to a restaurant, somebody fills up water from the tap and puts it on your table. Perfectly normal. But in Japan, there's a vending machine every 2 ft, right? So you said to think about, there's something about consumption here which is a huge problem, which is convenience. It is unbelievable. There's a convenience store every 2 ft. There's literally a 7/11, a Lawson and a Mini Stop or whatever within literally inches of each other. So, this kind of feeds the machine of consumption, right, when you can just always consume. Right? So, how do we get people to still have a great quality of life and just not do that constantly, you know? And I think that that's something that's going to be very hard to change here. Perhaps in the country areas, you know, it'll be a little different, right. But in the big cities, the problem is the big cities are where people are moving and migrating to. So the rural areas are quickly hollowing out here in Japan. And urban lifestyle is just not conducive with this, right? Because there's always these stimuli to get you to consume something, right.

Paul Beddie 44:52
The other thing that's really interesting is there's been research done by different companies, smaller research companies. I'm thinking like fabric, that have found that the segment of the population that really cares about sustainability are actually what we now refer to as the boomers, the over sixty-fives. The younger people actually aren't that interested. And it's just because wages in Japan aren't that great. It's hard to make a lot of money here. And so, the young people are more concerned around, “I gotta make money so I can pay my bills, I gotta pay the rent.” And it's not top of mind to them that, oh, we gotta do something. I mean, they just think, oh, I'm from Japan. So everything here is, we're good, you know, we're sustainable. And that's just the perception that they have. The reality is quite different. But the older generation and the older generation grew up when Japan was industrializing, basically from after the second World War. And there was a lot of pollution in Japan. There were a lot o problems. Polluted rivers, you know, there's famous cases about, you know, how people got sick. But all this was in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and the young people today have no recollection or awareness of any of that. But the older people like, hey, we can see the forests are dying, we can see things aren't the way they're supposed to be and so they care about it. But the young people, for whatever reason, don't really. But as I said again, they're struggling to make ends meet and that's where their focus is. All of that said, I mean, Trista and I, we're both from the US. Trista also has connections back to Europe. Most of the long-term non-Japanese living in Japan probably don't want to live anyplace else. It's not the sustainable juggernaut that it could be. Particularly after the big earthquake in 2011, there was a real opportunity for Japan to become a renewable power, renewable energy superpower, and they kind of passed on that, unfortunately. That aside, it is a pretty amazing place to live.

Trista Bridges 46:57
So I encourage you to come visit. I encourage everybody to come visit. Plus, the yen is very weak, so that helps.

Gael Duez 47:04
And I think what a great way to conclude our podcast. Thanks a lot, both of you. It was great having this journey into the Japanese culture and into the challenges to work more sustainably with a very nuanced discussion, which is what I really enjoy. So, thanks a lot. I don't think I will see you that soon, but who knows, maybe we will organize a Green IO conference in Tokyo or Osaka at some point.

Trista Bridges 47:36
Please, we'd love to have you. That would be great.

Gael Duez 47:39
Yeah. Well, let's discuss this in 2025. I think for the moment, let's make Singapore, London, Melbourne, maybe other places in Paris as well a success. But why not? It really depends on the maturity of the ecosystem. Once again, thanks a lot for joining the show. It was great.

Trista Bridges 47:56
Thank you. Thanks so much.

Paul Beddie 47:58
Thanks so much.

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💭Decarbonizing tech stacks and platforms? This is the challenge many CTO face these days. 🎙️In our 42th episode, 2 CTOs with different backgrounds and operating in different lines of business cross share their experience in reducing the environmental footprint of their operations. Ludi Akue, former Lunii’s CTO, and Owen Rogers, .eco’s CTO meet Gael Duez to share their insights and reflect on each other journeys in sustainability.Some Takeaways:🌐 pro and con of migrating infrastructure to a lower carbon region,⚙️ how to leverage technical debt to boost decarbonization,💰 when does optimization pay for decarbonization,⚠️ the pitfall of creating a separate program to steer sustainability,and much more!
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Learn more about our guest and connect: * Ludi's LinkedIn * Owen’s LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Ludi and Owen's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* Putting our websites on a low carbon diet * Lunii * .eco * Carbo * Sustainable Development Goals * UN Global Compact * Not the End of the World * Lucie 26000

Transcript Intro00:00With regard to organizations prioritizing sustainability goals, a big part of that, in my opinion, is ensuring that those goals are publicly stated so that there is an element of accountability around that.Gael Duez00:24Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO with Gael Duez - that’s me! - Green IO is the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the Tech sector and beyond, to boost Digital Sustainability.And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform, and, of course, on our website greenio.tech. Decarbonizing a tech stack, or a platform, or a full information system. This is the challenge many CTO face these days. And beyond carbon, more environmental indicators are taken into consideration. Far from being just a few technical choices to make, it often implies multiple decisions at multiple levels with multiple stakeholders to succeed. Hence, this episode where I wanted CTOs to share and exchange about the strategy they choose to achieve the sustainability goals their company committed to. 2 CTO with different backgrounds and operating in different lines of business are welcome today. Ludi was CTO at Lunii for three years, a highly successful toy maker in France, and she's now digital CTO at Bpifrance. But she's also part of a vibrant community, tech.rocks which gathers French CTO in Paris and beyond. Owen is CTO at Dot ECo, a company operating the registry ECO and has successfully run decarbonization of its tech stack. And he's also part of the climate action tech community. And this is where I've had the pleasure to meet him. Ludi Owen, thanks a lot for joining Green IO today. It's a pleasure to have both of you in different time zones making the effort to be in the show at the very same time. So thanks a lot and welcome to the show.Ludi Akue02:41Happy to be here. Thanks for the invitation, Gael.Owen Rogers02:44Thanks for the intro, Gael.Gael Duez02:48So without further notice, I would like to ask both of you the same question, and it's a highly complicated one. What was the impact, or in another word, what were the goals you were aiming to achieve when you started to reduce the environmental footprint of your technical operations or your tech stack? Maybe, Ludi, you want to start?Ludi Akue03:16Yeah. Thank you for the question. So the goal was pretty big. It was, we need to change the way we produce everything. So it's a big, hairy goal. Not clear at all. That was the goal I had in the beginning, knowing that the company Lunii was a toy maker. So as you said, a hardware toy maker. And I managed both the hardware teams and the software teams. So the challenge was just clear. Very clear that we need to change things. We need to be impactful, but we don't have a clue about the KPI's to get there.Gael Duez03:59It was kind of top down. It was like a big strategic enterprise goal and in a very sort of OKR approach, like we've got something very ambitious to achieve, I guess not in a single year. Make something with it. Am I correct here?Ludi Akue04:19Yeah, I think it's much more subtle than that. There were some key results, let's say more on the supply and the manufacturing side. The first model of the toy was made in China and brought back the manufacturing to France. For example, you have big goals but after those goals, when coming to the tech stack, everything about the tech operations, architecture, there was a blank page. Like, I needed to build a plan with my teams, of course, to measure and to reach the goal of changing, be more responsible.Gael Duez05:05I guess this is a moment where I have to admit that, a) my daughter has bot histoire, b) actually, I know this because the one my daughter has has been made in France on top of it, but the one my nephew has, which is one year older as still made in China. So I was like, oh, my God, they made it. Congratulations.Ludi Akue05:31But, yeah, I just want to add something very quick. I was really impressed by the vision of the founders. It's like they wanted to change things as they are growing a growing company. They now have a working business model. I can share some figures. At that time, there were about more than half a million customers, more than a million of toys sold all over the world, in France, in Europe, North America. So they had this strategic vision to say, we need to measure and change our impact. I was really impressed by that.Gael Duez06:15And what about you, Owen? What were the goals when you started this sustainably journey at .eco?Owen Rogers06:23So I would say for us it was pretty different in as much as it was more bottom up instead of top down. And we are purely virtual. We just deal with digital products, so there's nothing physical for us to have to worry about optimizing. So my job, I think, was probably significantly easier than Ludi's in that regard. So for us, we operate the .eco top level domain in partnership with the global environmental community in the face of increasingly dire climate effects that we are seeing in the world around us. We were feeling like there had to be something more that we could do some way that we could have an impact ourselves. But it wasn't totally clear how we could do that. Being a company that focuses strictly on digital products, we started to learn about the climate effects of technology and realizing that there was in fact, a lot that we could start to do to reduce our impact. So we wanted to understand what was our carbon footprint. None of us had any expertise in doing carbon life cycle analysis and carbon footprint calculations. So we went and spoke to a number of auditors that will evaluate the carbon footprint of organizations. And the response that we got for most of them was, we're super busy right now, and perhaps there's some work that you can do on your own in order to understand your own footprint, compile the data, and then perhaps we can come and assist you later. So we started to do that ourselves. We started to work with our vendors, with our partners, and pull together whatever data we could to understand our own carbon footprint and realize pretty quickly that this is not complicated. Doing basic carbon calculations is not a hard thing. It's certainly something that you're doing some pretty rudimentary mathematics, and it's something that most software engineers should have no trouble with. And so that enabled us to calculate the carbon footprint of our company, and that served as a basis for optimization. So we did our first carbon footprint calculations in 2020, and we established a goal of reducing our overall, that's our Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3, carbon footprint by 4% for our 2022 fiscal year. And a lot of that was through optimizing our digital services.Gael Duez09:23But just for clarification, Owen, your goal was to reduce by 4% in two years.Owen Rogers09:29Within one year. So that was for our 2022 fiscal year. We were quite close to achieving that objective. We managed to reduce our overall carbon footprint by 3.7%. And we have a similar target for our 2023 fiscal year. We actually have no Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions because of the fact that we're a purely virtual organization. So during COVID we gave up our office space, so we work entirely remotely. We also don't ourselves run any data centers. We don't have any office space. So everything for us is Scope 3 emissions. So we've tried to be fairly broad in terms of including as much as we can within our Scope 3 footprint. So one of the things that we account for is 100% of the energy used in the homes of our employees within our footprint, which actually is quite a significant portion of our footprint. But the recognition being that's where work is happening right now. And so we should account for that footprint. And our employees are not otherwise attempting to account for their home. Any emissions associated with energy use in their home.Gael Duez11:09Fair point. By the way, Ludi, did you have the same approach? And what can you tell us about the carbon footprint of a toy maker?Ludi Akue11:23Yeah, that's a very interesting question. Yes. We had the approach of measuring the carbon footprint. And for Lunii at that time, we have the three contributors that we have. The first one is everything related to supply logistics. So transportation, production, and manufacturing. So it's big. If we need to address only one point, we need to address that. So the first contributor, I think it's something about maybe 40%, I think. I don't have my figures. I don't have the figures here. And the second one is the operations like customer service. And the third contributor was the tech. So they take about 6%. I remember the figure because it was 6% of the whole. So as a hardware company, the real job is to tame the production before the other one.Gael Duez12:32Right. That's true that you're a CTO, but you're a CTO not only in the way you were a CTO at Lunii, but not only in the way we think about it in the digital sector or in the IT industry, because you are in charge of the IT infrastructure, obviously, and we will talk about it. But you were also in charge of the entire designing and building of the toys itself.Ludi Akue13:00So the first thing is to measure. So we have these carbon footprints measurements with the leader in France. It's Carbo, hellocarbo. So we found out that our… So we have pretty much more Scope 1 than everything else. Even if we needed to help our suppliers to comply with our mission, our goal said. So we had a supplier code of conduct to do that. And the key results were bottom up. So we had this high goal. We have this big result, like relocating in France, co-designing the product, and for the rest… So the operational teams come with the key results they need to address, they need to tackle. So you had all the production team, the production is supply and everything. The real job here is to tackle the Scope 1 carbon emissions. So the production teams managed to has the carbon emissions. So it was a great win that we can have carbon emission.Gael Duez14:18That's very interesting that you say that actually the IT itself was only 6%, because that's, I guess, a challenge that many CTO and CIO, they face, that they don't weigh that much within an organization, but if we gather all of us together, we weight sometimes as much as the ROT freight transport worldwide. So that's quite significant. And that's what I call the green IT curse, which is you're small within an organization, but eventually you're super big at that global level. So if we focus on this more IT side of things, Ludi, you mentioned at the beginning that you had a very aspirational goal. How did you manage for IT operation and also the firmware, as you mentioned, to make it something tangible, something actionable.Ludi Akue15:13The first thing to do is once we have the measurements, like the carbon footprint, we have something to reduce. You have a goal, you have something to reduce, like a salesperson, let's go differently. And how we tackle that is to identify where we are not very good. Like for example, something that I want to stress here is imagine it's a fastly growing company. It's a scale up. So the scale up, as every scale up has some technical depths. And so here the technical depth is an opportunity to think differently. We need to rebuild something, so how can we rebuild it? For example, let's go mobile first to reduce, to optimize the web pages. Some indices were like, let's move into the cloud. So I decided to move into the cloud and to use managed services and to benefit from the calculation. Even if the calculators are not really reliable, they can show you some trends. So that's interesting. You can measure that. Let's be simple in the way we move to the cloud too. Taming technical labs is when we had an existing microservice architecture, but we don't really need a microservice architecture. So it's like, it's to say like the vision, technical vision is to go back to a modular monolith, for example. It was a strong choice. Our job is pretty simple. So for the scale, everything was homemade. Like you have an e-commerce platform that is homemade on a microservice architecture. Lunii also has a mobile application for the usage of parents and kids can recall their own stories as well. And you also have an application, a usage application, I will call that, that you can download stories, you can buy stories, you can download stories, manage your toy. Right? So the technical vision here is, okay, everything was built for growth. Right now, what is the company’s job? The company's job is to make toys and audio stories. So we don't need to continue to build an in house e-commerce platform. So a strong decision was like, we need to stop building the e-commerce platforms and buy an e-commerce platform like Shopify. This was a strong decision, so we don't, don't need the whole infrastructure that comes with building an e-commerce website.Gael Duez18:13And that's super interesting, because to make sure I understand it well, your main point here is leverage technical debt, because you were in a scale up company, so you had the opportunity to redo things and you, like, technical debt becomes an opportunity to rethink everything and rebuild everything in a more sustainable way. And the way you did it was a bit counter intuitive regarding state of the art architecture, etcetera. It was more… So, obviously, you had like, let's try to eco-design, let's try to move to the cloud. I will have one question about it, but it's maybe we were too ambitious with our architecture and a good old fashioned modular monolith. And buying more off the shelf stuff will actually help us to reduce environmental footprint.Ludi Akue19:05Yes, absolutely. It's like, it's just technical debt was the leverage we needed to do things differently. It is simplicity [and] optimization, simplicity and automation.Gael Duez19:21And just for the sake of understanding this e-commerce platform that you've chosen, was the sustainability criteria taken into consideration?Ludi Akue19:33I think that, no, we didn't include that. Maybe we did, because we have a supplier code of conduct. I'm sure we have those because we have a companion wide supplier code of conduct. It was a matter of simplicity. So I think the first thing is simplicity and automation. Yeah.Gael Duez19:54And what about you, Owen? What were the technological choices you made to achieve the -4% reduction? Was it cloud migration or anything related or a very different approach?Owen Rogers20:10So, like Ludi, our digital services accounted for only 10% of our overall Scope 3 emissions. So not too far off from the 6% at Lunii. The 4% reduction target was going to be entirely achieved by optimizing the efficiency of our digital services. So really what that meant was we were looking to reduce the carbon footprint of our digital services by upwards of 40%. So for us, we are running entirely in the cloud. So it didn't entail a migration from physical data centers to a cloud environment. We were already there. But one of the key things that we did was moving our infrastructure from one region to a lower carbon region. So we ended up migrating our entire stack to Quebec, Canada. Electricity in Quebec is entirely generated through hydropower. It has one of the lowest carbon emission intensities in the world. So that was definitely a positive move in reducing our footprint. Otherwise, we did quite a bit of work in terms of optimizing the footprint of our website and services similar to what Ludi was talking about doing work around optimizing images, JavaScript, CSS. Our sites are currently already static. Not entirely, but most of them are already static. And that's definitely a huge win because you're not running any servers or we're not running any servers on the back end. But my approach architecturally is actually a little bit different from the solution that Ludi was suggesting. I can definitely understand why with a microservices architecture you may end up with a very large fleet of instances depending on how you distribute that work, cross compute. But our focus is more on trying to eliminate servers altogether and ensure that everything that we're building can run through serverless. Serverless is, I think, the current end state or optimum for virtualization within cloud providers. It enables them to maximize multi-tenancy so that you can have the most compute being run through the fewest possible instances. So that's the direction that we're moving, at least for the parts of the tech stack that we have under our control. We were already using serverless and we're continuing to use serverless, but in terms of architectural direction, that's where we're headed. Anything new that we're building, we're trying to make it serverless first and move away from having to deal with any infrastructure that we need to manage ourselves.Gael Duez23:10Did you use a specific tool to measure the carbon footprint of your tech stack or how did you tool up? And maybe the answer is not at all. We didn't need to.Ludi Akue23:22We used a tool, Carbo. Carbo is a French tool. I think it's hellocarbo.com. It's a bit of calculation and declarative, also measure. We also use the cloud calculators. So you have a lot of calculators with the major cloud providers so you can have an estimation of your carbon footprint. Something that works great at Lunii is we build external accountability. How do you do that? Is like we sign the global compact. So the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN we signed that we needed to provide every year some reporting on how we are advancing the mission. We are also signed with a collaborating company, Lucie. So Lucie 26000, we needed to have a clear goal in our OKR to have a Lucy label by 2022. So we build external accountability to make it work like it's not just us with our OKR, but we need to report to the UN that we measure everything that we build this, we build that, so this helps us move forward.Gael Duez24:48But as far as I know, hellocarbo is a generalistic carbon accounting tool. So you didn't have the need to tool up specifically to measure anything regarding your IT stack except the data provided by the cloud providers, as you mentioned. And what about you, Owen? Did you use any specific tool or not that much?Owen Rogers25:14So for us, we followed the sustainable web design methodology as the foundation for our carbon footprint calculation. For our digital services, that methodology uses data transfer as a proxy for calculating energy consumption, and then on the basis of that can be converted into carbon. It certainly is not perfect, and unfortunately, there aren't really perfect measures at this point in time in the cases where you don't own the infrastructure. But it does have the benefit of relying on data, data transfer that is relatively easy to obtain. So what we did for our digital services was look at data transfer, whether that be transiting via the content delivery networks that we were using, or load balancers, etcetera, and estimated our footprint on that basis. So that's the tooling that we used. It's not a specific third party tool. A lot of this data was just aggregated in spreadsheets, and then the calculations were being performed there.Gael Duez26:33And there is nothing wrong intrinsically with using proxy metrics, as long as we don't claim that it helps us understand absolute values. And for anyone following Gerry McGovern's work, I think using data as a proxy, it's far from perfect. There is a question of embedded carbon, etcetera, etcetera, but it doesn't lead people in the wrong direction. That is simply not true. Maybe we will have better metrics, better tools, as you say, Owen, but a company strongly engaged in reducing the amount of data produced they manipulate the exchange is not going in the wrong direction when it comes to reducing our environmental impact. Now I'm fully convinced of it.Owen Rogers27:23Well, in general, data transfer is correlated with energy consumption. But if you look at most organizations in terms of how they're calculating their carbon footprint, especially for their Scope 3 emissions, it's almost entirely based on spend. So whatever their expenses are, they're using some sort of a general metric that is converting dollars spent for this category of product into carbon intensity. And personally, I think the data transfer is going to, at least within the technology space, be better correlated with energy use than spend. And spend also gives me nothing. I mean, I can try and optimize my spend, but it may point me in the wrong direction, like what we were talking about before. I could move all my infrastructure to a high carbon intensity region, reducing my cloud spend and therefore, under that basis of calculation, reduce my overall carbon footprint. I mean, it's just crazy. It leads to the wrong types of outcome, at least with data transfer. Plus, one of the nice things about the sustainable web design methodology is that it is somewhat component oriented. In cases like for my infrastructure, I have a better way to calculate the footprint because I know the number of instances that are running and I can estimate the infrastructure and I know what the carbon intensity is of where that infrastructure is running, I can get a better estimate for that component. But if I want to have a broad scope that includes emissions associated with the use of our products, so the energy drain on end users devices as a result of using our digital services, I can still estimate that under the umbrella of the same methodology and use data transfer as a proxy for that. I'm hoping there's going to be a revision to the sustainable web design methodology. The better accounts for what we're learning now about the energy use associated with the various components involved in the end to end journey for digital services, so as to better discount the network component. But I do want to underscore the importance of something that Ludi was talking about, which is with regard to organizations prioritizing sustainability goals. A big part of that, in my opinion, is ensuring that those goals are publicly stated so that there is an element of accountability around that. So Ludi was talking about the UN Global Compact as establishing a requirement for a public report around sustainability. Similarly for us, we publish our Annual Impact Report and part of our impact report is setting targets for the upcoming fiscal year around sustainability and impact. And so that means that you have an element of accountability there to your customers, to the community you serve, to the general public. And I recognize that that is hard, especially in cases where we're relying on data that we know isn't perfect like there… I know that the sustainable web design methodology has flaws associated with it and that I'm sure in a couple of years we will come up with some sort of more comprehensive methodology that will enable us to produce more accurate carbon footprints. But I don't want to let the imperfect be the enemy of the good. I think it's much better for us to try and get in front of this and be transparent about what we're doing with the data that's available. Recognizing that at some point later we're going to have to say, okay, we're going to need to revise these estimates of our footprint and our impact, because this is where the state of the art is now.Gael Duez31:35Ludi, Owen mentioned not the cloud migration, like you had to do at Lunii, but relocating within the cloud operators in Quebec, which has tremendously low carbon electricity, even if we include embedded carbon from the hydropower. When you talked about the migration you did to the cloud, did you consider the region that you wanted your services to be hosted to make sure that actually you might not migrate from a very old data center with a PUE of 2 to a brand shiny cloud providers with a PUE of 1.2, even a bit less if you listen to their marketing communications, but hosted in an area where the average carbon intensity of the electricity will be at time five or six higher, which is very classical case with a very famous three letters hyperscaler. But I will stop here. So my question, sorry, I'm rambling a bit, but my question is, did you have the opportunity to consider the intensity, the carbon intensity of the electricity grid from the region where you relocated your cloud activities.Ludi Akue32:56Not directly. We were on a pass before. We didn't pass. Like I said, we had this microservice architecture, and it was really ineffective in terms of management, in terms of billing, bills were very expensive and ineffective. Like, we cannot really measure things in fine-grained speaking. So the first thing is we consider green goals when moving to the cloud. This was really clear. We work with a provider that helps us migrate because they're green objectives while moving to the cloud. We also consider GDPR goals when moving to the club. So we were more like, we want to stay close to our customers. And at the same time, our customers were kind of everywhere. But our big, you know, huge base of customers were located in Europe, and we chose to locate our clouds in Europe. So privacy was first, the closeness to our customer base was second, and then ended in green objectives.Owen Rogers34:24For us, we migrated from Ohio to Quebec. And so Ohio, the grid in Ohio is largely powered by coal and by gas, and so there's a 200 times difference in carbon intensity between Ohio and Quebec, so it's significant. And Ohio is not the worst in terms of carbon intensity within the United States. So there are much worse places to be and many of those places operate large data centers. So I think it's absolutely something that technologists should be taking into account when they're considering a cloud migration or when they're looking at ways to reduce their carbon footprint.Gael Duez35:14And just a side note, that's something really to pay attention to, because unfortunately, sometimes carbon incentives and financial incentives are not well aligned in the hyperscaler industry. And that's really a shame, because obviously, the dirtiest place should be the most expensive. And that's not always the case. And sometimes a CTO faces a very difficult challenge to explain that he wants an increase in 5, 10, 15% of his or her bill, because that is to achieve a target of decarbonization, and that shouldn't be the case. But that's okay. So that's something to pay a lot of attention to.Owen Rogers35:50Well, it did increase our bill by moving to Quebec. It is a more expensive region for us to operate in, but not significantly so. So that was a price that we felt like we were quite comfortable to pay. But to both your point and to Ludi's point, as a CTO, it's essential to find alignment between overall business objectives and your environmental objectives. Now, fortunately, in many cases there is alignment. There are ancillary benefits that can be achieved as a result of reducing carbon. So specifically, a low carbon intensity website is generally going to be a higher performing website. So you're able to pitch this type of an initiative under the guise of performance improvement, which will boost user experience, hopefully boost retention in sales. So there are these ancillary benefits. Similarly, a low carbon intensity infrastructure, so relying on serverless or higher levels of virtualization, is generally going to be more cost effective. So often there is alignment between an infrastructure cost reduction program and reducing carbon intensity. At the very least, you can find it if you look for it. It's not to say that reducing spend within the cloud is always going to lead to lower carbon, but you can find and make the case for where those two things are going to be aligned, and then that gives you a lever to push on.Gael Duez37:30And what a wonderful transition. Because I wanted to ask both of you the question of process and strategy, like how you connect, how you align with the business strategy, and what were the process, what was the organization that you set up to achieve these goals? Because we discussed quite a lot the technical side of things, but it's more a human thing than a technical thing. So maybe, Ludi, you want to share also how you actually created something from the wide statement. And of course, how did you manage to align them, as Owen just said, with the overall business goals?Ludi Akue38:11My context was easy, because you have these big goals for the company, so everyone is aware it's a strategic goal. And I recommend that green initiatives should be taken at a strategic level for everybody to be aligned. Right. So once you have that, the fact is, as you are a growing company, you scale up, don't have time, do not really have time… the tech team didn't have really the time to build the product, ship the product, take a technical debt and also take into account something to reduce the carbon footprint. So for a long time, it was kind of a failure to add some green initiatives to the backlog. Something I learned is adding some green initiatives to the backlog is the failing mode. You should be able to initiative into the existing backlog. And the first thing is to work with the teams is to come up with the optimizations. So optimizations pay for the business. That's the first thing. So if you have optimizations, if you have your website that respects the providers, for example, it's good for the SEO, it's good for the user conversion. So you can show the business your optimization strategies. Link to the ARR of the subscription number of the user that will convert it to buy a product, to use your service more so you can showcase that your optimization is aligned with the business. Right. When taking the example of the cloud migration, for example, is to show that the existing is very complicated, it is costing us. So the hidden cost that we have with the existing systems and to show the return of investment with the migration to the cloud. So it is the same thing. And it is to make the business case of when you can make the business case and for the rest, as it's the whole company initiative, to show that you are working towards the goal of reducing carbon footprint.Gael Duez40:42If I understand well here, there are two main takeaways of what you've just shared with us. One is optimization will pay for decarbonization. And I would love to comment on this one. And the second one was do not try to create a separate track, a separate program about sustainability. Just add it as a new criteria in the definition of dawn or a new type of task or sprints in your backlog. But do not try to run something separately, which is, as far as I know, kind of now a state of the art approach. Also, when it comes to cybersecurity or accessibility, for instance, don't try to create things on their own. So same applies to sustainability, am I right?Ludi Akue41:33Yeah, you are correct. You need to shift left on sustainability.Gael Duez41:39When Ludi mentioned in our previous talk that there is a sustainability manager, or at least a sustainably reference at Lunii, was it the way you were organized at .eco? Did you have someone kind of running the show? Or did you have some sustainable reference in the different teams? How did you make sure that the key results, we're not talking about the overall strategy, but the day to day operations embedded in the sustainability goals.Owen Rogers42:13We're a small organization, so there's not the same level of challenge associated with communicating and disseminating these types of objectives throughout the organization. In general, we have a set of KPIs around impact that are pretty well broadly understood. We review them on a monthly basis, along with how we're tracking towards our other goals for the organization. So I think it's pretty front and center for our team.Gael Duez42:45Would you be able to share this KPI? Not the numbers, but what they are?Owen Rogers42:50Well, I think the main one in terms of climate impact is our overall carbon footprint reduction target for our fiscal year. So again, we're aiming for another 4% reduction from our baseline target. We also have an objective to register through SBTI. And one thing that we have achieved recently, which is not directly related to climate, but all kinds of plays together, is that we are now B Corp Certified. We will be certified as a B Corp. And that touches on a lot of different pillars around sustainability.Gael Duez43:29So if I understand it well, it was a very bottom up approach. You're a small team, so the communication was pretty straightforward the moment you had the right goals and not that much of an issue on how to incentivize people. Ludi, if I get it right, it was more a top down approach and your organization was scaling at the time where you were trying to reduce your environmental footprint. So what about the human side of this? Did you face challenges to get the sustainable angle adopted? How did you convince people to join?Ludi Akue44:10Yeah, so we have these goals, these top down goals, but I think in the same test, even if you have 100 people, you have the people who were at the company at that moment were really aligned in terms of their own values. So you have these top down goals, but you also have a bottom of approach. Like the teams were responsible for their key results and their key initiatives that should align with the goal, like, because they are doing the work, so they know where to look at. And something that really works, in my opinion, is having a sustainability manager reference. I think it's something really powerful because she did a lot of training. So first, the whole organization has champions into the teams. So every department has sustainable champions. And the champions help spread the world, spread the culture, spread the training, the information. The challenge was not on the human side, the challenge was on the workload side. Picture, scale up, growing fast. We need to build 10,000 things in parallel. And we want teams to focus on sustainability. That's not going to happen.Gael Duez45:41And how did you manage to get some positive arbitrage towards sustainability.Ludi Akue45:47We learned to make it right at the executive committee level. We needed to come up with priorities first to tell the teams that, okay, now we don't have 10,000 priorities to chase. You have five ones. And sustainability is one of them. So make room for that. So when we started to have those ok in place and to have these priority likes, every executive committee member has the priority to make sustainability happen.Gael Duez46:22I've got one last question. What about the trend that you see in our industry? And for that, it's very interesting to see that you've got two different perspectives. Because, Ludi, now you don't work for Lunii anymore, you're at Bpifrance and you see dozens of different startups, scale ups, companies, and you've still got this sustainable young angle at heart. So I'd like to ask you the question first. What is the trend that you see today regarding digital sustainability?Ludi Akue46:55What I'm saying is sustainability is not anymore an option. It's not. I can build my company and I will figure out that later.Gael Duez47:08Can I borrow your statement that sustainability is no longer an option? To make it the title of the episode?Ludi Akue47:18With great pleasure.Gael Duez47:21And what about you, Owen? You're in the heart of the web hosting industry in particular. More generally, is the digital technology sector sustainably an option?Owen Rogers47:35I think that for the time being, it is an important consideration for anybody looking to get into the technology space, whether they're launching a new business or an organization, is to think about how they can do so in the most sustainable way possible. At a certain point in time, I don't think it's going to matter. I think that with the rapid decarbonization of our electricity grid that we're not too far away from a scenario where most data centers are going to be powered using renewable energy, or at least low carbon energy. But I think that we have a role to accelerate that transition as much as possible by helping to educate the general public that their choices matter and that there are options out there that will reduce their climate impact and it won't cost the earth that there are cost effective solutions out there. One of the KPIs that I didn't talk about earlier that we have established for ourselves is the proportion of people using eco domains that are using sustainable web hosting. So on an annual basis we go and evaluate every .eco website and run it against the green web, check from Green Web Foundation to see whether or not they're using sustainable hosting. And what we're seeing is year over year growth pretty significantly. I believe that last year we saw an increase from 33% to 40%. Now, some of that is hopefully due to our education, but I think a lot of it is actually due to the changes that are happening in the overall industry where more and more hosts and data centers are working on ensuring that they offer a sustainable solution to their customers.Gael Duez49:43So that's excellent news, because once we will have achieved decarbonizing the data centers on the energy consumption angle, we will have to open the even more complex and complicated question of embedded carbon and making sure that we use equipment as long as we can and not change them every five or six years. But that's a different debate.Ludi Akue50:10Yeah, but it is the... I think that it's... When we are looking at the statistics, it's the huge problem ahead. It's a huge problem you need to tackle. Like, we went talking about community, we also have. We are also responsible not to like having heavy websites, heaven applications that will need people to change their mobile phone, for example. So we have many things to do on that side too. And for me, the end device is where the problem meets the core problem. It is something we need to fix what we can fix, the decarbonization, like you are talking about, Owen, to move to the real problem. The real problem is there. The end devices and the raw materials also. I mean, together.Gael Duez51:16Yeah, agree. And that's true that with your angle of being someone who also had to produce hardware, you've got this, I would say some awareness about the fact that end user equipment still accounts for the largest part of the overall digital sector, carbon footprint. It's true that with an episode with a CTO, we tend to focus on how to decarbonize a tech stack, and how to actually reduce the environmental footprint of the tech stack. But if you look at the entire digital sector, the data centers and networks are not the places where the majority of the impacts happen. It's still a very significant chunk of these impacts. But the end user equipment is even worse, that's for sure.Owen Rogers52:08I'm optimistic that that's what's coming next is that we'll see a real revolution in terms of e-waste management and like a cradle to grave approach with regard to electronics manufacturing because of the fact that they're. They're full of valuable minerals and it's... At a certain point it's going to be a lot more cost effective to reuse those minerals than it is to continue to extract it. I'm on a bit of an optimistic kick right now because I've been reading Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie, who I think would be a fantastic person for you to invite on the podcast. I know she's been doing a bit of the podcast tour lately, but I think it is important for us to ensure that we're also telling positive and optimistic stories about our future because it's too easy to get drawn into some of the fear and negativity around climate change.Gael Duez53:11So two fun facts when I'm seriously considering, but I don't know if I can afford her, but to have Hannah Ritchie as a keynote speaker, or at least as maybe a keynote speaker. I would like to thank you again, both of you, to join, to make the effort to find a way to accommodate our different time zones and to be that precise when it comes to the goals, what you did and what you didn't do, and the process and the the human side of things as well. So thanks a lot for joining. It was a pleasure to have you on the show.Ludi Akue53:51Thank you, Gael.Owen Rogers53:52Thank you and thank you both. Thank you, Ludi. Great to meet you.Ludi Akue53:55Yeah, great to meet you too.Gael Duez53:59Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode! If you enjoyed it, please share it on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Twitter (if you are still there)! We are an independent media and word of mouth is the only way to get more listeners. I don’t ask you to rate it 5 stars on Spotify or Apple podcast because of course you already did it, didn’t you? In our next episode we will talk about Japan, not because the country used to be super dear to my heart. Yes, before the K-pop wave, another generation - mine - discovered Japanese animation and was crazy about it. Anyway, we won’t talk about manga but how a super techno-centric country is now considering sustainability and the potential limits that the ongoing ecological crises might create to our digital world. A fascinating discussion with 2 experts who have been living there for ages: Paul Beddie and Trista Bridges.Stay tuned. BTW, Green IO is a podcast and much more, so visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. The next one is in London on September 19th. Early bird tickets are not available anymore but … you can still get one of the 90 free tickets for Green IO listeners using the voucher GREENIOVIP. I’m looking forward to meeting you there, to help you - fellow responsible technologists - build a greener digital world, one byte at a time [Roxane’s voice]
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☁️ What can AWS users achieve today in terms of decarbonization? And what can they expect tomorrow? 🎙️ In this episode, Gael Duez welcomes Adrian Cockcroft, the former creator and leader of the AWS sustainability team who now leads the Green Software Foundation project “Real Time Cloud”. They had an in-depth chat about measuring carbon for software and the sustainability challenges of Cloud providers, starting with AWS. Some of Adrian’s takeaways were:

⚡ The case for PPA and market based approach facing the AI energy-hungry boom☀️ Why we should not chase the sun 🌱 Sustainability of the Cloud vs Sustainability in the Cloud and other architecture tips☁️ His confidence in getting a standard for Cloud-based GHG emissions🤝 Why AWS internal structure prevented sustainability to ramp-up and why it should change… And much more!❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss our episode, every two Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conference is in London on September 19th 2024 (use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket)Learn more about our guest and connect: * Adrian’s LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Adrian’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* Adrian's article "Measuring Carbon is Not Enough — Unintended Consequences" * CNCF’s Kepler tool * Green Software Foundation’s project on Real Time Energy and Carbon Standard for Cloud Providers * Adrian’s presentation at CNCF Sustainability Week in October 2023 * Boavizta’s API * Digital Collage * The Sustainability pillar in the AWS Well-Architected Framework * Cloud Carbon Footprint * Green Software Foundation

Transcript Into 00:00
A video conferencing company used to have an outage every Tuesday morning at 09:00 because that's when everybody wanted a video call at once. Their systems would keel over and they had to go beef them up for that one time of the week when there was a big spike in traffic.

Gael Duez 00:26
Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO with Gael Duez. That's me. In this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website greenio.tech

Before we start, I would love to share a personal anecdote with you. A few weeks ago I had to do a full day of painting in our recently refurbished house and I was happy because I would eventually have the chance to catch up with dozens of podcast episodes that I couldn't listen to in the past weeks. I ended up listening to a fraction of them over the day actually, and it made me realize again how precious our attention is and how dedicating almost 1 hour to a podcast episode is a significant investment of it. And it made me feel sincerely grateful for the thousands of you allocating a precious time every month to listen to Green IO. So in two simple words, thank you and to honor the gift of your attention, today I am going to put on my captain's obvious costume with two statements. AWS remains the biggest public cloud provider worldwide, despite not having that much data on its chinese competitors. I guess it's still a safe bet to say that. Second, IT sustainability experts and environmentally conscious CloudOps working on AWS are not ballistic about the level of services provided by AWS to decarbonize a tech stack, to put it mildly. On the other end, I had the pleasure to meet several AWS employees across Europe highly involved in climate change topics, among others, in trying to move the needle in the right direction internally.

So what can AWS users achieve today in terms of decarbonization? And what can they expect tomorrow? And what is the general trend for the cloud industry when it comes to reducing its environmental footprint in carbon emission and beyond? Now, who would be the best guest to discuss what to expect at AWS and in the public cloud industry at large than the one who created and led the first sustainability team there? And who has been one of the most influential cloud architects of the last decade, as well as one of the managers behind Netflix's highly successful homepage? And before Netflix, having worked in the most iconic tech companies like eBay and Sun Microsystem. And yes, back then it was iconic. Adrian Cockroft, since it's him we're talking about, has retired in June 2022. But he has a very active conception of retirement. He still gives talks, does some consulting gigs and volunteers actively in the Green Software Foundation. So welcome, Adrian. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.

Adrian Cockcroft 03:46
Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Gael Duez 03:48
If we put ourselves in the shoes of a CloudOps, a very climate aware CloudOps, what should I do to reduce the carbon emissions of my public cloud use today? And to be a bit provocative, why shouldn't I do nothing? Because this is my cloud provider issue, to become low carbon. And b, the electricity grid is being decarbonized every day a little more. So why should I care? What will you be according to you, the main actions and maybe some hurdles that you should pay attention to.

Adrian Cockcroft 04:23
I think there's two sides to it. The first thing that most people are looking at is measuring their carbon footprint. And it's not just from an academic point of view. It's because your users want to know what their carbon footprint is. So the one thing is that most software companies are in a supply chain. You consume services and you provide services to somebody else. And along with those services in that supply chain, you need to start communicating how much carbon it is. So I think this is one of the areas that people are starting to realize, is that if I know how much carbon to allocate to the activity of my company, then I need to find a way to allocate that, a proportion of that carbon to my customers via some algorithm for doing that. This is one of the areas which is a bit fuzzy, exactly how to do that. There's some fairly simplistic ways of doing it.

So the first thing is measuring, and the reason you're measuring in many cases is because your customers are saying, I need to know how much carbon to allocate as a customer. And then the other side is, once you've measured it, then you can say, okay, where is this carbon coming from? And then I can say, well, most of the carbon is coming from here, so we can do some work to optimize that part of it down. And I'd say that there are, I put companies into two different classes, if you like one of them. And sort of, I have an old physics degree. So the way I like to think of companies that push electrons and companies that push atoms, atoms are much, much heavier and more energy. So if you're moving physical things in the physical world, that's atoms, that's where most of your carbon footprint will be. But if you're a purely software company, you're a SaaS provider. Most of your physical carbon footprint is going to be employees, buildings, but your purpose of your company is to do software.

Software inherently has a pretty light carbon footprint. It's electricity, which is relatively easy to decarbonize. If you're in transport or manufacturing or anything like that, shipping, all of those kinds of things, most of your carbon is going to be somewhere else. So think of whether your company is purely a software company, like maybe a bank, or whether it's a manufacturing or some other kind of company that's moving things around in the world. And then if you're purely software, then most of your carbon footprint will be from your IT stack and you can kind of go in and focus on reducing that. If most of your carbon is from things on the atom side, you may actually want to do more software in order to optimize the hard, you know, the hardware effectively, the physical processes you might want to do run some additional software jobs to optimize scheduling or resource usage in some way. So it kind of depends on what you're, where you're starting from, but that's how to think about it from my point of view.

Gael Duez 07:42
So I know it's a bit of a rabbit hole, but could we actually explore a bit why it is so fuzzy to measure a carbon footprint in the cloud, as you mentioned at the beginning?

Adrian Cockcroft 07:56
Well, if you have a data center, you know how much power is going into that data center and you know where you're getting your power from. And if that data center is completely used by your company, you can just allocate it across the different machines. You can measure everything. When in the cloud, you don't get to measure everything. And there's a lot of shared infrastructure. So one of the reasons the cloud is more efficient is because there's shared infrastructure across customers, and customers are coming and going dynamically.
So that's one aspect you have to figure out. How much of that network switch carbon footprint should you allocate to the particular customer that is using some percentage of it? Do you even know how much percentage of use that customer is putting on that network? So it's quite hard to measure if you're trying to get a very fine grain accurate measurement. So that's one aspect of it.

And then when you're trying to figure out the carbon, there's really two aspects to it. Mostly it comes down to electricity and then the carbon used to manufacture and ship the equipment around. And it's mostly manufacturing. And if you look into it. Most of the manufacturing is silicon. Most of the carbon involved in manufacturing computers is actually the silicon, which is very carbon intensive. And that silicon is almost all made in Asia. It comes from Taiwan, Korea, Japan, China. And the carbon footprint, the mix of energy there, is very carbon intensive. Even if you're running on completely green energy, you still have to allocate what's called “Scope 3”, basically the supply chain of the machines that you're using.

Gael Duez 09:54
I think what is quite interesting also, and I don't remember which hyperscaler it was, so I will not drop any names. But there is also, because of this energy consumption boom, I've seen some articles explaining that we are basically turning on, again, older cold powered facility to provide electricity would actually mean that even if you use AI to, let's say, decarbonize something, the energy required might actually slow down the energy transition, because we are relying on older coal plants that were supposed to be decommissioned. But I don't know if these are information that you've also seen on your radar or if you could have been able to double check them.

Adrian Cockcroft 10:42
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear coal is sufficiently dirty and uneconomic that it's being replaced very quickly. I'm not so worried about coal. That's a very short term. If anyone's turning back on a coal plant, it's for a very short period of time. Mostly they're being shut down. What's been the current argument is whether they should be building more gas plants. And gas is a lot cleaner than coral obviously puts out carbon, but it's the least carbon intensive of the carbon options. So it is better, but it's obviously not going to be good enough. And then the other thing with the sort of IEC projections and things is they've consistently underestimated the deployment of renewable energy by a large amount over many years. And it's not clear whether the current projections are really probably being too pessimistic about how much solar plus battery and wind and geothermal and things like that can be deployed. I think people are generally surprised every year by how much solar in particular is deployed. And wind is a bit easier to track because it takes longer to build. You can kind of measure the deployment of that a bit more easily at an economic level. So I think that there's. The optimist says that while renewables will step up and meet the demand, there's still a lot of opportunity to do that, and it's the cheapest form of energy. So this is why we can't really, if we say well good. The energy industry has been decarbonising. They're not decarbonizing because they felt like it would save the world. They're decarbonising because it's cheaper. The lowest cost energy you can get is solar right now and wind as well, although there's more capital investment to put up a wind tower. So that's kind of what's driving the energy industry.

Then on top of that we've got the large cloud providers who are all buying their own energy. They're investing in what's called Power Purchase Agreements or PPAs, and they will contract with somebody to build a wind farm and take all the power from it or build a solar farm. Most solar farms nowadays have batteries attached to them to extend the power and smooth things out. So that's developed to such an extent that the largest commercial purchaser of energy is Amazon. It's somewhere over 20 gigawatts, which was the last number I heard. It keeps going up exponentially year by year. The amount that Amazon is buying is growing extremely fast. And that's also true of Microsoft and Google. Although the carbon footprint of Amazon is much larger than Microsoft and Google because it's a physical business. Amazon's shipping and manufacturing vastly more than Microsoft and Google who are largely online businesses. A little bit of manufacturing, but not so much then.

The other piece of news recently was from Microsoft, who have had a commitment for a while to decarbonize their business. But then they recently did a big expansion of their AI workloads and they actually started going backwards. So their carbon footprint was increasing rather than decreasing. And they said that they just hadn't planned that much AI development and they had effectively built data centers full of GPU's to run OpenAI and things like that. And they had not managed to invest in as much power purchase agreements to offset it in the short term. So I'm sure that they're trying to ramp that back up. But that was a recent announcement just in the last month or so that they are at least temporarily falling behind on their decarbonizing commitment. And it remains to be seen how the other cloud providers do on that because everybody right now is deploying as much GPU as they can and it runs really hot. That's a lot of power.

Gael Duez 15:11
I've got a question that I have to ask when I read that Microsoft is currently planning to open one data center per week, one new facility per week, so I don't know how much. It's an announcement to please investors to show that they are actually fueling the AI boom. Or if it's like true figures, there are many ways to count what is a data center. But do you believe that the business model of hyperscalers is sustainable somehow, because this is just so much energy consumption that is added to the electricity grid and so much resources? You mentioned manufacturing. We could also have been mentioning mining and all the environmental impact of mining to provide the metals within this silicon, as you've described it. How do you see the future in 10 or 20 years? This is exponential at the moment, as you said.

Adrian Cockcroft 16:09
Yeah, it's increasing rapidly right now, but the IT industry is only a few percent of the carbon emissions. Buildings are about 40%. I seem to remember transport's 25%, something like that. Mining is a big proportion, so to get a sense of perspective, yes, it's increasing. The main problems are with suddenly wanting to put up lots of data centers. You've got to find a place that you can source the power and the cooling requirements and get a building put in. It takes a little while, but the big cloud providers have had lots of experience in standing up regions, but regions don't come into existence overnight. You can add buildings to existing regions maybe a little quicker than starting a new one, depending on where you are in the world. This is something it probably takes at least six months, maybe more than a year to just get everything permitted and built out, unless you're expanding in an existing building. And one of the things is there's a lot of data center capacity that's basically empty or ready to be renovated, but that's generally lower quality buildings. And what we're looking at here is very high energy density, like the racks are very hot, and it's a specialized build to make sure you have enough cooling. So that's kind of. I think that's what's going on. The AI boom kind of caught people by surprise, and it's sort of working its way through. I think it'll settle down a little bit over the next year. But in terms of the hardware deployments. But the big companies, Meta and Google and OpenAI in particular, are anthropic, those kinds of people that are training huge models, they have tens of thousands of GPUs that they're running for those, and each GPU. So that's an enormous amount of energy and capital deployment.

Gael Duez 18:15
We've barely scratched the surface, but could we go back to sustainability of the cloud?

Adrian Cockcroft 18:20
Yeah, but I actually came up with that wording. So historically, the security model for AWS used to talk about security of the cloud and security in the cloud, and what was the customer's responsibility, what was the cloud provider's responsibility. And that was something that was sort of fairly well understood in the cloud environment as a security model. And when we came to do the sustainability messaging and write the well architected guide, that was something where I kind of adopted those words and in fact, one of the same diagrams and changed it and said, okay, let's talk about sustainability of the cloud, and then sustainability in the cloud, where how do you use it and the interaction between the two? Because one of the things is, if you use the cloud, you might only, there's the allocation of energy effectively or carbon to you, but if you use it in a way that is better for everybody, then you actually reduce the cloud providers' need as well. So one of the things to think about is the impact of what you're doing. Like if you have a footprint, which is that you use no, any, you run basically nothing at all, and then you run a flash sale thing for 1 hour once a week, and you need thousands and thousands of computers for 1 hour a week. And the rest of the week it's like ten computers. The carbon footprint of that is just the area under the curve. It's the number of compute hours that you have allocated to you. But if you think about the cloud provider, they have to have thousands of machines for that 1 hour, and those machines don't disappear at any other time. So they're still there, hopefully with somebody else using them. But what it does by having a very spiky workload, is it increases the capacity that the cloud provider has to have. And overall it makes it harder for them to have high utilization.

So one of the things you can do to reduce your utilization and also make the cloud provider not need to have as much capacity, is to smooth out peaks. And there's a few techniques for that. But running batch jobs with fewer machines for longer, perhaps scheduling jobs so they don't run all at the top of the hour, very time synchronized, you sort of move them around a little bit so they're offset from the people who tend to schedule things on nice round numbers in terms of time. And that means that everybody schedules something for the same time. One of the companies I used to work with was a video conferencing company, and they used to have an outage every Tuesday morning at 09:00 because that's when everybody wanted a video call at once. Their systems would keel over and they had to go beef them up for that one time, at one time of the week when there was a big spike in traffic. So that's just sort of calendar clocking.

So those are some of the things that make it easier for the cloud provider themselves to use less carbon because they can run higher utilization, because the average across all of their customers is more independent, there's less coordination. The more coordination there is across the customer base, whereby external events like Black Friday or shopping days, or Christmas or New Year's Day or whatever, those kinds of things, a big sporting event, Super bowl, whatever, those events are where the problem is. So you want to try and spread things out as much as possible. And that's why cloud providers are generally more efficient, because they have statistically averaged across many different industries and many different customers. The average across all of those becomes a much smoother workload than if you're trying to manage a small number of customers or one customer in a data center.

Gael Duez 22:22
Absolutely. And so time shifting seems to be a very easy and straightforward way to reduce the environmental footprint of a public cloud user. Do you also have some advice when it comes to architecture, data storage, or even the way we code?

Adrian Cockcroft 22:42
Yeah, just thinking about storage. The most high performance, high availability storage typically has more copies of the data, and typically on solid state disks. And then if you get more into capacity storage, it's more on spinning disks. Now, the difference between the two is interesting, because we talked previously about scope two and scope three. The energy use of a solid state disk is extremely low. In fact, the energy used to manufacture a solid state disk, there's so much silicon in it, is typically more than the energy it will use in its lifetime. So you look at like, the energy used to manufacture that SSD is whatever it is in tons of carbon, and then you just power it. For several years, you've used less carbon, you've generated less carbon because it uses so little electricity. If you take a spinning disk, it's the other way around. They're made of iron oxide and a bit of metal, and they're fairly well automated, and the carbon footprint of manufacturing isn't too bad. But they have like a ten watt motor spinning all the time, spinning that disc. So they consume quite a lot of power, even if you're not using them. So it's the other way around. And then finally, you look at the tape. And tape is great because you write it to tape, and the tape sits somewhere and gets put in a cabinet. Whatever just sits there consumes no energy. So one of the techniques you can do with storage is to try and archive two tapes, because tape is extremely low carbon. And that's kind of the sort of hierarchy in terms of storage. And then just try to compress. Another thing you can do is just compress things better. You should always be compressing long term storage anyway. But we did some work at Amazon, which did get published, but we switched from GZip to Z standard compression and saved about 30% on storage for one of the large internal workloads. And that was an exabyte or something, because several exabytes of data was being compressed and it went from like, I guess three or four exabytes to two or three exabytes, something like that. So that's kind of the thing you can work on from the storage point of view. It's basically keeping data for less long, compressing it and archiving it to tape in particular, if you can.

And then I like serverless architecture. It's for most workloads, they are pretty lightly utilized. Your machines are idle most of the time, but you have a big spike in work every now and again, particularly corporate IT type workloads. And I think serverless is the best approach there. AWS Lambda is particularly efficient at that. You're sharing your compute capacity with a large number of other people, and so you only get to pay for exactly what you use. And that's a very efficient way of thinking about how to allocate, particularly workloads that are sort of spiky in nature. And obviously, if you've got something that's running continuously, then it's going to want some more dedicated capacity and you can run more efficiently. If you're running 24/7 effectively with a very constant, predictable workload, you can do that better with a containerized workload. So there's different options there.

Gael Duez 26:25
Once you've done the basic homeworks, I would say, would you advise people to shift to a bit more carbon aware computing, carbon aware cloud operations? I know that you've got some nuanced opinion on it because you've got some unintended consequences, just to quote you.

Adrian Cockcroft 26:47
Yeah, I could talk a bit about that distinction, but the basic questions you've got, if you've got a workload, you've already tuned it up, you think it's running as efficiently as it could run, then the question is, where are you going to run it? When are you going to run it? If you can choose when, if it's a batch workload, you can decide, well, do I want to run it at night because demand is less then.

Do you want to run it during the day because there's a lot of solar energy wherever you live, and that's curtailed. So there's this idea about what's the marginal difference? Like, if you ask for one more kilowatt of energy from your grid, where does it actually come from? Not what's already there, but where does the additional kilowatt come from? And in many situations, that variable amount, you know, there's the baseline of some wind and some hydro and whatever nuclear, those are running all the time. And then the variable amount on top is often gas because it's easy to spin up and down a gas powered station. They're particularly good at that. So a lot of what's called Peak Plants deal with the peaks in load. So when you say, I want, I'm going to use a little bit more capacity to run this workload. If you do it at night, you're mostly probably going to be running on a gas peak plant. And then you need to look during the day and say, well, how much solar is there? If you're in California during the day, there's an excessive amount of solar, and they're actually turning windmills off and not using all the solar power that they could generate because they don't, there's nowhere to put it. So running during the day, for example, I have an electric car and I have a Tesla, and it has an option that says charge whenever there's excess solar energy. I have Tesla batteries in my house and solar panels and a car. And basically the panels charge up the battery for the house. And then when it takes out whatever's being used to run the house, it takes whatever's left over and puts it in the car until the car's finished charging. And just make sure that the car is always charging off fresh solar energy, which has been transmitted several feet from the inverter to the car. It's not going across the transmission line. So it's the most efficient use of that energy. And that's a standard option in the way they're set up. So that's kind of the, what you're trying to look for is what is this marginal use of energy? And so the question is, how can you find out what the marginal production percentage is?

Gael Duez 29:43
That was my question, because it's not that easy to find.

Adrian Cockcroft 29:48
Well, there's a company called WattTime that produces that data. And the problem is that the data is you can get it hour by hour and you can get it as a prediction for the next hour even, but you have to pay for it, it's a commercial company, so you have to pay for a subscription to their API. They provide more general data, and data that's a little older. I think they have one region in California where they provide full access to the data, so you can experiment, but only for that region. So there's the good data you have to pay for, perhaps, if you want to do it.

Gael Duez 30:29
And do you believe that at some point this marginal grid approach, which I like to call grid aware computing, which goes beyond carbon aware computing, do you believe that a service like world time would be provided or even incorporated in some IT solution, in some cloud provider solutions as a very basic API call that you do before launching any job, any training, AI training, whatever, etcetera?

Adrian Cockcroft 31:03
I think it's unlikely to happen in the short term. I think it's more to have it built into the cloud provider. One of the ideas that's been floated would be to change the way the spot market works, so that the pricing in the spot market is effectively driven by the carbon impact, if you see what I mean. So you've got spot pricing for different resources and the people look for the cheap. When you're using spot pricing, you're looking for the cheapest resource. If you could price that resource so that it took carbon into account, so it wasn't really what was cheapest, but it was what was lowest carbon, then that might be an interesting way to get people to lose the low carbon resources. Whereas if you've got something sitting in the spot markets, an unused resource, but it happens to be a high carbon resource, you'd rather people didn't use it, because it's better to have it sit idle and consume minimal power than to have somebody using it. So you could differential spot pricing at different times and around the world, and different instance types, you could bake that in in some way. I don't think the cloud providers are going to are likely to put in their own detailed carbon footprint. So one of the problems is that the data you've got is very hard to measure then. So if you really want to know what the carbon footprint of a particular point in time is in the cloud, the data isn't actually available to really know until sometimes a month or so later, depending on how accurately you want to know. It's one of these things where you can get a rough estimate in real time, but if you want to have something that's going to pass an audit and be reported as a corporate number, you want to be more accurate and you have to wait until everything settles and you get all the numbers from all the different places. And in some parts of the world you can get numbers fairly quickly, but in other parts of the world, the automation isn't there and these are global providers. So if you look at, well, I want to provide this data globally, well, I can give you the data in North America or Europe quickly, but in Asia it's going to take me a month. Well, I'm not going to have different data for different regions. I'm just going to wait a month everywhere. So that's one of the aspects that affects our providers right now. The data you get from them that is for audit purposes, is generally delayed by two or three months. In Amazon's case it's three months. I think in Microsoft it's about two months, something like that. And that's purely so that they can gather the data from everywhere around the world and give you a final number that they don't have to revise when they get more data in. And that's one of the aspects of why it's annoying. So this is great for reporting the carbon footprint of a company. It's useless for tuning a workload because you run the workload, you run it again, I gotta wait three months and the numbers are blended into something else. It's not helpful. So the tool people use for real time, if you like, is an open source tool that was largely developed by thoughtworks called the cloud carbon footprint tool. And that works off the billing records because you pretty much, you know how much you're going to be charged for something. Billing data comes out. You know, I think there's hourly billing data records out of AWS, but certainly you can get daily, and from that you can see all the resources you were being billed for. And then they've got a way to turn those billing reports into a carbon estimate. Again, the data you get there will be different to the data you get from the audit report a few months later. They're not related, they're estimates, and they include different things and they're calculated differently. So you end up with multiple different ways of calculating carbon which will not match. They're just based on different algorithms.

Gael Duez 35:18
And carbon footprint relies on electricity maps approach, which is the carbon intensity of the electricity grid at some point, which is slightly different from the approach that you advocated for, which is a marginal grid intensity. So obviously in the long term, we can safely bet that all the decisions will manage to align. But in the short run, we could have this counter effect of highly optimizing some workloads or shifting services and actually triggering extra fuel powered capacity.

Adrian Cockcroft 35:58
Yeah, it comes under what do you want to use this measurement for? Depends on the number you'll get that drives the number you'll get. So if you are trying to measure carbon in order to report it as part of a corporate, this is the carbon footprint of my company. That's one use case. If you're trying to measure a workload so that you can optimize it, you want to measure two different variations of a workload. You're doing that kind of benchmarking thing, then the cloud carbon footprint is good for that because you can just hold things constant, say, okay, we're in the same region, but how much carbon is this workload? And which portion of the workload is most of the carbon? Coming from those kinds of questions, if you're trying to do real time optimization of where to run a workload, then you want to use the marginal number. And there's another metric called SCI, the Software Carbon Intensity, and that uses the marginal data. So the idea there is you're looking at a particular transaction, say a customer logging in or looking up their account or whatever, that you'd be able to get that single transaction and say, what is the carbon per customer, event per transaction, if you like. So they're trying to normalize the workloads down to that level. Customer visits, a web page, or whatever, a particular piece of whatever your business logic is, what is the purpose of your company? What is a unit of that? If you're Netflix, you showed somebody a movie that is a transaction effectively for Netflix. What is the carbon footprint of showing that customer that movie, or in general, showing customers movies at some point in time, and they use the marginal intensity by default for that. And again, this is location based, which means you're measuring the energy used by the data center directly, and it doesn't include any of the power that's generated by the companies. So you end up with a much higher carbon number for sci and cloud carbon footprint than you do from the cloud provider audits. And this is because there's two basic ways of calculating carbon. One is called the location method, and one's called the market method. And we can go into that a bit more detail, if you like.

Gael Duez 38:30
But for someone trying to reduce its workloads, carbon footprint, it makes more sense to use location based, I would say data. And in that sense, I think SCI and CCF are pretty well aligned with tooling up Ops guys, Ops folks to try to do what they can achieve, whether or not the main cloud provider is trying on its own end to be as low carbon as possible when it comes to energy consumption.

Adrian Cockcroft 39:10
Well, there's a thing there because Google only provides location-based data and Microsoft and Amazon only provide market-based data. And so they're just not comparable numbers. You can't compare across cloud providers at all.

Gael Duez 39:31
And maybe this is the good time to discuss a bit, because we were mentioning that the future of the cloud industry, and one project you lead at the Green Software Foundation is actually about building a real time, not real time, almost real time standards, about this carbon intensity workloads and how to compare it between cloud providers and how to make them as actionable as possible. And before just you enter a bit more the details and you explain what you expect and how well it has advanced in the past months. Does it mean the end of a cloud carbon footprint as it is today if this standard is applied?

Adrian Cockcroft 40:14
I don't think so, because it would get better data and it would be more accurate. You may have some different options, but a cloud carbon footprint underneath that is a bunch of guesses. This sort of unwinds this a bit. The Green Software Foundation was set up a few years ago. It's an interesting organization, it's been quite successful. It's got lots of different groups working on lots of different things, including standardizing this software carbon intensity metric. I proposed a real time cloud project to provide a place where we could engage with the cloud providers and try to get them to align around, providing the same data in the same way and getting it more up to date, because rather than every few months we want it to be more current, like every few hours or something. So I wrote that proposal for wouldn't it be nice if they all had a common standard and that proposal then turned into a project? We've been meeting now for about nine months. Projects like this are very slow, but what we've done is map out every tool, piece of information, whatever, and how they're all related in a big mirror board which you can visit. It's a public mirror board. If you go to GitHub and find the Green Software Foundation and find a real time cloud, there's a GitHub account there with some information about the project, and the mirror board there kind of maps out. And if you find something, if you know of a tool that isn't on that, then let me know and we'll add it in there. So that's one of the things we've done, is sort of document end to end. Where does all this data come from? What's going on? And then we started trying to standardize various points, and one of the things that we're trying to wrap up right now is regional metadata. So this is data that changes fairly slowly, like once a year about a cloud region. So if you're running in US east one, which is the big AWS region in Virginia, what do we know about that region and year by year? Well, there's all kinds of information that you can get on that. What are the different carbon coefficients that would apply to that region? What is the electricity maps lookup key? What is the time lookup key for that region? If you pick one of the Google regions, they have a bit more data available, and for Azure, you get the PUE, the Power Usage Effectiveness, which is like, so if your computer is using a kilowatt in a data center and the PUE is 1.5, that means that it's pulling 1.5 kw from the grid. So it's a number that you have to multiply your energy use by for a particular data center. Data centers in Asia have particularly high PUE numbers because it's hot and humid and hard to cool. Some of them up there as high as two cloud providers generally run better than that, but commercial data centers quite often are around in Singapore or whatever, like 2.0. Some of the better data centers are sort of 1.08 or something like that. Particularly if you're in Finland or something where it's nice and cold, it's easy to keep the machines cool, so you need to just know what that number is for every region. So we're figuring out that number, and it's also a place where we are engaging with Google and Microsoft directly and sort of, I'm using my contacts at AWS to engage with at AWS more indirectly to try and make sure that they're all hearing, please can you do this number? Please, can you all do location? Can we get a PUE number that's comparable and can we tidy up whatever's available and get more consistency across the cloud providers? And they've sort of bought into that as an idea, and we haven't made an enormous amount of progress, I think. But one of these things is it just, it takes a long time to get people to come into alignment, and it takes a long time for them to get around to updating new things. Most of the carbon data comes out in the summer and then in June, July time. So I think in the next few months we'll see more updated information from the cloud providers.

Gael Duez 43:58
And Adrian, I was wondering whether the recently passed European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), which requires data centers above 500 mw, so all hyperscalers obviously are above this, will be an accelerator or the kind of data that is required, PUE. But you know, PUEwas also the absolute values, not only the relative value, will be an enabler or it's kind of a different way, different approach than the one that you're pushing through the Green Software Foundation.

Adrian Cockcroft 44:38
Really, this project is trying to be a focal point for communication with the cloud providers. We're not trying to duplicate work happening elsewhere. So wherever something like that is happening, we'll just refer to it and go and ask the cloud providers, well, what are you doing about it? And can you please do the same thing about it and try to coordinate somewhere somewhat? So that's the general idea I'm trying to achieve. So you can say that all models are wrong, some models are useful. What I'm trying to do in this project is to make the models a little bit less wrong, a little bit more useful. They're never going to be fully accurate, they're never going to be quite what we want, but we're trying to sort of nudge things in the right direction. And we have a group of people that engage pretty regularly. There's a meeting every two weeks, and I recommend that people that are interested join the Green Software Foundation if their company is there, or at least go visit the website, look at the project and the work that's been done there.

Gael Duez 45:40
Yeah, thanks a lot. And we will put the links in the show notes as usual. You know, we are heading to the end of the podcast and I realize that we've been talking about cloud providers at large. Actually, maybe it's time to talk a bit more specifically about AWS, because you've got a great experience there. And I don't know, I wanted to ask a pretty general question about AWS: how do you feel about the current situation at AWS for the sustainability team and what they've been able to achieve since you left and what didn't move that much and the general trend. Because I was, you know, when I was researching for this episode, I reviewed the slides that you put for it was not QCon, I think it was CNCF Sustainable week. And some of them were pretty depressing when you were comparing it as GCP in Azure. And I was wondering, how do you feel about it? Because hey, you're the guy who pushed for sustainability to become a pillar at AWS. So I guess the situation is not all that dark and all that light. So, could you enlighten us a bit about it?

Adrian Cockcroft 47:00
Yeah, I think there's a lot of good work going on where AWS is helping customers decarbonize their companies. That side of it, lots of good examples. They're happy to talk about that, and that is a significant thing. The other good area is all of the investments in energy generation. And then it comes down to the carbon footprint tool, which was created by a real... I don't know exactly how to describe it. It wasn't a full on service team effort. Right. It was done by a team that wasn't really one of the product teams, because they knew customers needed something and they managed to get it put into the billing information area of the AWS console. That data was hard to get produced and hard to get released. So that was kind of annoying. And then it just sat there. There's been basically no updates on it in two years. And one of the reasons is that just as they were kind of going, okay, we need to staff up a team to do this properly. And there were some internal reorgs that happened as well. And then there was the. The sort of big layoff crunch happened, and they just got short on headcount everywhere. And if you look across the company, where are you going to leave your headcount? You're going to put your headcount on things that generate revenue. This is not revenue generating. And you're going to put things in areas where there is a strong leader who is advocating for this thing being important. And the carbon stuff didn't fit into the normal systems. It was being run by a group within the energy team that builds data centers. It wasn't really being run by the people that build services. It wasn't part of one of the collections of service teams. It's not part of the S3 storage organization, or the EC2 organization, or whatever, or the Lambda organization. There are these large groups of software services. You look at all the AWS services, they form groups, and each group has a manager and VP’s going all the way up and a budget. This was done on the outside of that, as part of the energy team that was basically, their job was to buy PPAs. Most of the work they're doing is doing contracts to build solar farms. And on the side, they built this little tool and managed to get it stuck out so that customers could see it, but it was never properly invested in. So that was the situation two years ago. And then it got worse, because there were layoffs. And then in the last year they've started to reinvest in that team and hired people, but they haven't actually released anything yet. What I can say is that they do now have a team and they are working on it and they are staffed to do something that hasn't come out yet. I'm hoping that they will release some more stuff this summer. And as I mentioned, there is an annual cycle where carbon announcements tend to happen in June July time. The 2023 data takes almost six months to accumulate and get it all tied up and audited. And they generally release an annual report in the summer. And everybody does that report at various times. Amazon, because it's such a large, complex organization. It's got an airline, it's got delivery stuff, manufacturing. It actually takes longer for them to gather everything and sort it out. So we get an update then. And I'm hoping that part of that update will include some more updates on what's going on with AWS. I'd say I'm unhappy that nothing has happened for a year or two, but I'm more optimistic now than I was a year or so ago because there does seem to be a team at least working on it internally.

Gael Duez 50:57
Where I'm a bit surprised is the AWS culture, at least at the beginning, was to really give your customer what they want and they were super reactive, like every day is day one, etcetera. You have a lot of customers, at least in Europe, at least for regulatory reasons, asking for tools. And I was surprised that AWS didn't see it as a business opportunity, not necessarily generating tons of revenues, but being some sort of a market differentiator against competitors. And to be honest, one of the analyses that I found today, I would say, which explained the best, the pretty strong commitment of Google Cloud platform regarding sustainability. And I'm not, as you say, they provide the data on the market globally, on being local-based, those things are not comparable, et cetera, but they brand quite a lot. They sustain the effort because they're number three and they're significantly behind both AWS and Azure. And my bet, and I didn't get any internal information, I will try, but I didn't manage so far, is that they're using the sustainability angle as a market differentiator. So why didn't AWS catch this opportunity to differentiate, according to you?

Adrian Cockcroft 52:30
I think that when it comes down to it, how many deals are going to be lost just on that one thing? Almost all deals are one. On other aspects, they're won by price, features, product stability, security, and the sales relationship. A good sales team will sell something against another team. Most of the time, AWS has been able to sell its way around the carbon data and where it's been super critical. They've just done a deal with that customer. If it's a big enough deal, they've just done a deal that says, we'll give you some information under NDA that will give you the information you need. So that's when it comes down to it, if that is the last thing that's going to make or break a deal, they will do an NDA level disclosure of whatever that customer wants. But that doesn't solve the problem for everyone else. It doesn't solve the problem for small customers that just want to get some data and optimize. So I think that fundamentally, AWS is very customer driven, but it's also driven by the customers that spend money on things. They are driven by customers' purchasing power rather than. Yes, I'd also like this other thing, but it's kind of optional because it's not going to make or break a deal. And I think that what it came down to for a long time was not enough deals were being lost that they could document were lost because of a lack of transparency on sustainability, because the underlying actions they are taking with all of the power purchases are good. They do actually have a substantially low carbon cloud footprint. It's just that the data that they're providing just doesn't let you do anything useful with it from a developer point of view. So we were advocating for this while I was there, and it never really happened that we needed some kind of developer oriented tool that you can use for optimizing workloads. And the sort of the counter argument is, well, if you just wait long enough, we'll get rid of all the carbon and it'll be zero carbon anyway in that region. But that's Scope 2. That counts for the energy, and what's left is the Scope 3, which they're also working on but haven't released, which is going to dominate the amount of carbon it took to make the machines that you're using. So that's the sort of internal kind of viewpoint that I think it was not, it didn't have a strong enough centralized like the team that was working on it was in the wrong organization. That was my kind of thing. As I left, I said, this team, yeah, they're not, there needs to be a real team, they aren't in the right part of the right organization, but it wasn't clear where they should belong and the managers of the different parts of the organization didn't want to move things around. So I think that that has finally moved into that. They are actually part of an organization that makes sense and they have got a team there now. So I think that's the kind of the thing that got fixed, but it took a while and it's only now that they're hopefully working on something that's going to come out soon. So I know there's a team there. I don't know what they're. I couldn't say if I did know anyway, but I don't know when they're going to release what, other than that in general, they are, they've said they are going to do Scope 3 at some point. I think they're going to do better. I hope they're going to do pue. That seems likely. There's some other things they could do that would be fairly easy and they need to be more granular on their carbon tool. So one example, I was looking at a carbon report and it said, you have three buckets. It says, here's your S3 footprint, here's your EC2 footprint. Here is other and another is all other services bundled together. And the numbers sort of moved from month to month and then at some point others shot up and became more than EC2 and S3. And we weren't sure why. And it was in. And then they just have Europe, US, Europe, all of the Americas and Asia. And it wasn't clear which region this was in because the data wasn't per region, so we couldn't tell. And when there's multiple regions we were using in this geography, we couldn't tell which region it was or which service it was. And this workload now is dominated by whatever isn't other. And we can't figure out what to do about that. It's going up, the traffic's increasing, so it's going up anyway. But we're trying to work out what to do about it and there's just not enough resolution in the information to figure that out. And that's kind of escalated internally. Say, come on, we need more data. Here's a clear example of why you need to provide everybody more data. Now on Google and Microsoft, they have much more fine grained data, but it is still delayed by a month or two. They'll tell you service by service and region by region, and I think down to maybe zone level on Google so the data is there. One of the reasons they don't want to provide the data is that you can reverse engineer what's going on inside the organization from a business point of view, and they regard it as sort of leaking proprietary information. But since the other cloud providers are already leaking that information, it doesn't seem that it's that much of a big deal or it shouldn't be that much of a big deal. So that's all the arguments. But ultimately, what it takes is having the right leader and the right organization with the mandate to go and do something, and then it takes just time. And that's, I think, where we are right now. I'm hopeful, but still waiting for more useful information out of Amazon.

Gael Duez 58:42
Well, that was a very comprehensive tour of public cloud issues and solutions and very transparent answers on what is going on in AWS, in your own opinion, because I say it again, you don't work at AWS anymore. So thanks a lot for all this transparency exercise and pedagogical exercise. Also, I think it was very valuable. It might be a bit of a nightmare to make some hard choices of where to cut and what to keep, but thanks a lot, Adrian, that was really lovely to have you on the show.

Adrian Cockcroft 59:17
Yep, thank you.

Outro 59:19
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View Details

🤔 Why do we do so little to decarbonize software despite already knowing so much?

🎙️ In this episode, Gael Duez is joined by Janne Kalliola, author of "Green Code," together with Satu Heikinheimo, Planet Diplomats’ founder, to discuss how to trigger more actions among Tech people to reduce the carbon footprint of our code.

🌍 Both being based in Finland, a nice side-benefit of their exchange was exploring how the Nordic countries handle the environmental footprint of digital technology.

Key takeaways:
🏃 trend of employees considering resigning if their company's values don't align with their own,
🤝 importance of collaboration among multidisciplinary teams to create sustainable digital products and services,
⚙️ concept of carbon-neutral software and the choice of focusing mostly on energy consumption, and
💡 Nordic approach to trust, self-organization, and low hierarchy in fostering psychological safety and agency for individuals to drive sustainable initiatives

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss our episode, every two Tuesday!📣 Green IO next Conference is in London on September 19th 2024 (use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket until June 18th)📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. Learn more about our guest and connect: * Satu’s LinkedIn * Janne’s LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Satu and Janne’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* Green Code * LUT University * SE4GD * 2023 Net Positive Employee Barometer * Code from Finland * Planet ambassador * The psychology of sustainability with Iida Mäkikallio

Transcript Intro00:00

When we talk about agency, we need stories. We need to hear what somebody has already done. Otherwise, how is it possible?

Gael Duez00:20

Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO with Gaël Duez. That's me. In this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website, greenio.tech

Sometimes, and I do mean sometimes, nice connections happen via social networks. When Janne Kalliola, Exove CEO, reached out to me to chat about his book Green Code, I was happily surprised to discover his work and a bit ashamed that it flew under my radar so far. Our discussion went from code efficiency to the Nordics way of deploying sustainability. Janne being based in Helsinki, Finland, and it made me curious about local specificities once again. So, after Latin America, Singapore and soon Japan, let's focus on another geographical area to see how the Nordic countries handle the environmental footprint of digital technology. A sector where they weigh significantly more than the size of their population would suggest around 26 million if we gather Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

And I also wanted another point of view, less technical and with a clear focus on organizational challenges to bring sustainability within the IT sector and beyond. Hence our second guest, Satu Heikinheimo, longtime founder of Helsinki design company, who launched Planet Diplomats last year. So welcome, Janne and Satu, thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.

Janne Kalliola02:28

Thanks for having us. It's a pleasure.

Satu Heikinheimo02:30

Thank you. It's fantastic to be talking about very important topics with you today.

Gael Duez02:36

Yeah, thanks a lot. And you know, before we deep dive into green coding and enabling action in the Nordics way, I'd like to understand better what triggered both of you to become more planet aware, I would say. And Sato, you mentioned to me in an earlier conversation that you were a climate quitter. At first I thought you meant that everything was lost and we cannot save us from the massive force calming climate disruption. But actually, I got it all wrong, didn't I? Satu Heikinheimo03:06

Yes, a little bit. Okay, so two things. So what got me into sustainability was actually already a long, long time ago. More than ten years ago, I was studying service design and business like strategic design. And then I had an opportunity to do my Master's thesis, actually quite near where you, well, not near, but near where you live in Zanzibar. And I was examining how you can use design tools or can you use design tools to solve systemic problems. So that was like my starting point. And then I realized that sustainability is my thing and there is so much to do, and with design skills we can make a difference. And then ten years, or more than ten years passed, I worked in IT and in very many different sectors. And then I realized that I actually want to do only sustainability. And that wasn't possible in my current position, like previous positions. So that's why I am now calling myself a climate quitter since last fall. And that means that I am fully dedicated to fight climate change, create businesses and services that are fully embracing sustainability, the opportunities within sustainability, and to create a better and more regenerative future for all of us.

Gael Duez04:40

And actually, you're not the only one. I think there is a significant trend of people changing jobs.

Satu Heikinheimo04:47

Absolutely. There have been lots of studies made recently where I can see that I'm not the only one. So, for example, there was this study made by Paul Polman. It's called the 2023 Net Positive Employee Barometer. And they were researching the climate quitting phenomena and it seems that it's major and we're not really talking about that much. According to the study, nearly half of the employees, I think there were like 4000 employees interviewed or answering in the survey, were considering resigning their job if the values of the company did not align with their own values. That's major, isn't it?

Gael Duez05:32

Pretty impressive. That's something claiming it and then something doing it. So congratulations for doing it.

Gael Duez05:41

Janne, did you have an uh huh moment? Or was it more something consistent over your professional career and personal path?

Janne Kalliola05:50
I think that I had like two moments that were sort of like a pinch moment, like in a war, that there was one from our employees, from Exove, that their demands for the sustainability, especially social sustainability, and the diversity, equality and inclusion were getting stronger. And as I'm a middle aged white male from a developed country, then there was a lot for me to learn. So that was one sort of starting point that there's something here that I need to understand better. And then the other one was that I'm the Chairman of the Board of Code from Finland association, and there we had a sustainability initiative. And then I went to Finnish think tank Sitra to discuss the ecological impact of IT, to understand it more, and then found out that everything is not right, that it actually is. There's a lot to fix. And then I started to think that, okay, I will do something about it on gold from the Finland side. Then I started to talk about it and hoped that somebody would pick up the topic and do something. After doing that for a while, I found out that actually nobody is really moving because of that. I'm beating the drum. So I decided, okay, I'll do it instead. And I started to write the book and preach about these things, because at the end I thought that the. I have three kids, so I would like them to inherit a livable planet. And if they later ask me, dad, or maybe someday. Granddad, what did you do when we were ruining the climate? And I said, I actually sat back and hoped that somebody else would do something. That is not a really good story that I would like to tell to anybody. So I decided that, okay, I need to roll up my sleeves and then get things done. And then it's sort of one thing that has led to another, and then I've been more and more entangled in a positive way with the topic and being discussing and speaking and doing things.

Gael Duez08:08

That's a very good way your grandchildren keep on visiting you. The only other way is to dig a pool. But I'm not sure that you use it that much in Finland. I'd like to start this episode by being a bit nerdy first and talk about Green Code. And before we cover several points in this book, Janne, I'd like to ask you a question. What are the two most unconventional tips that you gave in the book?

Janne Kalliola08:33

One is for the. I don't know whether they are unconventional, but at least these are not easy. Let's put it this way. One is for the companies to actually use the golden rule that they who have the gold make the rules. So the organization that buys a lot should demand sustainable solutions and maybe put some money out of it on it. But especially that it would be a requirement because the money makes the world turn around. And then the adoption of sustainable policies would be way easier. The other one is probably very hard, that everybody should restrict the use of digital services. Less watching videos, less doom scrolling, less Netflix, more being outside, more being with friends without devices, at least from personal experience. It's surprisingly hard. And it's sort of a habitual thing that you grab the phone and people are not sort of… we don't sustain boredom, for example, anymore. And that is really bad for creativity.

Gael Duez09:54
For example, it's a consumption angle. And there is the chapter in your book that I love the title, which is raiders of the lost efficiency. And it really connects to a battle that a dear friend of mine is fighting at the moment. So Tristan Nitot, about the reverse Moore's law, he calls it the erooM law and starting with this simple statement, which is our 20 years old computer, they still work, they're still perfectly functional. The problem is that we cannot operate anything on them anymore, because software gets bigger and bigger and bigger, et cetera, et cetera. And it kind of resonated with what you wrote about code efficiency and us becoming lazy in this raiders of lost efficiency. What were your main drivers to read this chapter? Janne Kalliola10:50

Let's start from the history that I was nine years old when I got my computer in I think Christmas 83 or 84, I'm not 100% sure which Christmas, but it was week 20 with 5 kilobytes of memory, 1 MHz processor. And you could not do much with that computer. And every single software should be and had to be really efficient, because otherwise it would not run. And if you have patients who are nine years old, then you know that you don't wait too long for the computer to crunch the numbers. And recently, a few weeks ago I was in the alumni meeting of a 30 year old club that I founded when I was in university. And there was week 20 there with demos, with recent demos, like one year old demos. And I could not believe how much the people could get out of that computer. They were really fancy, the stuff that was there on the screen. You can do a lot. And I think that we don't currently after Amigas or the early PCs, Atari ST. You don't really need to stretch the envelope anymore, because there's always enough power. Deep loading is harder and then most focus. And I think that because it makes economic sense, the faster the code is produced, the better. And that is the problem. The problem is that the coder's time is way more expensive than the electricity used by the bloated code. But you're absolutely right that they are perfectly fine devices. I have an old iPad mini, the first version that runs two software of those that have been installed still, luckily for me, they are the software that I'm using almost daily. So it works. But for example, I can't surf any web pages because it runs out of memory. For the same sites that I used to flawlessly use on that iPad like five, seven years ago. The site has blown it, but the information, the amount of information that is on the site hasn't changed. You don't need to do an all encompassing software. And you don't need to do software that is like a hundred tools with an army knife. Just do something simple like it used to be back in the days and 70s, 80s with Unix. That there are very simple things that do one thing and they do that one thing well, and then you can combine those things to do something else. But then one thing that is crucial to understand is that the software developer is sort of at the mercy of a designer, because the designer figures out how the software interacts and a lot of that interaction then decides how it has to be implemented. And then if the designer doesn't really understand the eco-friendly approach, then the developer can do just that much. Satu Heikinheimo14:26

Yeah, I think, Janne, you're wonderfully talking about the importance of collaboration and how important, when we are creating more sustainable products and services, digital products and services, how important is that we bring the knowledge and the skills of different experts on the table. No developer alone can create the premium sustainable service nor can a designer. So this is what I've also been seeing, that we are so much going into our own boxes when, in this era, when we are wanting to tackle and actually create super good, very human centered services, digital services, we need to bring the multidisciplinary teams to work together. Gael Duez15:24

A final question when it comes to your book, Janne and Satu, please help us also to understand this decision. You decided to focus solely on energy consumption as an environmental variable. That was really the red line in all your book. Not that much mention of embedded carbon or carbon footprint of devices themselves, and no other mentions to water consumption, resource depletion. Why did you make this choice? Janne Kalliola16:01

I think that the energy consumption, or at the end, the efficiency is the key. That if we have more efficient software, we need less energy to run it, we need less hardware to host it, we need less network capacity to move the data around. So if we have the efficiency in the core, then the rest automatically follows. Of course, you need to do improvements, efficiency gains on the server side, on the network side, that development needs to march on. But for me, everything starts with the energy usage, and everything else sort of is a secondary matter because the software dictates the environment. Of course, the environment somewhat dictates what kind of software you can run, but the requirements of the software create the rest of the ecosystem and not vice versa. So that's why I started from the software.

Gael Duez17:16
That's why you started from the software. And Satu, is it something, this focus on carbon and more specifically on energy consumption, is it something that you see a lot in your different initiatives, or do we also start discussing other environmental variables?

Satu Heikinheimo17:33

I think it's like what Janne has been like, the focus Janne has in his book about energy. I think energy is very. It's kind of easy to grasp because energy equals money. So if you can save money by creating more sustainable software, then it's very easy. It's easier for businesses and leaders to understand, isn't it?

Gael Duez17:58

Yes, it is. I'm just concerned about the pollution transfer there. But I guess it's less the case in your country. But we're seeing more and more a trade off between carbon reduction in water consumption, for instance, in data centers, and to cut this cycle. Actually, I'd like to investigate another aspect of your work triggering action. Because what I've noticed, reading your book, and what I've noticed discussing with you, Satu, is that we already have quite a lot of tools and quite a lot of awareness on these issues. I mean, it's pretty rare to find a CTO not being aware that there is an energy consumption issue. And no matter how hard it tries to reduce it, there are new usages, new needs, or not, maybe not needs, but popping up everywhere. So my question, and it will be starting with you, Satu, is why don't we act more? What is preventing us from building an agency? And I know that's a word that you use a lot, so could you maybe explain to us what are, according to you, the main pain points? Satu Heikinheimo19:17

Yeah, of course. Everybody wants to do good in their job and in their lives, right? Nobody wants to harm the planet and destroy it, unless you work in the oil industry. But even there, you have people who want to change things. And I think fundamentally, the core of humanity is to grow, to build, to create. And I think in the past years, we suddenly woke up to the fact that we have a climate crisis. It's been going on for years, but suddenly it's like we are in a serious situation. And that's why I think if we really want to change things, we have to consider that every job has to be a climate job. And now that Yanne has written a book about green code, he's doing what he can in his domain of ICT. He's giving the tools. And like Gaël, you said, there are already a lot of tools in different industries of how to really actually do the change. But what I think Janne has been able to do is that he's been giving the information, creating awareness, but also showing, like practicing what you preach. And I think this is like when we talk about agency, we need stories. We need to hear what somebody has already done, right? Otherwise, how is it possible? So we need inspiring stories, we need to make sustainability and even green coding a fun thing. It's not scarce, it's suddenly you're like, oh, I need to do something like I'm losing something. But we need to think of sustainability as a positive thing that brings hope. And when we are in this environment of hope and where we see that what we do has a meaning in the long term and also now, then we can get that agency. But agency is not possible if you don't have a community to support you.

Janne Kalliola21:33

Yeah, I think that you're absolutely right. The thing is that I don't know how to put this in a positive spin because I fully agree that this should be fun and this should be cool and so forth. That everybody should be at the end accountable. What did I try, did I do or did I invent excuses because China is a bigger polluter? Or we have this like my company's parent company, they are printing a lot with the traditional printing. We could say that here in Exeter we don't really need to do anything because there's always the printing that is using propane and using a lot of electricity and producing a lot of garbage or that kind of thing that needs to be recycled, we don't need to do it because the bad guys are somewhere else. Everybody is a bad guy. And if we can make it so that you don't do it because you have that kind of climate angst, that you are motivated by fear or depression, but you are motivated with the possibilities.

Gael Duez22:48

Could you, both of you, concretely share an example of how you manage to create a momentum towards change regarding green coating or even sustainability in general?

Satu Heikinheimo23:02

I have been working with social sustainability before. I think it all starts when you realize what your values are, what is important to you, and then when you are in a healthy relationship with yourself, then you can start doing these things and then you can inspire others. That's how I see it. And sustainability has been my value for a long time. So, for example, in my previous job, I started to talk about, like, maybe we should create a sustainability strategy. And then kind of getting a little bit of buzz inside the company, I invited people to speak about interesting sustainability topics so that, you know, creating awareness for my working community, basically. So creating awareness, getting other people also excited about, oh, these are the opportunities. Maybe I could do that too. And suddenly we started creating sustainability training and then we created a sustainability strategy. And then Janne has been developing this green code, what do you call it? Janne Kalliola24:23

Yeah, the carbon neutral software company label in Code from Finland association.

Satu Heikinheimo24:30

Absolutely. So I also discovered that and I'm like, of course we're going to get that. So getting people involved is super important. And also getting people to discuss these topics together. I think that's super important. Janne Kalliola24:47

Yeah. For me, the turning point was, in all of my thinking, when I got kids. Now the oldest one is 19, and soon, soon goes to the army. We will have a less full house. But then I have found out that I'm not the most important person in my life. That was sort of a turning point. That was actually worded by our CTO a few years ago, because then there were a lot of that kind of demands from the developers, especially the younger generation, that what they are entitled and so forth. And he said that it would be really good, that they would not be the most important person in their lives. And when you find out that you are not that important, that there are more important things, then suddenly a lot of things that you felt that were sort of burdensome to you were actually pretty okay things, if they were good for the other people that you felt more important.

And then the other one, that I think that sums nicely, this meaningfulness and the fun. And the other is the Japanese concept of Ikigai. I don't know if you know it, but there's that. If you do what you love, what you are good at, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs, then you have passion, mission, professional vocation, and that forms the Ikigai that is the meaning of your life. And I'm currently doing those things at that time. I'm sort of good at it. I'm still learning. I love the topic. I get some money out of it, and then I surely know that the world needs it. So there's meaning in my life and having meaning, being on a mission with a passion, is truly an empowering thing. Gael Duez26:45

The fun fact is that I used Ikigai three years ago when I decided to pivot, and that was really like. I remember printing the page and playing a bit around. And after a few days, it was crystal clear that I would focus 100% on digital sustainability, and hence Green IO and all the things. There is something that I find quite interesting is that when I ask you the question how we could trigger change, et cetera, you start a lot from an individual perspective, and I'd like to deep dive a bit more with the Nordics way of doing things. I think it's very important for both of you to say, okay, this is, pardon my French, but this is your shit. You know, you need to eat it and to manage it. And you were not that much into it. Our leadership should do this, the government should do that, et cetera. Satu, you mentioned several regulations, but more of the force for good, rather than something that was a blocker or needed before starting to act. Could you tell me a bit more about how you do things and how you implement sustainable initiatives in the Nordics, starting, obviously, with Finland, where both of you live?

Satu Heikinheimo27:59

Yes. It all starts from the individual. And I actually launched a podcast about the psychology of sustainability today. And I think it's… Even if we are, I can see that there are lots of collectives, communities being born. But at the same time, I believe that we're moving very much more towards the individual era. And that means that we are kind of like, people are tired, people are burned out because they've been grinding in their jobs for years, and they don't see the rewards. And then they realize that, oh, okay, so this wasn't as promised when I was 18 and I went to study business, for example. So now people are kind of turning back inside themselves, and I can see that there is more and more of this happening. So we're going into this individual era where people are actually doing more Ikigai. They're going deeper into what is important to me. And I think there was a good saying. One of my friends said this quote, that your future self is talking shit about you. So I think that we are actually becoming more aware of what is a good life for me, how I want to live, and what is a good life for me. And that also requires that we actually do the work ourselves. What are your values? How are you treating yourself? Or are you just numbing your pain, for example, with doomless scrolling and such things? And that's where we go into the lifestyle changes. So from there, when you are more in line with your values and with your Ikigai, I think then we can actually make massive changes in companies, because then you can be honestly, brutally you. You can talk with your colleagues, you can create honest, aligned communities that are in the same mission as you. And that's what I'm seeing happening a lot, especially in Finland. We have so many networks of like minded people who want to do good. People are in different stages in their processes and lives. But I think that's where we create communities. And I think the communities can exist, like outside of companies, but also inside companies. And that's where we can create massive change. And the leaders are part of these communities. Right? That's how I see it.

Janne Kalliola30:42

Yeah, I fully agree. I think that the Nordic way starts with that there's inherent trust, that people are trustworthy, that they can be trusted without proving that they can be trusted, that this seems to be the other way around in most of the parts of the world. And then the other one is that we are expected to be self guided or self organized. I don't know, maybe because we have been always so little amount of people compared to the amount of land that you are there in middle of forest, with yourself or with your family back in the days like 1800 century or whatnot. And then you need to cope because there is no network, there is no huge amount of people. This is something that reflects that when people are self organized, then the communities start to self organize. There are a lot of companies in Finland that the management doesn't really tell people what to do, but expects and trusts that they will do the right things when it's time to do the right things. And that goes… It's not against planning, it's not against sort of structure. It's more that the planning and the structure happens during the execution, during the work, and it sort of emerges out of it. Instead of that somebody needs to say that, okay, this is the scaffolding that you need to work inside, because somebody else has decided that we can't really trust you, that somebody would go, that if he would let people roam free, they would go outside of the area and do something else somewhere else that would not be beneficial for the organizational community. So that is probably one of the striking things that then helps us to create those ad hoc stuff. Of course, I am sort of product of our culture, but I think that it's the crucial way, because the climate disaster is upon us right now, that everybody needs to start moving, and then we figure out what are the best ways, what should be stopped, and then you should be humble enough to say that, okay, I did not take the right direction in the beginning and I learned, and I'm now changing. Instead of that, I will go to this direction at the bitter end, because that is the risk that everybody starts doing things and then some people get stuck, that this is actually harmful, that it feels that it's not. It sounds like that it's good, but actually it's harmful because of reasons A, B and C. And the person said, no matter, I'm still. I've sort of invested myself in this cause and I need to continue that one. So if you can avoid that risk by accepting that nobody's perfect and failures to happen, which in Finland, we are not that good compared to states, for example, that if there's a personal bankruptcy, then that you are just one experienced richer here in Finland, you are member of pariah class, that you are not to be trusted because you couldn't handle your own personal finances. So there are differences also on the other side. But I think that the pace is more important in the beginning than direction, because the direction will form, the pace is harder to create. Satu Heikinheimo34:20

Yeah, I totally agree with the low hierarchy and this you can see everywhere in the society in Finland and also in the Nordics, and also in the society and also in companies that there is… When you have a low hierarchy, then you have a higher chance of having psychological safety. And when you have psychological safety, people feel safe in themselves and with others that is making the agency then possible, because agency, you can't act if you're not feeling safe, then you're just kind of in this fight or flight mode. Janne Kalliola34:59
Yeah. And then you feel that you are fraud, and then you end up later in burnout or something that you try to predance, something that you don't feel that you are, even if you could be.

Satu Heikinheimo35:12

Absolutely. And we have this peace. I wanted to also talk about peace, because we understand the value of peace. It's very much linked with safety, so we have a respect for others. And that also has to do with, again, low hierarchy. So let's say Janne has an idea of developing something in his company. He can just put it in Slack. I have this idea of an initiative, so it's very peaceful, safe to start things. And I think we need more starts, initiatives where people can then, you know, be engaged. Gael Duez35:59
The specificities of the Nordics' way are definitely based on law, hierarchy, and a sense of self organization. Like, you know, you're on your own in a big forest, you need to do your stuff, and you don't have to be told what to do. But there is also this sense of safety that you will be able to try something and fail. And that's okay. This is where I'm not fully sure to understand, because on the other end, Janne, you say that if you fail in Finland, you're a bit of… you're part of the pariah class, at least if you fail your business. So isn't there a discrepancy? Is it safe to fail? And do we need to be able to fail? If you really want to create momentum or to accelerate things? When it comes to sustainable initiatives? Janne Kalliola36:52
Yeah. I think that we are not the perfect society. That is the one thing that I want to make crystal clear. This is not the perfect way of doing everything. Even if we are in a number of different surveys, the Nordic countries are always on top and it's about happiness or different kinds of economical performance. So something there is done right. But that example was for the… that we could still learn from the other countries that are more tolerant of certain countries. This doesn't mean that we have… we would not have that kind of issue, that if somebody fails that this would fail worse. Like the, like some of the, that we don't lose face except in financial sense, that this problem is an exception. But then the other one, people understand that you can't be in the business, that you can't succeed in everything. And it's not always that it's sort of successful then out. This is not the way we do here, but we understand that people fail. But of course if it would have even the… although also the financial failure buffer like the states has, we could be way better. I think that in the other Nordic countries that failures are not seen that critical, but the safety comes from, I think, from the trust that you are trusted upright. If it fails, then it might be that you lose some of the trust and so forth, and you might lose some of the safety. Yes, that might happen, but it's still better that everybody is trusted upfront because then everybody has the possibility to have the agency and not wait until they have sort of proven themselves to somebody that they have the agency. Satu Heikinheimo38:53
It's a good place to start innovating and creating. But then again, I also see that safety has this kind of dark side in the Nordics. At least I can tell. I've been living in Sweden and Finland, so I can talk based on my own experience. But sometimes I think we are also afraid to take risks. And I think that's the dark, like the other side of safety. So we want things to be so safe that we are not taking risks. So everything has to be like, well, not everything, but you know, like we want to see that somebody already did it and then we can take those steps. And that's also a reason why we need more agency, more brave, courageous people like Janne and Gaël to show us examples, stories through podcasts and different kinds of events and so forth.

Gael Duez39:52

I think what I really like about the discussion we had on the Nordics way is that once you've built trust, you've got this ability to try and fail. Even if you've been perfectly honest about the dark side, as you say,Satu, sometimes we don't dare enough, but I think it makes total sense. And it's come almost all the way back to what triggered the agile revolution. And I'm not talking about it in a buzzwording way, but really, truly, at the beginning, we realized that developing software was super complex. And actually, sustainability is super complex. And we can literally freeze in front of such complexity because we're so afraid of failure that we want to have like double, triple, quadruple safeties before starting to code or starting to design or starting something. And what is scariest than climate change and biodiversity collapse, etcetera? Nothing. I mean, for me, nothing. Not even maybe nuclear war. But let's not talk about this. And my point is, if we don't dare to take small steps, knowing that others will trust us to at least go in the right direction, even if we make a mistake, then it can really freeze us. And that's something that I see in many organizations. Where do I start? And if I make a mistake, and if I do enough, don't do it right. But the truth is, when it comes to sustainability, everyone makes a lot of mistakes because we don't fully understand the magnitude of the problem, but we understand the directions. When you reduce energy, that's okay. Now, you know that it's a bit more complex than this because, of course, you've got the rebound effect, etcetera, etcetera. But if you're meaningful about reducing energy and you're meaningful about not reinvesting this energy in something, even with more consumerism, that's the right direction. That might be the best absolute, that might not be the absolute best choice to make right now if we had a full map and a full modelization of the system, but that doesn't happen. So I really like this kind of approach, like enabling people, trusting people, and daring to do the first step. Hence, to build success stories to follow. And then, of course, they will be broadcasted on my podcast. I follow your piece of advice. Satu Heikinheimo42:16
I also wanted to add one thing. When we're thinking about how we, like, actually make the change happen in a product service, digital development, sometimes. Like Gaël, you also said that there is enough information available, but now it's time to act. And how can companies and how can people in their daily jobs act? So I am hoping to see, like, a shift from lean consultants and scrum consultants to actually, like these sustainability coaches who are going inside companies, walking, you know, going hand in hand with the development teams, and then in practice, making these little changes that Janne is also talking about in his book. So really small steps, and that's where we can start building, like, bigger things and the maturity in the company grows, and then there is more willingness to actually pivot to something more incredible and something with bigger impact. Gael Duez43:31

You believe, Satu, that some external help is still needed to trigger change at some point?

Satu Heikinheimo43:38

Sometimes it's the same with facilitation. Sometimes it's good to get someone from the outside. It's like, hey, come and help us out a little bit. So it's like the person comes with a different position, doesn't know about the history and the legacy and whatever is going on in the company. And then just focusing on, let's get this thing done brings the value. So, yes. So external. Yes. But also the awareness, like, I'm not really sure, like, how much sustainability training there is for, say, regular employees. So there actually needs to be training, like practical training. Sustainability shouldn't be something that is only for the sustainability directors or leads. It should be part of every single job. So everyone should be able to, or at least given an opportunity to reflect on their own job. From this perspective, what does it mean? In my life, you can't even make the change if you don't even know how to. How to change your job or what you're doing that day, isn't it?

Janne Kalliola44:44

Yeah. If you don't understand the vocabulary and it feels like that it's only for the experts. And it might be that the best expert for your job is probably yourself. But if you don't have the tools, if you don't have the understanding, if you don't have the awareness, then it might be really hard. There's a good example of how we have launched the green it metric model in Exove, and we tested that out with our parent company. And after the test run, sustainable director said that this was the first time ever that she had been able to discuss with IT about sustainability on IT terms. And the IT people understood what sustainability actually means outside, that they need once a year, provide data for the carbon calculation. So there was that kind of missing link that we could then forge together in that meeting. And then now there's a green IT committee formed that there are people that are doing those things. They made immediate changes to certain ways of procurement and so forth. So there were a lot of sparks happening because they had the mutual understanding vocabulary, and then they shared the values and the goal. So then things started to happen. There was nothing actually changed except that they learned a bit more about the ways of understanding IT and sustainability. And then a lot of things happened. And I think that this is crucial, that there's so much expertise and sort of execution power locked, because people don't really know what they should do or what they could do because they just are not asked to think about this. Satu Heikinheimo46:48
Yeah, absolutely. I love this example. And here again, the importance of dialogue. And what is the narrative that is in the company, in the teams? Is it like, oh, yeah, the sustainability team is doing these strategies and doing, taking care of the compliance and da da da da. Or we need to actually change the narrative so that, okay, I'm a UX designer, for example, okay, what can I do in my job? How can we create an internal team where we discuss these things? And I've seen this already happening in big companies and also small companies in Finland, where teams are coming together or people are coming together and forming teams, and then they're showing like, oh, I did this kind of thing here, this kind of change in our product, and this was the impact, and people get excited. So, yeah, the narrative and the dialogue is super important, and the change is happening through people. When we're talking about products and services, it's the people who are actually the creators and the developers.

Gael Duez47:58

Fair point. Now to close the podcast I will ask my traditional question to both of you. Could you share one piece of positive good news regarding sustainability? And who knows, maybe sustainably in the IT sector. Janne Kalliola48:13

Awareness is rising. And I was yesterday speaking in lobbied and the University of Technology to students that were focusing solely on sustainability, on IT, that their whole study program is about sustainability. So we are getting new generations that are sort of tooled already from the universities to tackle the problem. I think that there's hope at the end. The hope is something that if you have the hope, then you can do miracles. And I think that there's hope especially how quickly things have progressed on the sort of talk level. Of course, talk is shit that the actions matter about then they typically talk always comes first and then the action comes later. And we are now in the talk phase and hopefully we are in the action phase soon.

Satu Heikinheimo49:09

I actually also have two answers. And the other one before you even said that you were lecturing or had a keynote yesterday. I would have also said the same, that there is so much happening in educational institutions, in academia, there are even doctoral programs where the focus is sustainability. And this to me shows that the idea of every job will be a climate job is becoming a reality. It starts from different levels and education has a huge role in it. And also the collaboration that different educational institutions have with businesses then. So I think that is fabulous to see. And I hope I can also collaborate more in the future also with these domains.

The other thing that came to my mind is we're going back to the people. I think it's great that it's easy to find your people who have the same values because it's becoming more obvious now. Maybe it's a little bit polarized that you have people who are super into sustainability, then you have people who are like, I'm interested and curious, and then you have the people who are kind of. It's not in their agenda, but most of the people that you meet nowadays are, at least I meet, super inspiring and we have fabulous conversations and there are opportunities for collaboration. And I think that's where what Janne mentioned about Ikigai comes into play. So I think it's very important that we as individuals also know where we are standing and where we are headed and we have a vision. I think it's super important to have a vision where you're going and then you can execute and of course there are several like I don't know dozens of ways to get there but I think it's important that you have a vision, you know your values and then you will be able to find your people.

Gael Duez51:15

I think we can close the podcast on this statement. Thanks a lot both of you for joining. That was inspiring and it was an interesting angle to see how the cultural context helps to understand what works well and what doesn't work that well when it comes to sustainability. So thanks a lot. It was great to have you on the show. I hope you enjoyed it as well.

Satu Heikinheimo51:41

Thank you so much Gaël and Janne, thank you. It was a pleasure.

Janne Kalliola51:45

Yes, thanks for having us. It was a true pleasure. Outro 51:49
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🔎 Major regulations have been built up in Europe these past years impacting the Tech sectors. How have they been built? What does it take to pass these kinds of bills in the unique European Union political system? And what are the consequences for the people working in the digital industry? 🎙️ This episode 39 welcomes Kim Van Sparrentak, a Member of the European Parliament involved in legislation related to tech and sustainability, and Max Schulze, the founder and chairman of the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance, one of the main lobby groups for more responsible technology. Together with Gael Duez, they share their perspective on the European regulations in Tech.Some points which have been discussed:⚖️ the Artificial Intelligence Act🌱 Environmental transparency among actors🤝 the Influence of big tech companies through lobbying
❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conference is in London on September 19th (use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket). Learn more about our guest and connect: * Kim's LinkedIn * Max’s LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Kim and Max's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* SDIA * EU Artificial Intelligent Act * Clarification between regulation and directives * EU CSRD * EED * Taxonomy * EU Right to repair law * Chris Adams analysis on AWS 4% expenditures spent in energy * EU transparency monitoring * EU Report on addictive design of mobile phones (Kim Van Sparrentak was the rapporteur)

TranscriptIntro 00:00When you sit in a plane, you want the plane to be safe. And you look at your government, your elected government, say like, Hey, you better make sure those planes are safe because otherwise I'm going to die. With tech, most of society today, they're getting a lot of their truths, their information out of modern technology. And it's a little bit like asking somebody who really likes to smoke to advocate for stopping the tobacco industry.Gael Duez 00:34Hello everyone, welcome to GreenIO with Gaël Duez. That's me. GreenIO is the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time, twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript will be in the show notes both on your podcast platform and on our website greenio.techThe long arm of European Tech Regulation, I'm not sure who coined the term, but it surely resonated with me when I heard it the first time. The classical example is GDPR, the data protection law which has inspired similar bills in Indonesia, India or Colombia, just to name a few. It's fair to say that despite remaining an economic giant, the European Union is not leading the race in digital technologies compared to lets say China or the USA. However, it's clearly having a major influence in shaping how people use digital technologies worldwide. And when it comes to sustainability, it's an arm the size of Elastigirl from the Incredibles movie that was talking about taxonomy, GDPR, energy efficiency directive, you name it. Major regulations have been built up these past years impacting all economic sectors and especially tech. This is why I have been eager for a while to have a good overview of these regulations, as well as those in the pipeline for quite a long time now. And to be honest, I'm also curious how they've been built. What does it take to pass these kinds of bills in the unique European Union political system? Hence, my need to have solid guides to navigate the Brussels Maze and I couldn't find better than Kim and Max. Kim Van Sparrentak is a member of the European Parliament. She's a member of the Green Party, and she has been involved in pretty much all legislation related to tech and sustainability in these last five years. And Max Schulze, he's a former engineer with quite long experience in it, and he's now the founder and chairman of the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance and he has been very involved in positive lobbying, I would say, among sustainability for the tech industry. Now, I'm honored to have both Kim and Max. I owe some disclosure to my audience before I let them introduce themselves in more detail and explain how they've been interested in this sustainability work. This work, sorry around sustainability, but I owe you a full disclosure. I'm a member of the SDIA, a very, very passive member, and that was just for support and I'm not a member of the Green Party, so full disclosure, and I'm not a member of any political party.Very nice to meet you, Kim and Max. Maybe just to clarify a bit the wordings and set the stage. Kim, could you, I'd say that I know it's super hard exercise, but what kind of legislation does the European Union pass? How does it, I mean, we hear about laws, bills, regulations, et cetera. I think it's maybe good to, for instance, we've heard, I've mentioned GDPR, which is a regulation, but there are different kinds of laws. So without answering a full lecture, it might be worse for understanding the discussions later to get a grasp on how it works.Kim Van Sparrentak 04:28Yes. So basically you have, if you keep it very short, there's two types. You have directives, and a directive gives basically guidelines to member states with sort of minimum standards on what they have to make sure happens in their member state. But depending on what the current rules are already in a respective country, they can adjust as long as they sort of reach the goals of the directive. And then you have regulations and acts, and that is a standard for the whole European Union. And especially when it comes to digital technology, we have lots of acts and regulations because they are related to the internal market and we want the same standard for products and platforms in the European single market and the single digital market.Gael Duez 05:20And I think it was just a good reminder of how it works. Now, my first question for both of you would be what are, according to you, the main legislations covering both sustainability and digital technology that we should be aware of? And maybe, Max, you want to start with?Max Schulze 05:39Yeah, I think we talked about it before the call a bit, but, so I would describe it, people can't see me, but I would describe it that we have regulation on the very top layer and at the very bottom layer. And what I mean is we have something like the Digital Markets Act, we have the Digital Services Act. We have things that are trying to regulate the products and services. So the metas and the really big platforms and Airbnbs of this world and Spotify and try to set rules on how you can make a product or a digital service in the European market. And then we have the very bottom layer, which is about digital infrastructure. So data centers, fiber, which is the energy efficiency directive. There is something in the taxonomy about this where we say this is how we want the physical infrastructure to be built. One point, because you already described me as a lobbyist, so I'm going to lobby here. What we're missing at the moment in Europe is always a more systemic perspective because these products and services that are very large use a lot of these infrastructures, and we don't target it as one. We target it as two different blocks. And I think we ought to have a bit more of a systemic perspective on the digital realm to be more effective in implementing sustainability. But at the moment, it's these two fronts, which are also two different parts of the commission essentially pushing different things. But maybe I missed something, Kim.Kim Van Sparrentak 07:03No, I think you're very correct. And I think one of the things that is, I think the most important thing to know before we can really dive into the legislation per se is that we actually don't fully grasp what the environmental impact of technology is right now. Because all these tech companies are very fake about how much energy they actually use. They are claiming their sustainment. I mean, Amazon lobbyists have told me they're the most sustainable company in the world. I don't know how, but they are according to themselves. And one of the things that we're all the time seeing is that we don't have enough evidence on how much energy they actually use or how much water they use, which is, of course, also a major issue, or how much rare materials they use. And that makes it more difficult to make legislation. And I can tell you, as an environmental activist, when I hear we're fighting for transparency, I was always like, no, we want change. But in this case, the first fight is more transparency on how much energy and rare materials and water is actually used by these tech companies.Max Schulze 08:19I'm just building on that. I think I've been doing this now for four years, and I've been stuck in this endless loop that I have come to understand is actually a political strategy of the other lobbyists, let's say, which is of European value, says we only regulate things where we have facts. It's very deeply rooted. I'm German also, even more so in Germany. We cannot touch something where we are not sure, where we don't have evidence and facts and scientific things, which I think is a really good value to have. I think that's nice. But because in the absence of this transparency, we never have real facts. Like, we might know that Google uses this many kilowatts, hours of energy, but how much is in one YouTube video, we don't know. Right? How much is in an Instagram picture? We don't know. How much is in online banking applications? We don't know. So by not having this transparency, we can never really effectively come up with standards or regulations or levels of what we want to get to. All I can do, really, what I'm an activist for, is transparency, because in the absence of facts, it's hard to make good regulation. And though I wish that maybe this year or after these elections, we can try to break out of this loop and just make a regulation to enforce transparency.Gael Duez 09:33And being able to build proper regulations based on facts, facts being provided by transparency regulation. Okay, so thanks for the clarification, because I think this is a very important statement that we are kind of guessing at the moment and not being able to be as precise as we would like, as we are today in all the economic sectors. As you offered, Kim, we deep dive a bit. Maybe you want to start with your little darling, which is an Artificial Intelligence Act. And I guess the environmental impact is very interesting as well.Kim Van Sparrentak 10:09Yeah, it is, my baby. Especially the environmental part, because this is what we've been really, as greens, fighting for. Of course, the focus of the Artificial Intelligence Act was to make sure that it was like that we have artificial intelligence based on ethics, on human rights, but we knew that from the start that we also would like to look at the environmental aspect, because we know that the amount of emissions that comes from making AI, and especially generative AI, such as ChatGPT, is just– it's massive. And as I said, we don't know exactly how massive, but we know pretty massive. There's estimates that asking Alexa to turn off a light bulb is as much as leaving the light bulb on for 12 hours. So, you know, like, you're completely trumping the idea of sustainability or turning by turning your lights off. So we knew that in one of the first leaked versions of the Artificial Intelligence Act. So when the commission was still working on it, there was also part on sustainability in it, really making sure that because we have some key risk areas in the AI Act, like, if it can impact the judicial system, then it's high risk, and then there's stronger rules. And there was also one for sustainability. It was very disappointing to see when the final version came out of the Artificial Intelligence Act, that part had been deleted, and we still don't know how and why, but it was quite a frustrating situation. So we've been really, really pushing to make sure that we get some sustainability aspects in again, to make sure that artificial intelligence doesn't, and the regulation doesn't only protect human rights, but also the environment. Just like one example, that critical infrastructure, to some extent, is also looked at, whether not only for safety, but also whether it will impact the environment. And if it can impact the environment when you use artificial intelligence, then you should also fall under high risk. And that is something we got back in. And I'm also very proud to say that we asked for actual environmental standards for artificial intelligence and also environmental transparency. Well, and that's in the European Parliament's version. As I said before, we have different versions of the act there. We really got it in. So we were asking for environmental transparency from all artificial intelligence, or at least the high risk ones, and we asked for environmental sustainability standards, really for general purpose AI. So the ChatGPTs of this world, of whom we know that they use a lot of water, energy and critical raw materials. And in the final version, we now have this environmental transparency in. And there will be in the review, at some point, they will have a look at environmental standards, which is really like, you cannot imagine what a big fight that has been, because we even had a commissioner who said artificial intelligence is numbers. Numbers can't pollute. Numbers don't have an environmental impact. You know, and it's really been a massive fight to only get people realizing that the fact we're talking about clouds, the fact that we are talking about just AI and things that sound very futuristic, doesn't mean that there's very big, ugly boxes in our environment that are just using lots of CO2 and water. So the fact that we managed to get it in and even got the member states on board to accept it is something I'm very proud of. And we're going to have transparency. They were going to have to be transparent. And that's such an important step to make sure that as soon as we know how much they exactly use, and we have ideas and estimates, which are mind boggling, we can really do something about it.Gael Duez 14:32So if I understand it well, we do have standards, or we have to have standards. What will be the standards? Because at the beginning of the discussion, we say that we terribly lack transparency. So can we have a grasp of what you think will be the future? Okay, so we've got a standard. The bill is passed. How does it work a bit more concretely?Kim Van Sparrentak 14:56Well, so we have a standard for transparency. But I think when you're talking about environmental standards, for example, for artificial intelligence, you are basically, you should look at the full supply chain of artificial intelligence. So you already start with thinking about, do we need, how much data do we need? There's, of course, the more data is better in the artificial intelligence world and in the tech world in general, the more data we have, the better we can do everything, which is not true. It's about quality data. And it's not per se about more data, because if you just add more bad data, that in the end you don't have quality data. But it's also about how do you program these systems? You can program systems to run more efficiently and make sure that they don't use as much computing power as they do right now. Right now, the only goal is to make sure that you end up with something that you like. Whereas if you are a smart engineer, you can also immediately make sure that you reduce the computing power. And then lastly, of course, we have to also make sure that the data centers that they use are more sustainable, use less water, et cetera, and are more circular. But I think, yeah, when we really have environmental standards for AI, it really means the whole supply chain has to be readjusted. And I really hope that just by having environmental standards already, a lot of these companies are realizing how much money they waste. Because in the end, it's of course, the bottom line for these big corporations by just polluting more. And I really hope that's going to be a thing. One of the things I've been very worried about is that when you see these booms of certain digital tools, also with cryptocurrency, for example, suddenly it becomes almost worthwhile again to reopen coal power plants, because you will make more money than it will cost to buy off the pollution of these coal power plants. So we really have to have a different mentality and a different approach, and at least having transparency and these corporations being held accountable, hopefully through that transparency, will really change the way that these digital companies work.Max Schulze 17:25I really like the way you explained this, Kim. By the way, we shouldn't forget that our economy is based on energy conversion into value. And the digital world has the highest delta. So a kilowatt of energy put into the digital world can lead to the biggest value creation. A good example of that is a very good friend of all of us, Chris Adams from the Greenfield Foundation. He drilled into AWS, or Amazon's as a whole company, power consumption. He found that, first of all, that's the equivalent of Ireland. That's how much power they consume. But how much of their revenue is that in cost? And it's about 4%. So really, do they really care about the energy consumption of their business? Is it really affecting their bottom line if it's only 4% of revenue? And there you see this, how much value they squeeze out of energy is just insane, right? Just have to acknowledge that.I want to be the digital philosopher in this podcast for a minute… So, Kim, if you would really ask her, honestly, I was never in these AI discussions, right? Even though I am a clear activist for this stuff. I've also never been in the crypto discussions because I know that I can't do anything about it, because the power that is pushing to do it exactly the way they want is so big that there's no way we can stop it. And that makes me, as a citizen of Europe, it makes me really sad that we cannot choose if we want to have AI or not. We cannot choose if we want to have crypto or not. We cannot somehow make various based choices anymore. To put an example, if somebody builds a nuclear power plant over there next to my house, I have a say. But if somebody builds a 400 megawatt data center, which is actually, I live in an area of the Netherlands where around me, I have about 400 data centers, I have no say, I have no way to stop it. And my values are not embedded. I cannot vote on it. I cannot say, “I don't want it. I don't want it to use fresh drinking water.” I can't. I have no power over it. And I find this incredibly frustrating. And that's why I keep also talking about the systems perspective, is that we ought to unbundle this power, because that's really what's going on. It is not that… Kim, you also talk about the right to repair a lot. Like, there's no problem repairing these things, like an iPhone or an Android device. It's just that the companies don't want it that way, and they have so much power that they'll keep it that way. And that's the systemic issue we need to get to. And so if I have very little personnel and energy. So that's why you don't see me in these, let's say, application discussions. You see me only in the discussions at the systems level or at the infrastructure level, because I think that there is, for me, as an activist, there is more impact at the moment that I can have at the top level. I know we need to do it, but I have never felt so powerless than being in these kinds of conversations.Kim Van Sparrentak 20:28You know, one of the major difficulties working on digital affairs is that there's not many discussions in society around these topics for generally whether we want them or not. And I think it was very clear during the Artificial Intelligence Act, at some point, we were at a point where a majority of the parliament, because of lobbyists, big tech lobbyists, set general purpose AI, generative AI, and foundation models like ChatGPT and DALI from the AI Act. That's where we were at. No one is better than I. Most people were like, AI act also my colleagues. Great, you are doing that because it sounds complicated. And then ChatGPT came out, and there was a massive discussion in society on what these systems can do. Do we want that? Do we want them to be regulated? And suddenly the mood shifted, and we wrote a whole chapter on what we had to do with foundation models. What we don't have right now is a societal discussion indeed on what we want when it comes to digitization, is it useful? Do we need all these things that can generate videos for some reason, while we know that that uses lots of energy and can be used in a dangerous way when it comes to our democracies, for example, we need that discussion, and it's very difficult to start a discussion from top down. So it's something that I'm really thinking about. And I think one of the first things, and this diverges a bit from the core of this podcast, so I'll keep it very short. But one of the core things I'm working on is seeing how we can deal with digitization in the work environment, because that's where most people actually experience digitization already, and where we can actually have discussions on whether we want our bosses to know exactly how many keystrokes per hour we do. And I think by having a lot of people involved in the discussions on whether they want digitization on the workflow, we can actually, hopefully, create a more broad discussion. How much digitization do we actually want, and to what extent do we want to stay human in this world? So that's really something I hope will happen. But it's necessary in order to, indeed change that system where right now there's a few big corporations with all the knowledge and all the power versus, you know. Yeah, quite a difficult situation.Max Schulze 23:15I just want to point out. Okay, you are an entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur– used to be. And I'm the son of a secretary. I came into software 15 years ago thinking that I can automate all the stuff that my mom is doing because it's such a waste of time, like scanning receipts, scheduling meetings, responding to silly emails. And these problems are still not solved 15 years later. We have amazing technology. If you read the news, like, wow, I still scan receipts with my phone. The OCR still doesn't work. I have to manually correct the amounts and upload it to some system. Even with jet DBT and all this stuff, the fundamental things that digitalization promised us, making us, giving us a better life, more free time, that we don't have to do menial work. I feel like I have to do more menial work now than I've ever had to before, but I just use 40 different tools to do it.Gael Duez 24:11But Max, if you allow me to borrow your philosopher hat, and then we will move on to one of the regulations. Actually, you worked quite a lot on it, but you know, that's going to be true philosophy. I think we need a bit of a niche here. When you say, you know, God is dead, we killed it. And the truth is, in today's society, technology is not a tool. It's a God. It's a religion. It's the religion of progress that has completely bypassed all the former religions in Europe. Europe is a very, I mean, except maybe some eastern countries and still very agnostic, I would say, to say the least, places. But there is one true religion, which is technology. Technology is good. Technology will solve everything. And I can say it very freely as a technologist because I enjoy technology. But as you stated in the introduction of this podcast, it's very important to use it as it is, which is pharmakon, which is both a cure and a poison. And that's something that is barely understandable, I think, in today's society, because technology is not at a rational place. It is literally at the place almost at par with God. So it will save us. And that's very hard to open the debate in societies and even harder when people are working in technology, because they like the new doctors of society, you know, they can cure and save everything, and let's save the problem. But if we move on to something where, Max, you believed you had a bit more influence on top of being a tech philosopher, you mentioned the right to repair directive. Maybe we should talk a bit about this one as well.Max Schulze 25:56Yeah, but I think to give some space to Kim, I think she should give the overview again, and then I can add some commentary on that.Kim Van Sparrentak 26:06Sure. So, yeah, we have an initiative to have the right to repair, and this is now also legislation that we only need a final vote on. And it means that, yeah, we want to give people the right to repair, and that's also what the legislation said. But what does that mean? It sounds a bit vague, but, for example, think of your iPhone. I think it's the easiest example, one part of your iPhone breaks and you have to buy a full new one because it's not possible to change the battery because it's glued in, it's not possible to properly change other parts. So at some point your phone just goes to waste. But there's also other aspects, which is, for example, the internal software. This is not fully part of the right to repair, but that's also one of the things that we're seeing more and more, that at some point you can't update your software anymore and you just have to get rid of your phone. And this is, of course, a very smart business model, but it's not a business model that's going to get us anywhere, us having to buy a new phone every two, three years when we're lucky. So yeah, this is one of the things that we wanted to work on and one of the things that we are now going to push for is making sure that products are able to be repaired. And secondly, that also, this doesn't only have to be done by the company itself, so you don't have to go to Apple with your iPhone. And also that spare parts will be still available for a long time, so you can actually do it for a long time. And it's not that after three years, like, oh, yeah, no, that spare part doesn't exist anymore. So it's very interesting that we really go from the angle of consumer rights and that we make it a right to repair. And I think this is actually something we're going to see more and more in the future, that we are coming from a consumer protection angle when it comes to environmental but also digital rights. And it's very interesting. And I think the right to repair is really one of the first ones.Max Schulze 28:22It's a good overview. I think there was something in there that I will build on, which is this idea of software obsolescence, because I know that Gaël’s audience is a lot of people who make tech. And you all maybe remember the Internet Explorer thing where I was a web developer and I hated Internet Explorer because you had to always build websites that work in the most cutting edge case, but also in the legacy case, which was Internet explorer. And eventually we said we're just not going to support it anymore. But we still do that in software that we build on the latest MacBook Pros. We have the supercomputer at home and that's what we're building for. But we need to start thinking about building for less fast devices and also supporting them for much longer because we need to realize that it's always software that forces hardware to be thrown away. Always. It's an operating system that doesn't work anymore for me. I'm not so much on the consumer side, I'm a lot on the data center side. And there is firmware of switches that gets deprecated. And then all of a sudden a very functional switch that's maybe three years old needs to be replaced because somebody said, ah, you know, this switch, it's like three years old, we're not going to support it anymore. This is all a choice of software engineers. Sometimes it's also a business decision, but a lot of times it's a, it's a, it's a choice of software people, and we need to be really careful with those choices. Especially most hardware doesn't get faster anymore. So this idea of replacing it to get more speed has long been obsolete. And we need to make sure that everything should be backwards compatible at this point, at least for the last ten years of hardware generation.Gael Duez 30:08And is it this ten word number, which is a pretty big one for any software engineer or designers? Is it something that is already enforced by law, or is it something that we should get prepared to?Max Schulze 30:22Well, I tell you, I wish I had some numbers that I could tell you how much hardware is being made obsolete by software, but there we go with my favorite word, and Kim is also now using it a lot is the word transparency, we just don't know. But I appeal to all of you who are using these days browser based applications or things that are desktop apps, but they're actually just Google Chrome inside, Electron apps, for example. Look at how much memory they're using. You look at how much of their computer's performance is absorbed by essentially software that assumes that you have 8Gb of memory or 16 Gb of memory. And like I said, it's the same with the argument of my mom. I have a very fast computer these days, and I still manage to find like four applications that completely drag it down. And that just means that somebody didn't pay attention to that and assumed that everybody sits on this mega machine. If you want an economic argument to that, the majority of society does not have MacBook Pros. So if you want your product to be usable, high performing, you must make it work on really slow devices. Because the majority site is not on iPhones, not on MacBook Pros, it's not on HP elite books, it's on cheap 300 euro laptops, cheap phones. That's where the market is at. And if you want economic reasoning, there you go. Go get that market. Gael Duez 31:50Thanks, Max. Still, I go back to my question. This right to repair, I got it about spare parts not being forced to go to your vendor. And I know that Apple is a true champion about it. But what about this software angle? Is there anything in the law saying that, “Hey, you need to maintain the software long enough” Or was it a kind of a lost battle in the bill?Kim Van Sparrentak 32:17If I'm correct, it's not in this specific law, it's in another one. And we now are saying that planned obsolescence also for software should not be possible. I think, yeah, I think it's the eco design directive, part of the empowering consumers for the green transition. But there's so many of these legislations that it's very possible it's the eco design directive, but there are so many right now. And indeed eco design again is then an environmental standards directive. And then you also have the consumer angle again, where it's about, I think also about this plant obsolescence. So I'm not sure if it was an environmental standard or consumer protection standard, but we're saying plant obsolescence shouldn't be possible anymore. But that's a problem because how can you prove that a company actively planned for your products to not work anymore? So we're still working on the legal angle of that.Max Schulze 33:22I think that's also something we really struggle with in general for your listeners, is that enforceability? One of the biggest problems in general with software. And I'm going to use our favorite search engine in the world again as an example. Let's say we force Google to reduce the energy consumption per search by 10%. Let's say we do that. How are you going to check? Because every time you ask them, can I see it? They're like, no, sorry, that's intellectual property. How we do search, and it's true. That's their IP. How they do that is their secret. I get that, but how are we going to check? If we can never look behind the curtain? And they always say, like, we promise it's better now. You can't show you, but it's better. That's a bit. This enforcement issue and we don't have, unfortunately, Kim knows we don't have any internet police either that drives around and looks at digital applications and is checking like, is this one energy efficient? Is this one energy efficient? Is this one using minerals from child labor somewhere down the value chain? It's very tricky, because software, you only see the facade and it's very hard to look behind the curtain. And the first attempt to do that was to look at data centers, but it's very far behind the curtain. That's like looking at the light bulb of the stage. All we wanted to do was look behind the curtain, but now we're somehow like in the very back of it. And that's why I think we need to figure out a way, how do we actually check software to uphold the rules and values that we have tried to embody through regulation?Gael Duez 34:55And is there anything in the pipeline about this specific enforcement issue or not at the moment?Max Schulze 35:01This year's advocacy strategy for the SAA, and soon with a new name, is to educate policymakers. So to essentially just train people on the systemic understanding, because as long as we use technology and product also as synonymous, and data center, and fiber as synonymous, it's very tricky to get there. But I think the thing that's in the pipeline is a better understanding of how this works, which should lead to better regulation.Kim Van Sparrentak 35:29One of the things I'm trying to get into place is a digital agency. So one agency in the EU that can enforce all the major digital legislation. This would mean that there is an agency that gets insight on artificial intelligence, for example, that is being used by big corporations. And if they already have that, they could perhaps also look at the environmental impact and the computing power. So if we manage to have the smartest people in one agency working on these things, hopefully that will, in the end, also make it easier to have legislation on these kinds of aspects that can be more easily enforced. But it's an uphill battle.Gael Duez 36:11So I got it about the digital agency enforcing those regulations. And yes, that's definitely something that could be done. And actually just bouncing back on what Max said about intellectual property, Airbus has a lot of intellectual property also on how they make their plane flight. And still you do have a lot of controllers coming and checking everything. So I think this IP stuff is full of bullshit. Once you've got accredited people, and under the oath people, they should have access to everything. This idea of, like, a business secret is just complete nonsense. Business secrets stop when sustainability matters, human rights matters.Max Schulze 36:52I agree with you completely, Kim said it very nicely. Who cares right now? When you sit in a plane, you want the plane to be safe. And you look at your government, you elect the government, say, like, you better make sure those planes are safe, because otherwise I'm going to die. With tech, most of society today I mean, I try to have a lot of discussions with people who are not at all in tech and try to really understand how they're thinking about it. And, I mean, they're getting a lot of their truths, their information. They're getting a lot of pleasure out of modern technology. And it's a little bit like asking somebody who really likes the smoke to advocate for stopping the tobacco industry. And it's very hard to explain that there is somehow a safety risk because it doesn't feel like a plane, but there is. I mean, if you see the humps of children these days from holding the phone and scrolling TikTok, I cry, I'm a father. How do I protect my children from this? And unfortunately, I'm not in that part of advocacy. I wish I could be, but I really think, like, I mean, just the safety risk is so visible in our children. And it's not this argument, like, oh, you know, you're old now. You know, back then it was the same with TVs. Everybody said it's bad for you, but it's not that bad for you. But look, there are physical people who have these dumb things. They have this hump. Even the Chinese government is outlawing a certain amount of gaming. It's obvious that there is something, something there.Kim Van Sparrentak 38:21I'm working a lot on addictive design of mobile phones, and it is psychological tricks and manipulative tricks that they are putting in our mobile devices, in social media, which is harmful, and we have to do something about it. Check out addictive design and what we did on that in the European Parliament. I'm very proud that I led the work on that.Gael Duez 38:40I'd like to jump on the last one because you mentioned the light bubble of data centers. But actually, I know that both of you worked quite a lot also on data center regulation. And Max, you were specifically involved with the SDIA on the European Energy efficiency directive from the European Union. Why did you invest so much energy into this specific battle?Max Schulze 39:05So, tech, really, from an environmental science perspective, is all the environmental impact of the digital world is in its physical infrastructure, in servers, phones, devices, data centers, these buildings. So that's one. The other thing is, it's a lot easier to get people what we just discussed to care if it's a physical thing. And so I advocate a lot for the transparency of the environmental impact of data centers. So we can essentially create more outrage because every single time, a number comes out of how much water, how much energy, how much of the Dutch, for example, renewable energy goes into this infrastructure, the more people are making that connection between, well, we have this massive pile of digital technology that I actually don't really like that much. And somehow a third of my country's energy goes there. Why? That's for me, why I invest so much energy in there, because I find there a storytelling lever, and I need that data to be public. I need to really rip it open so that we can then do real advocacy at the moment, like, in the absence of facts, I find it very hard. I'm not a former US president who invents facts. I would like the facts to be transparent and public, and then I can do advocacy with those facts. And that's why I'm so much behind this energy efficiency directive. And unfortunately, in the current version, most of the facts that I need are not public. Again, they have managed to make it only visible to the commission, which is progress, but they're not public.Gael Duez 40:48And what are these numbers that you were looking for?Max Schulze 40:53So, actually, the list of metrics that was developed in this directive is very comprehensive. It goes all the way down to the hardware being used, how rare minerals and metals are in there, how much traffic goes in and out, energy, water. Everything we have dreamed of is in that list. But what's public is only the effectiveness of how they're using it. So imagine a financial statement of a company only showing you profit margin, but not revenue and cost. And then they're saying, like, look, we're fine. We're having a 30% margin. How much money you're making, can't tell you.Gael Duez 41:30Making things visible is a very smart approach, especially when you said it countless times in this episode, that transparency is key. But once transparency is done, that needs to be also accessible and understandable by people. So I got it. In talking about transparency, how these laws are made for real, how does it work? Specifically, what are these lobbyists? And actually, Max, you acknowledge to be considered as one of them, so that's pretty cool, but maybe if you're more an activist than a lobbyist. But how does it work?Kim Van Sparrentak 42:08Let me start by saying lobbyists are not per se bad. I think it is actually quite a crucial part of politics, to be honest, because they give us precious information and insights in certain things, also in industries that make us better lawmakers. But there is a limit. And the limit is, of course, first of all, making sure we have a bit of a level playing field. And the fact that €100 million a year is spent by big tech lobbyists in Brussels doesn't really give a level playing field to people who are not trying to fight for big techs. Right? So that is really a very problematic part. And if you want to know how exactly laws are made, no one really knows. But we do know that there's a very big chunk of big tech companies trying to influence these laws and trying to make sure that people decide not to put forward certain things or try to make sure that certain companies or certain systems are exempted from legislation. Just to give you an idea of what kind of things I see, maybe, from lobbies. So first of all, of course, I get the emails with, we would like to talk with you, and this is our position paper. Then I can have talks with lobbyists where they tell me, for example, Amazon, that they are the most sustainable company in the world. But also sometimes, actually, I also have interesting conversations to learn a bit more on how their systems actually work and what kind of different departments they have working on different, different ideas or different parts of companies. But then that's the formal part. That's the formal part of lobbies. Then the informal part is that they help produce reports or their lawyers produce reports, and suddenly it says something about a big tech company in a newsletter that everyone in the European bubble reads based on a seemingly independent report. But then if you look, it's actually the lawyer who also represents the big tech company who wrote it, or it's a call from startups for tech, which sounds very nice. You know, we want to help European startups. Turns out that they've all been sponsored by Google, and what they're saying is actually what Google wants. When you walk around the European district, almost all the billboards are filled with big tech company ads saying how they're going to protect children, how they will protect the environment, how they will protect democracies. When you turn on a podcast in the European parliament, usually the first ad you hear is Google does everything right. So it's a lot more than that. And I think what is important to understand is that it in general doesn't influence, I think the people who are really at the core of working on this legislation, to some extent they might the rapporteurs and the shadow rapporteurs, but it's especially the people in their political groups that don't know anything about the topic that are influenced and then try to have a say in how the group votes in the end. And those are the ones that then have, that the lobbyists have an influence on. So that makes it very difficult.Gael Duez 45:31The 100 million budget spent by big tech companies. Is it a firm number or an estimation? What does it come from?Kim Van Sparrentak 45:39I think it's a firm number. It comes from a Corporate Observatory in Europe. They do very, very good research on all the different lobbyists.Gael Duez 45:47Shouldn't we have a way to differentiate a scientific report from all the other reports? And the scientific reports being something published by people with non financial links, plus, peer reviewed, plus, plus. And isn't it the main transparency battle, the mother of all battles is that you cannot call a scientific study something that is not scientific. And actually it should even be made compulsory to say, this is an unscientific report.Kim Van Sparrentak 46:15There are scientific reports made by very smart professors that did that in their university. And turns out when you really look into them, that they're also on the advisory board of a big tech company. So we had one example when it was about the Digital Services Act and how we should deal with targeted advertising. There was a report. If you actually read the report, it was quite damning for the big tech companies. And it was actually like, you could have read it as a strong call for stronger regulation. But when you read the summary and when the professor came to explain the report… No, there was not really a need for regulation. And, you know, then you really have a problem. Then you have a professor that has done independent research, but the message they're conveying is actually blurred by big tech influence. And this is really a problem we're having. And that's also why it's actually a lot of work. When you get an email from someone or when you get requested for a meeting by certain organizations, you really have to, I always really have to go through their websites to see, but who are they actually representing? And that's that. And that becomes more blurry all the time. And every time they come up with new tricks, which is very frustrating.Max Schulze 47:43To go even deeper, we were talking about the AI Act. I was at the German AI campus, which is like a government, state funded mega facility together with the Max Planck Institutes, and I talked to the professors that everybody's doing a collaborative project with Google right now, and this is state funded. And I'm like, okay, and then they say things like, oh, any process that we digitize is by nature more energy efficient. That's a physically correct statement, but that's not really how reality looks like, does it? And I think we have technology, we have a power delta problem, the same as we knew with the tobacco industry and we same, we knew with the oil industry that there's just so much money and they're just everywhere and when Kim says 100 million, we're talking about direct spending on lobbying. We're not talking about working with the different municipalities in every country, making sure that Ireland feels like, hey, we're bringing jobs to you, and in return, we want your vote. They're everywhere, and they have so much money available to them to do that. And what we did with tobacco and all, at some point we said, hey, in the Netherlands, the tobacco industry cannot lobby. And I'm not saying that's the way it needs to go, but we can have the tech sector lobby. But there is a certain scale of the company that is as a civil society organization. I represent society. I can tell you I cannot compete. Even if every European citizen would give me a euro a year as a donation, my budget would still be just barely on par with the big top five lobbyists together, just to put that in your mind. But then comes the geopolitical angle. We can't piss off the Americans. Then the US government calls and says, well, we would like you to stop bullying our tech companies.Gael Duez 49:30And how do you do on a daily basis dealing with this frustration, Max? Because we had some success in regulations. I mean, we've listed quite a lot of them. So somehow we managed to get through some of these hurdles.Max Schulze 49:46Kim said it. We just need society to be aware. That's it. That's where my energy comes from. The more I get people to be aware, the happy I am that I can be on this podcast, Gaël. That you build this platform is amazing because it touches more people. And eventually there will be a momentum shift. And once we have that momentum shift, everything will change. But to create the momentum shift, there needs to be people like us that push.Gael Duez 50:11I think that's nice closing words to describe why we've launched the Green IO podcast and all the other related events. I like to ask this very simple question to close the podcast. Can you share some good news? Something that really uplifted you when it comes to sustainability, even better if it's digital sustainability.Kim Van Sparrentak 50:35One of the things that has given me a lot of hope is going to the Make Amazon Pay Conference in Manchester in November. And there, it was so amazing to see how trade unions, environmental groups, indigenous people rights groups, digital rights groups, policymakers, I must forget other groups that are involved there. All are working together to make sure that a massive corporate moguls such as Amazon becomes more sustainable and will be held accountable. And it's so cool to see that groups from all different aspects are working together on this. So that really, really gives me hope. It also means, you know, it also shows how much work it is that we need people from every angle. But, yeah, that's something that really gives me hope.Max Schulze 51:30Yeah. And for me, the positive thing is we talked a lot about the 100 million being spent, but it means something really positive. It means that Europe is considered to get the job done, to embody values in our digital world. And that's why everybody's here. That's why the battleground is in Brussels and all over Europe. But it means that people know that European citizens care about this and we will get it done. We're showing that we have teeth and we will get it done. And we need, just as citizens, to remain active and engaged. That's really important.Gael Duez 52:03Well, that was a nice closing word. So thanks, both of you, for your very precious time to enlighten a bit how it works in the European Union political system. The different legislations, we didn't cover all of them. We didn't talk about CSRD, we didn't talk about taxonomy. But hey, that would be, maybe that would have required a fully other episode. But thanks, both of you. Talk to you soon, hopefully. Bye.Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. I hope it has strengthened your decision to vote in the next European election by illustrating the pivotal role of European institutions, starting with the parliament. If you are convinced about it and enjoy the discussion, please share it massively around you. And of course, don't forget to give us 5 stars on Apple and Spotify if this is not already done. It will give our little team, Jill, Meibel, Tani and I, a nice booster. In our next episode, we will welcome Yannick Aliola, Green Code author, and Sato Heikinhaimo, the founder of the Planet Diplomat Initiative, to get a Nordics angle on digital sustainability. Stay tuned! Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. The next one is in London on September 19th. Early bird tickets are available until June 18th. Even better for you as a Green IO listener, you can get a free ticket using the Voucher GREENIOVIP. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world. One bite at a time.
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🔎 What are the main angles to be covered when you truly want to design, run, and sometimes decommission, software, in the greenest possible way?🎙️ In this episode, Sara Bergman, a seasoned software engineer and one of the acclaimed co-authors of the O’Reilly book “Building Green Software” joins Gaël Duez to discuss the book, and more specifically the chapters on AI, measurements, and hardware.Some takeaways:💻 Software people’s responsibility in utilizing hardware🌡️ Concept of temperature-aware computing☁️ Importance of major cloud providers🌱 Some follow-up on the discussion on carbon-aware vs grid-aware computing for more effective environmental impact
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Learn more about our guest and connect: * Sara's LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Sara's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* Building Green Software book * Green Software Foundation * Green IO #21 Greening Software 101 with Anne Currie & Arne Tarara * Environment Variables podcast * Can Federated Learning Save the Planet? * InfoQ articles on Green Software * Huggin Face * Kaggle * Oil firms forced to consider full climate effects of new drilling, following landmark Norwegian court ruling

TranscriptGaël Duez 00:00Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world one byte at a time. Every two Tuesdays, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO. All the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes both on your podcast platform and on our website greenio.tech O’Reilly books remain a world class reference when it comes to sharing IT knowledge. It kind of sets the tones on what matters in the software industry. And to be honest, if you do a quick research on a topic like security, you will easily find ten to twelve books talking about these topics in the last, I would say five years. I did the exercise with machine learning and AI and data, and it's just overwhelming. And then when you do the exercise with sustainability, I have to say that until this year, the only book mentioning clearly sustainability in its title was the one from Tim Freak, which was published way back in 2016. So it is a fair statement to say that the new O’Reilly book, Building Green Software, written by Anne Curie, Sara Bergman and Sarah Hsu, has been very much awaited in the green software industry, in the green software community. So this is why I'm delighted to have today on the show Sara Bergman with us to talk about the latest trends and what are all the angles to be covered when you truly want to design and to run and to maybe sometimes decommission software in the greenest possible way. Sara, as I said, is one of the co-authors of this book. She is a senior software engineer. She works at Microsoft. She's based in Norway. And I think I have to give her double kudo in this episode, because this year she gave birth twice. First to a wonderful book, much acclimated and much awaited, as I say, but also to a beautiful little boy. So nice to meet you, Sara. Congratulations for bringing yet another beautiful human being on planet Earth. And thanks for joining the show today.Sara Bergman 02:44Thank you. Thank you three times. Yes, it's been quite exciting the last twelve months, indeed. I'm really glad to be on the podcast. Thanks for having me.Gaël Duez 02:55You're more than welcome. And Sarah, if you listen to us, the other Sarah, you know you don't have to be jealous because you will also join the podcast at some point in September. And you're the one in Green IO London, the conference, the on-site conference that will have a book signing session. So we will have the three Musketeers on the show at some point or the other. But, Sara, before we jump into the nitty gritty of building green softwares, where you will bring your own expertise, I must say, I admire you so much. Every time I try to write an article, it's great for, I would say the first two thirds, and then I just can't make it. I just cannot close the project, etcetera. It's just a little article. And you wrote a book. You have to tell me, what is your secret recipe to manage to write a book on top of being a very active member of the climate action tech community, a very active member in the Green Software Foundation? A very active member. I guess. I mean, you're still on their payroll at Microsoft. So how did you manage?Sara Bergman 04:08Yeah. Also while being pregnant. Gaël Duez 04:13I mentioned it, but I didn't want to bring it up yet another time in the discussion.Sara Bergman 04:18Yeah. Sometimes I question my life choices. Sometimes I'm very happy with my life choices. No, but I think there are several things. So, first of all, I got the question to co-write this book. It was in the early stages of my pregnancy, and I was like, is this really a good time? There was definitely a lot of mom guilt from my side, you know, should I be doing this sort of selfish project when I should really just be focusing on my, my kid? But then, you know, how many times in your life will you get the question to write a book, especially the book I always wanted to write for O'Reilly, like, I felt this was maybe a once in a lifetime opportunity and I didn't want to regret it. And after all, you know, my son is going to live on after me. He's going to have a whole life on this planet. So I want to do everything I can do to ensure he has a bright future. So, yes, I said yes to write this book, but I wasn't the lone writer. I had Anne and I had Sarah. And when I asked other people, like, who have written books, like, oh, what are your best tips? A lot of them said, don't have any co authors, but I want to say, do they have co authors? Have co authors that you know and trust, Anne and Sarah, I mean, there would have been no book without them. It's been a great collaboration. We work really well together. I'm so pleased to be able to say that. And that's been such a driving function. You know, when you did a little bit of motivation, they had my back and I had their backs, and we could proofread each other's stuff. So that's been, that's been a really big part in sort of getting this book out. Also, having deadlines when it's like enforced by someone else can be really, I am at least motivated by that. You know, you should have this done by this date and sort of set it up at a reasonable pace. It hasn't been, in fact, we were a little bit faster than what O'Reilly suggested because we were motivated to get the book out the door. So that was helpful. And thirdly, it's a really fun thing to write about, I think. I enjoy writing. I always had and I miss it in my normal work, so to speak, because then I write code, but I don't write so much text except emails. Write a lot of emails. Gaël Duez 06:49Are you going to use the generating AI to do your emails? I'm surprised.Sara Bergman 06:54They will take away the creative process of writing. No, I know it's a great feature. I enjoy writing. So I guess that was a long answer to a short question.Gaël Duez 07:04Yeah, but that's a very interesting answer, I guess. Enjoying it. You need to find pleasure in entering such a big adventure. And let's talk about green software now. I guess you brought some specialties, some special knowledge compared to your colleague. I remember, for instance, that Anne was very proactive and was very, even a bit provocative regarding how you should code, looking for efficiency, trusting language builders rather than trying to tweak them, et cetera. She had also a pretty strong stance on AI, who would be a no brainer when it's about coding and coding efficiently. But I guess you brought other areas of expertise. And correct me if I'm wrong, one of them is artificial intelligence and data management.Sara Bergman 08:00Yeah, I did write a lot of that content for the book. And I want to say I'm not a data scientist, I am a software engineer. But AI and sustainability has really been a focus of mine, especially my talking career. I had my first talk on that subject in 2020. So that was like before the hype sort of. And the reason I've been interested in it is because there's been so much good research in that field. There's been so many fantastic researchers who have done a lot of studies, published a lot of data on it. So it's really, it's been a topic that was really easy to understand because other people have made all this wonderful information available and I don't know if it makes me weird or not, but I do enjoy reading research articles. I think they're fascinating. I think it's so cool that we as a global community have this practice where we pay people to do cutting edge research and then they publish these results for free for everyone to reap the benefit of, I think that's amazing. So, yes, AI was definitely something we wanted to bring into the book. It wasn't actually originally in the plan when we first decided to write it, but then of course, with the LLM wave that happened in 2023, it was a no-brainer to include it.Gaël Duez 09:30That was actually one of my questions, because there is this debate, like, is data management, data science part of software engineering, or is it subtopic, or is it a completely different field now? And I don't think it really matters to enter the debate, but I was happily surprised to see a chapter. So what are the top three main takeaways for you? If I want to be a sustainable software engineer, I have to deal with large amounts of data or AI. What are the main takeaways?Sara Bergman 10:04So, the main takeaways, I would say the first, is to reuse what's already out there. Other people spend a lot of energy and time and carbon to, for example, collect large datasets or for example, already trained models. Can you use those data sets? Can you use those models either directly or use transfer, learning to apply them to a new problem domain that's sort of similar, then you save carbon compared to starting from scratch, because you can utilize something that's already in existence. So if you think about the waste permit of reduce, reuse, recycle, burn, then the same applies here, right? It's always best to reduce, but if you can reuse, that's great, etcetera, etcetera. So that's the first takeaway. Secondly is to shrink the model size, both the training phase, but also once you deploy it and shrinking model size is ongoing and has been ongoing for quite some time, research space. So there are already all these great techniques. You can compress, you can use distillation quantization, and that saves you time, which is more efficient because if you have a smaller model, you can, for example, train it faster. Training it faster means you can utilize this hardware, this energy used to power the hardware on for other things. Same with the model. Once it's in production, a smaller model will take smaller space. You can even use smaller hardware devices. For example, you might even be able to deploy to the edge or to an Internet of Things device. So yeah, that's the number two. Shrink the model size.Gaël Duez 11:53Regarding this smaller is beautiful approach, you mentioned edge computing. Do you believe that that's a viable option when it comes to AI?Sara Bergman 12:05It really depends on what you're using AI for and the type of model that you have. I think for some scenarios it's absolutely viable. And not all AI needs to be these huge models. I believe we can use it for smaller things perhaps as well. And then I think edge can be really good. It's also a great way. If you're using user data to train your model, then you could even use something called federated learning, where you train your model closer to the end users. You sort of collaborate on a model, and in that case edge can be good because you don't have to transfer all the data back and forth to your data center, but you can rather share the model and not the sort of data itself, if that makes sense.Gaël Duez 12:50I didn't know about federated learning. Could you share an example? Did you have some ideas and illustrations in your mind?Sara Bergman 12:58So there is a paper actually called Can Federated Learning Save the Planet? And that's really good. In that paper, they had some examples of what they used it for, and then they compared it to traditional centralized data center training and saw that this can be a bit slower to converge, obviously, because you have all the end users collaborating on a model, but it can also be a greener approach, mostly because you're more efficient in how you use your hardware and you use the network less as well.Gaël Duez 13:28And do they provide an order of magnitude? Is it like 5 times, 50 times, 1 million times less carbon intensive?Sara Bergman 13:37Yeah, they're a little bit careful because it sort of depends on external factors like the grid intensity. Where do you place the data center? How long do you send the data? So it's a lot of ifs and buts, the way it can be in grant software. So it's not super straightforward to give a magnet to it always.Gaël Duez 13:57You mentioned reusing data in like the three R of waste management. I really love it. So of course there is a reducing part, and I think we could spend an entire episode on. Do we really need to gather that amount of data? Most of it, which will not be used with the reducing. I mean, if I'm a software engineer, not that well connected to the AI community, etcetera, etcetera. You know, someone asked me, okay, some sort of generative AI, etcetera, and the obvious answer would be, okay, I'll go for char GPT or GPT-3 depending what you want to achieve, and I don't want to do that. Where could I find these models or these data sets? That I can reuse that.Sara Bergman 14:46Two great places to look at, at least, are Kaggle and Hugging Face. They have lots of both data and models open source available, and they're community led, which is pretty cool.Gaël Duez 14:59Okay, so Kaggle and Hugging Face are the two places you would advise people to look for. Jumping on another part of the book, there is something that was really music to my ears, that you've got an entire chapter dedicated to hardware. And once again, I believe that you're kind of the expert on this topic, and this is not that usual to have a software engineering book going all the way down to the hardware level. So once again, what are the main takeaways of this chapter, and how could you share useful tips or actionable things to do for a software engineer?Sara Bergman 15:34Yeah, so I think there could definitely be a whole book, or like many books on hardware and sustainability, another area of research and really focused attention for a long time by the community. Anything new? I come from so my background in engineering was actually half hardware, half software. So I had, you know, coursemates who, like me, became software engineers. I have others who design hardware. So that's my background on hardware. So here's the thing. No matter what type of software you write, it runs on some kind of hardware. You have to accept that fact and accept that hardware is a part of your life. Even if you just see hardware as, like, a means to an end. Or if, like, there's some people who love hardware, right? They collect old machines, they learn how to program on punch cards. Like, those people are still very much alive and kicking and active in our community. So you know that we have the full, the full range. But either way, like, wherever someone falls on that range, hardware is like a fact of life as a software engineer. And hardware comes with this great carbon debt, right? It's incredibly carbon intensive to produce the kind of hardware that we use to run software. What we wanted in the book is to make sure that this is known, right? I don't think anyone is unaware of this fact, but to really make it, to highlight it, to make it clear that this is a fact and there are things that you in your software can do to affect it. And that's the thing we don't cover anything on. Like how do we make hardware greener? Because, again, that's a topic for a completely different book with other experts to write that book. And there's plenty to be said there. However, we as software people, have a responsibility for how we utilize said hardware. And there are two main things I want to say that you should be doing. And the first is to increase the lifetime of your hardware. Simply use what you have for longer, even if that's a server in your server hall, or if that is to promote end user devices longevity. So basically making them last longer. And the second thing is utilizing what you have effectively, so increasing the utilization, again, more relevant, I want to say, on like the server side, where you have more control. If you are programming for end user devices, you can't really control how much an end user is running simultaneously on their phone, for example. But you can if you own the hardware, and you can if you're deployed to the cloud, by making sure you are using the right tools to enable the cloud provider to be more efficient. And I believe Anne talked about some of those things when she was here.Gaël Duez 18:36And on this specific topic. Did you talk about some sort of graceful degradation concept? The fact that I think Ismaël Velasco is the one who coined it, sorry if someone else did it before, but the idea that it's okay, that maybe some features won't be available on older devices and yet they should be able to smoothly run through your services, etcetera. Hence the graceful degradation. And I really love the graceful degradation idea. Is it something that you believe is applicable? Is it something that you talked about in the book?Sara Bergman 19:13Would you talk briefly about it? Yes. And also how some of that functionality that you may be able to live without should never be security, right? You don't want to leave users on an unsafe device. You still have a responsibility as a software engineer. So that's something we talk about as well. But it's an action packed chapter and it's not super long. So yeah, there's definitely more to be said in the future on that topic.Gaël Duez 19:43And I have one last question that literally popped up in my mind when I was listening to you and connecting the dots with the interview I had with Professor PS Lee who was one of the really worldwide top experts on data center sustainability, especially tropical data centers. He's based in Singapore and he was telling us something that I guess pretty much all of us knew but we don't pay attention to is that the temperature on which you run your processor matters a lot when it comes to the longevity of your equipment. And my point is, and I'm pretty sure you didn't have this crazy idea in the book, but do you believe that at some point we should introduce in our software some sort of feedback loop saying, like for instance, if I launch a very massive batch, data treatment, whatever you name it, real time processing I guess that we should introduce some kind of feedback loop regarding the temperature of our hardware and saying, hey, by the way, you know, if the temperature reaches a certain threshold, even if it doesn't threaten the operation itself, we know that actually we're damaging the hardware. So that could be interesting to pose or to reduce the amount of computing that we are requiring from our machine, whether it's virtual or not, because hence we will literally make its life easier and make sure that the hardware will last longer. Some sort of temperature aware computing.Sara Bergman 21:22I think that would be super cool. And I think this is where we come into, like a distinction of who should write which type of software. I don't think that maybe every software engineer should write that piece of code. It will likely look exactly the same for everyone, but there should be some kind of controlling software that allows you to take these options. So you can just say, when I deploy this, I want to have the temperature aware computing option so you don't have to make the decision, if that makes sense. It's the same when I use my washing machine. I don't know how a washing machine is built. I guess it uses a lot of electricity and water. I know there is an echo program, though. I use that echo program because I trust that the people who build the washing machine are smarter than me and they know how to save the most electricity and water. So I just click the button and the washing machine does it for me. Same with this type of software. All software people can like, understand how it works. Like, yes, keep temperatures down, make hardware last longer, great, but they just want to check the button and not write the code for reading the temperature of the CPU and figuring out when is a good time to switch off and how long should I delay, etcetera, et cetera. It will require us to write possible or breakable programs, though, that can allow for that type of action. But I think that will come more and more when we have more renewables on the grid. We might have to, not might. I think we are going to have to accept that we live in a world where electricity fluctuates, where there's time with more electricity, time with less electricity, and our software is going to have to get on with their lives anyway and sort of gracefully scale up and down, depending on that. And temperature can be the same type of variable, right. Something we did touch a little on in the book is repairs. Right. Sometimes you might notice that some part of your server always kicks the bucket first, typically like your disks, because they get a lot of tension, especially mechanical discs. So maybe you can even change your software to write less, keep those discs around for longer. That's, again, a little harder thing. But it's definitely possible. And depending on the scale you operate on, it can definitely be a worthwhile exercise to at least investigate.Gaël Duez 23:53Yeah, food for thought, indeed. And by the way, you know, these echo programs on your washing machine, I learned very recently that this is the only program that is tested when they deliver the ecolabel. So it means that, you know, when you buy a washing machine with A or B ratings, etcetera, because you're very conscious about, you know, electricity consumption savings and water savings as well. If you use any other program, there is no promise at all that the ratings would be achieved. So the test is only on the echo program. So I guess we have to trust them and use the echo program a lot.Sara Bergman 24:34Oh, that's interesting. I don't know.Gaël Duez 24:36But Sara, I know that you wanted to talk about this topic as well, because that's one of your areas of expertise, something very dear to my heart, actually measuring. And my first question would be how accurate our measurement needs to be to start to do things or to be actionable?Sara Bergman 24:55Yeah, it's a great question, and I think different people have different points of view. Here I am firmly in the camp of let perfect be the enemy of progress. I don't think perfect measurement, of course, it's a goal. It would be great if we could have perfect, reliable, trustworthy carbon data. That will be amazing. We don't, however. So we can't halt all progress just because we don't have this perfect measurement yet. Sometimes I feel people get so caught up in it, it's like, oh, but if I don't have these numbers to report, then I can't show that I made progress, and then there's no point in making progress. And that is exactly what I don't want to happen. So I don't think we need to have perfect measurements. I do think you have to be scientific in the way you measure, though. You can't measure one way. First do some changes and then measure in a completely different way. Obviously, then the result isn't scientific. So you need to keep a scientific approach and measure in the same way. But it's fine to use a proxy, like just measuring energy, it's fine to use cost. For example, if you do it a bit smartly, it's fine to use the amount of hardware that you use as a proxy. You don't have to measure every single detail just to do something, is what I really firmly believe.Gaël Duez 26:15And what is interesting in what you say is it's not only a question of having impact metrics like carbon equivalent emissions, water consumption, abiotic resource depletion, etcetera, having them in a not so accurate way, although always scientifically measured and with a scientific process, because, as you say. But you also find with using proxy metrics, like for instance, for trying to assess the carbon footprint of a website, there is this big debate around whether the weight and the amount of data being exchanged or whether the network really matters or not, and whether it matters short term, etcetera. Well, big debate, but your point is that it's fine to also use this kind of proxy metrics, as long as we know that they go sort of in the right direction and that we measure it in a scientific way.Sara Bergman 27:07Yes, you can always find more things to measure, more complex ways to think about things. There's always more data, more things to consider. What about erosion of the soil? What about eco diversity? What about the water use? What about this and this and that? You can add on, and then you end up in a state of analysis paralysis, where you are just trying to model the perfect reality to make decisions. And that can be a fun exercise to do. And I'm very glad that there are lots of people who are doing it, so the rest of us can make use of that eventually. But that shouldn't stop us from starting to make progress today, because I am convinced that almost everyone is writing software. They know at least one thing they can do to be more efficient, and they might not be able to say it's like ten times more carbon efficient, or even one time more carbon efficient, but they know it will be better. So just having something that can show some number, maybe so you can just show your manager, your datasheet, whoever, you know, decides if that was a good or a bad thing, then I think it's a good thing. I think it's a valid thing, because we are in this state where we can't really afford to sit back and just do the numbers for a while. We need to take action. We need to do things, preferably yesterday.Gaël Duez 28:27I'm on you with this one, that actually, it leaves too many people also on the side of the road waiting for the perfect metrics. And don't get me wrong, I'm part of the Boavizta. These folks there are just geniuses when it comes to metrics, measurement, etcetera. They run one of the most comprehensive databases in the world when it comes to impact hardware. We're very happy to have this kind of people helping us. But for the 99 other percent, waiting for the perfect numbers will be an issue.Sara Bergman 28:59Yeah, and then, and that's why I'm also glad that all major cloud providers have some kind of metric now. It's, I dare say none of them are perfect, but a few years ago we didn't even have that. That is one number you can use to get better. Because like you said, the majority of software people should not be spending their time modeling and figuring out the perfect metric. They should be spending their time writing software. And it's great that we have other people who can focus and do this really in depth analysis. We absolutely need those. But not everyone in the field needs to be doing that.Gaël Duez 29:35We've talked since the beginning of the interview of software engineers, but we know that it comes in very different shapes in flavors, and the same goes for the sustainability experts in our field. Some of them are very much into the clouds. I will slightly disagree that it's better than nothing, but a bit more will be better than better than nothing when it comes to the data provided by main hyperscalers. But I know also that there are great people within these companies trying to move the needle way higher. I would say kudos to them, but I think we could do better, especially regarding the revenues at the end of the year. I think they could allocate a bit more money to speed up things, as you say, preferably yesterday.Sara Bergman 30:19Agreed? Yes. And I think also people who are the customers of cloud providers should ask for this, because that's how any business operates. What the customer wants is what the business will spend time on. If people ask for it, it will be a worthwhile investment for the major cloud provider. So that's something that everyone actually can do to make measurements better.Gaël Duez 30:44Let's use our consumer power also, whether it's in our personal life or professional life. I have one last question, Sara for you. You wrote the three of you a full chapter on carbon aware computing. Sara, don't know if you had the time to listen or to read the episodes that we've made recently with Ismaël Velasco and Hannah Smith on carbon aware computing and the limits of this approach just for the listeners who didn't have the chance to listen to it. The main takeaway from these two great experts is that be cautious about carbon aware computing because it cannot be used as a silver bullet sometimes. The idea of shifting over time or over space your computing workload to go where the grid is greener, aka low carbon. Please stop using the word greener, except me in the subtitles of my show. But it is because I do very lazy marketing tricks. So sorry for this, but otherwise, let's talk about low carbon and renewable. Their main concern, and that connects nicely to what you said about specialization, is that a software engineer and even a data scientist, etcetera, that they're not experts in electricity grid management. And there are some things that we need to pay attention to. For instance, if you shift your workload in a place or in a time where the electricity seems to be low carbon, but actually you're at the very peak of your low carbon production, you might actually trigger the production of very highly carbonized electricity via gas or mostly gas or even coal powered factories. That was one of the issues. The other issue being that for the moment, it's a zero sum game. And if you take the low carbon electricity of someone, he or she will have to use highly carbonized electricity. And it cannot be an excuse not to reduce. You mentioned, like you reduce, reuse, etcetera, it cannot be an excuse not to reduce. And there were other aspects, so I cannot redo the entire episode, but I think there were two of the main takeaways of this discussion, which in a nutshell, ended up with, we might talk about grid aware computing rather than carbon aware computing. And knowing that you're an expert on this topic, and you're a very loud advocate on this approach in the green software foundation, what's your take on it? What's your position on this fine tuning of our approach?Sara Bergman 33:34Absolutely. Hannah and Ismaël, are giants in this field. There are great people. So obviously they have very smart ideas. So yes. Once again, the grid is so complex these days, and not everyone has the time or should spend the time figuring this out. And in the book, we do have a chapter on carbon aware computing, but it's only one chapter out of a whole book, because as you said, it is not the silver bullet. If it was, then, you know, we would only write that chapter and be done with the book but it's not. It's a great tool that can be used. I want to say it's not always perfect considering the signals that we have now, but I believe the signals could be if they were a little bit better. For example, now we sort of have two signals. We have the carbon intensity of the grid, and we also have the cost of the electricity because typically, if it's cheap, no one is competing for that electricity. If it's expensive, a lot of people are competing about that. Electricity. You could combine those two signals and get something that's closer to what I think they suggested. But again, I, as a software engineer, don't want to do that. I want someone to do it for me. So I just have a signal that I can read as an API, for example. I think if I'm allowed to be a visionary a little, I think that will come because I think it will be worthwhile. And then all the things that we talked about in the carbon aware space will apply. It will just listen to slightly different signals is what I personally think. I don't think carbon aware computing is necessarily bad. I don't think it's bad at all, actually. I think it's good. I think it sometimes can be a little counterintuitive, but yeah, that full episode was great. Now let's not redo it. But I strongly agree that it's not the silver bullet. It should not be used as a sales silver bullet, but it is a useful tool to have in your tool belt with all the other things.Gaël Duez 35:34Yeah, fair point, fair point. So I think we unpacked quite a lot of your book. We need to save some chapters for Sarah as well. So maybe I'd like to close the podcast with. Not this time, one, but two questions. The first one is, of course, we talked a lot about your book. You mentioned several references. Do you want to add one or two other references that could be extremely useful. It could be a video, it could be books, it could be articles, podcasts, you name it to software engineers truly willing to decarbonize the most urgent environmental issue but of course there are others as well to decarbonize their code base.Sara Bergman 36:16I think if you're brand new to the space, the green software engineering course, it's a really good place to start to just get your feet wet. It's not super long and it covers a lot of the basic stuff, so I think that's really good. Also, the Green Software Foundation podcast. I think it's cozy and nice, and it's similar to this one in the conversational style and being else. I don't know. Personally, I don't like when the rhetoric becomes very like, lecturing to me. That makes me sort of shy away because I, you know, when you're trying to do something good, when you're trying to learn something, you don't want to be like, told sternly that you're doing things wrong. And that's also the tone we strive for in the book. Everyone is on their own unique individual learning curve. And no matter where you are, like, you shouldn't be shamed for not being further along or things like that. It's very important to meet people where they are. And I think this podcast and I think the Green Software foundation podcast are both also. Sorry, one more InfoQ has had some good articles recently as well on sustainability and so on.Gaël Duez 37:31Thanks a lot for sharing these references. Yes, some of them are guests pretty familiar with the listeners, like environmentally viable. My dear fellow podcast. Hello, Chris and Asim, who are longstanding podcast hosts of this great show. To close the podcast. Sara, could you share some good news, like, a piece of good news when it comes to sustainability, or even maybe IT sustainability?Sara Bergman 37:58Yeah. Well, I had one piece of news that was not really related to IT sustainability, but to sustainability. In Norway, where I live, we're actually pretty recently Greenpeace and natural Ungdom, which means nature and youth in Norwegian. They won a case against the Norwegian state regarding new oil fields. So the state wanted to do three new oil fields, anger, peace and nature. They took them to court, and they won. So there will be new. There won't be these three new oil fields anymore, which I think is pretty great. Of course, it is very controversial here in Norway, who makes a lot of money from oil but I think if we really want a low carbon future, then we need to focus on other methods of generating energy.Gaël Duez 38:57Yeah, that was a great victory, actually. And I guess you won another one pretty recently with a ban on deep sea mining. That was also very controversial. So it's a good signal because Norway, I guess, is, unfortunately, the remaining country where climate denial has some momentum. I think maybe in Poland as well. But I don't want to say stupid things. Sorry, Lukasz, if you listen to me and say so. But I think there is, or maybe it's Hungaria. I don't know. Sorry about that, if I recall. Well, there is one eastern country which is still pretty deep in climate denial. And Norway, for obvious reasons, likes the connection with oil production. And you don't really want to kill the hand that nourishes you. But that's very positive news that even in areas where the fight against climate change is not as consensual as it should be. I'm not saying that there are no issues in other countries. I mean, in France, to talk about a place I know pretty well, we are between 30 and 35, sometimes 40% of people around some sort of climate denial. So either it doesn't exist, which is a small minority, or it exists, but it's not human related. So I'm not lecturing anyone or any country here, and that was not my point. But it's just that no way is a specific challenge as a specific challenge on its own. And still my main message, that being said, because I didn't want to sound too pretentious or whatever, that was a million of miles away from what I intended to say, that yeah, we can still win cases and manage to get massive sustainability achievements. So I think that's very, very positive news coming from Norway. Thanks a lot for sharing it, Sara, and thanks for joining the show. That was great to have you. I hope we didn't spoil the readers too much, but it was great. I mean, thanks again for making this book happen. I think it's a very important milestone in our road toward more IT sustainability. So thanks a lot for sharing all of this in the show, too.Sara Bergman 41:09Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. It's been really fun and taking time off your busy schedule and early morning and all of those things, so thank you so much for that.Gaël Duez 43:11 Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it and give us five stars on Apple or Spotify. We are an independent media relying solely on you to get more listeners. Plus, it will give our little team Jill, Meibel, Tani and I a nice booster. In our next episode, we will talk about politics or actually how the European Union Parliament has delivered several legislations to the green IT industry, either directly or indirectly. And what does it mean for product and tech people in Europe and beyond, such as GDPR did? I will be joined by the members of the European Parliament, Kim Van Sparrentak and Max Schulze, the founder of the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure alliance. Stay tuned. Green IO is a podcast and much more, so visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter every last Friday of the month. Read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. The next one is in London on September 19, and you can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. The call for speakers has also been opened, so feel free to apply if you wish to speak. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you fellow responsible technologists build a greener digital world.
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💡In product management, there is a strong culture of adapting to change, testing, and rapid learning. Talking about change, we have a big big one ahead of us: climate change! How can product leaders include climate considerations into the build and run of digital services and scale sustainable practices? 🎧In this episode, Gael interviewed two hands-on experts and daily practitioners in product management on how to become a climate-conscious PMs. Antonia Landi, based in Germany, is a strong voice in ProductOps, and François Burra, based in Canada, is the co-author of the Climate Product Management Playbook.What product manager should consider?🌱 Environmental impact throughout the product life cycle,
💻 Minimalistic approach on user experience, 🎯 Climate-related OKRs and reducing costs through intentional data storage.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!📧 Once a month, we deliver carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents in your mailbox, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. Learn more about our guest and connect: * Antonia Landi’s LinkedIn * François Burra’s LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Antonia and François' sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* Climate Product Management Playbook * Digital Product Decarbonization * Paper beats plastic? How to rethink environmental folklore

Transcript[00:00:00] Gaël Duez
Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO with Gaël Duez. That's me. Green IO is the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world. One bite at a time, twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on the website greenio.tech

Product managers have always lived in a world of contradictory injunctions. They are at the converging point of all requirements, business requirements, of course, and all the others. Let me illustrate with some sentences which might be familiar to many of you. We cannot launch feature X because I need some time to deal with my technical debt. Make sure your product is accessible and secure. We need to launch this proof of concept to test our hypothesis next week, but beware of being pixel perfect because of the risk for our brand image. Accessibility is key in our values. Such as innovation. So let's not miss the latest trend in virtual reality, et cetera. And now after cybersecurity, accessibility, performance, et cetera, a new wave is coming. Sustainability, with sentences like beware of your carbon budget. How much will this new feature impact our CSRD reporting? Watch out for greenwashing with these product claims. Did you check the W3C sustainability guidelines for your product? And product managers in charge of back end products are not off the hook. How does it perform with our API green score? Our cloud operations are too carbon intensive. Can we delay some process to enable carbon aware computing, or even better, grid aware computing? To be honest, I'm not that worried about the product management world succeeding eventually to overcome these new challenges. There is a great culture of adaptation to change, testing and fast learning in the product management line of work. The main questions are how and when, because time takes time with climate change. And many sustainability tools for product managers are still missing. Hence, a question for this episode is how to become a climate active product manager today, not tomorrow.

And to try answering it, I asked two hands-on experts and daily practitioners in product management to join our show today. Antonia Landi, a former Aviv Group colleague, has become one of the top voices in European product operations. Being a community person at heart, I can testify, and loving bringing people together, she leads Germany's only meetup for product operations in Berlin, where she's based. You can easily find her work online. She has written for publications like LeadDev, Product Alliance, and MindTheProduct. François Burra is a Canada based product lead and UX consultant, mentor, and speaker with 13 years of experience working with startups and agencies in North America. After taking almost a full year off following climate courses, he pivoted his career to fight the climate crisis. He now helps digital companies and product teams reduce their digital emissions via consulting, measurement, and training. And talking about training, I had the opportunity to meet him via the wonderful climate action tech community when he was presenting his newly released climate product management playbook, which was well received in this community and others. So welcome Antonia. Welcome François . It's a pleasure to have both of you on the show.

[00:03:56] Antonia Landi
It's a pleasure to be here.

[00:03:58] François Burra
Thank you for the invite, Gaël.

[00:04:00] Gaël Duez
It's my pleasure. Thanks a lot for joining to set the stage. I would like to ask a general question about the context and the momentum. Why do you believe both of you that product managers have a unique opportunity and responsibility right now to embrace sustainability? Maybe François , you want to give the first shot?

[00:04:23] François Burra
Sure. I think product managers have a unique opportunity because their role, the sense of what they do is based on influencing. So whether it's influencing their team or even beyond their team, they collaborate with all departments across the organization, they tie the strategy with the execution. So they have these posts, like the way I see it visually, like a vertical and horizontal influence. And because of that, if they integrate sustainability as part of their vocabulary and part of their processes. Then suddenly it can shine throughout the whole organization. So that's why for me, they really have a unique opportunity to play a big role in making their job, a climate job and their company, a climate company.

[00:05:08] Antonia Landi
Yeah. I think to add to that, for me, PMs have a unique responsibility because we'll actually have, or should feel a unique responsibility, right? To make sustainability the forefront of what we do, and especially looking at the climate impact of tech off the everyday things we use, right? How? How sustainable is this? You're actually working on and how much could you actually meaningfully change. And if we all individually take small steps to take sustainability to the next level in our digital products, then together we can make a very big impact. So to me, that's exactly why we should be talking about this.

[00:05:53] Gaël Duez
Are more people talking about sustainability in product management these days than before? I mean, both of you, you're privileged witnesses in your industry. So is it still a happy fuse or do you see something a bit more general happening?

[00:06:11] Antonia Landi
Yeah, I think for me, honestly, there's still not enough. I think there's definitely more than there was even a year ago, right? We are starting to think about sustainability in product management. We're starting to right shift left with sustainability, not do it after the fact, after a product has been created, but really as we create the product. But to me, it's still not nearly enough, honestly, like we are scratching the surface only just barely, which is also why I was so excited to have this happen to have this recording where we uniquely focus on what PMs can do.

[00:06:51] François Burra
I 100% agree with Antonia. And thank you so much, Gaël, for creating that space because we need more person like you and podcasts like you to raise awareness, not only on the topic of digital sustainability or green IT overall because being French, I have ties in Europe, but living in Canada and North America, I can see the gap that exists between those two markets. And I usually joke, or it's not necessarily funny, but that there's maybe a three, five, seven years gap in terms of awareness between the two continents. And when it comes to product management or climate positive best practices, we even behind I think he started more with designers and engineers, you know, this movement but product managers still are lagging behind those two roles. And that's why I got passionate about trying to do something about it because when I was in a position with a startup. That was borderline doing greenwashing without bad intentions, right? The leveraging of the marketing that would come with it and the benefits that comes with this. I was faced with a sense of not being able to properly address those concern or I was not educated and didn't have the tools to influence the company to do a better job and avoid implementing those practices that were not necessarily transparent, which reminded me of a company, a startup that I used to work with a few years back before I made my pivot to work as solely on the climate crisis as a PM. I didn't have the tools to properly see through the marketing strategy that we had, and basically we were making claims that we were environmentally friendly companies or aiming towards net-zero and so on and so forth. But purely basing on the whole strategy on offsets on carbon offsets without any other actions or awareness of what it means to be in a zero or try to fight climate change. And we were making those big claims to our users that if they were using our app, they would do a good gesture for the environment. And I always knew that matter was super high. Unfortunately, I didn't have the tool to properly educate people or push back against it. So it ended up being part of the strategy and released and everyone was leveraging it in our social network and so on. And that's also why I felt this frustration, this not necessarily anger, but this desire to start educating myself and, and with that, try to spread the message and raise your awareness for my peers.

[00:09:31] Gaël Duez
It reminds me of a very personal story of a guy who had a very significant over several hundred millions of budget in a big company as a CTO or group CTO, you name it the way you want and didn't do that much because he just thought that it was all about asking AWS to be greener. I must admit this guy was me. And yet, François , it's interesting what you've described because it's really what Harriet Kingaby in a previous episode on greenwashing, she referred to it as unintentional greenwashing, like greenwashing was the best intention. It's just that you don't have a, like a master plan and with people with dark hoodies saying, "Oh, we're going to screw our customers." No, it's just. You believe this is the right stuff to do because you don't have the information and the basic information regarding offsetting is sorry dude but the civil aviation took all the available land on earth to plant trees to offset their only activities and there is no room left for any others so that's just the basic issue with offsetting but I still love this example.

[00:10:35] François Burra
Against planting trees. Right.

[00:10:37] Gaël Duez
But yeah, it's super important. Yeah. It's super important to plant trees for sure, but it doesn't offset anything. It's just that it will help us to rebuild the carbon sink that we need so badly. And what about you, Antonia?

[00:10:53] Antonia Landi
Yeah. I mean, just listening to you, François , like I worked at the sustainability startup for a little while. Like, our whole thing is it was a reusable shipping box, right? You could reuse hundreds and hundreds of times. It had some smart trackers and everything. Obviously there was an app, right? So even though our core mission was sustainability, recycling was enabling the circular economy by, I don't know, packing your old clothes in the box or dropping it off at the center, having a community around all that. It's stopped at that product. Right? Even back then, we weren't savvy enough to think about where our data is hosted? How much of this data do we actually need to host, right? How many iOS versions or Android versions are we supporting, right? Things that nowadays, after my own research, after sort of embedding myself more into these topics, seem almost like common sense to me, but even in such a climate active, I suppose, environment. We weren't even thinking about that because tech was always only seen as an enabler and not as one of the root causes, right?

[00:12:17] François Burra
I think there's something that I observed over the years, which is that people especially climate tech or sustainable companies because their whole mission is to deliver impact based on their mission, they forget that the why is not allowed to align with the way they do it. And they could implement the worst practice in terms of, like, digital, right? And yet the target, like, claims that they're doing a good thing for the word, but, it's kind of like this duality that is not well understood. And what I could observe is that the reason why the company is created and the how, which is how they build their software from a digital standpoint, because they implement the worst practices at the end of the day, backlash the whole reason why they were created in the first place, which is something that obviously. No one is perfect, right? So the intention is to try to do good in all areas of the company. And there's parts that would be more advanced than others, but it's important and that's what today is important to raise awareness about, like how you can build software and digital products because that could impact. I have a great impact and you need to be aware of it to lessen the negative impact that you can have while building and maintaining what is created to solve this valuable problem, the society.

[00:13:43] Gaël Duez
I think it's very valuable feedback that you share about this discrepancy between what we want to achieve, what we are truly doing, et cetera. But both of you are daily practitioners, so let's get our hands dirty. How can we become a climate active product manager today and what is sustainable product management?

[00:14:08] Antonia Landi
I think for me, sustainable product management really is, so I have this super basic definition of what product management is, right? It's delivering value to the user in a way that benefits our business. And to me, sustainable product management is in a way that benefits our business and our planet. I think ultimately sustainable product management starts from the moment you are identifying problems and scoping solutions, but it can run the whole gamut of, and this is something that people will not want to hear, right? But how much data are we storing and how much of that data are we actually looking at? And then, I mean, I addressed this beforehand, right? Like the implications of our product choices. How many mobile phone versions are we going to support with our app, right? And it becomes more and more narrow every single year. And the consequence of that is that we are excluding ourselves from people who want to have older and perfectly working phones. I think there are just many small knock on effects that we just need to play through in our minds. We just need to think through the ramifications of small choices like that.

[00:15:32] François Burra
Yeah, I love it. I think, as you said, like, we need to, as PM, consider the environment and sustainability as we used to think about the triptych technology design or user and business. And for me, we can see sustainability as the fourth pillar, or we can see it another way, which is kind of underlying conditions. So, if you apply those best practices will create a better experience, will create better technology because you learn faster, but also will drive better business results. So I kind of see this triangle like 3D shapes in my head right now, which may not make sense, but I think it's, we can really see it as something that will make your whole business and product better, but I think what is missing that we were referring to earlier is that because the awareness is is is lacking on the topic, we don't know the impact that we have. And if we start to line things together from an energy standpoint, carbon emission, water consumption and so on, then suddenly, we would've another lens to see the problem and other tools or reinforce the desire to implement the tools and the best practices that we all know that are good to implement. Right. So for me, that's where there is a huge opportunity for the PM.

[00:16:49] Gaël Duez
Can you indulge us in a structured way to deep dive into what are the big bunks of stuff or actions or tasks that you would advise as an overview to pay attention to when you're a product manager, because Antonia mentioned the data. She, and that's very rare in our industry, mentioned the hardware and making sure that we are not part of the planned or even not planned, but just technical obsolescence problem that our industry is rigged by. So, wow. Big kudos for that. And François , how would you structure everything because this is exactly what you've done in your playbook.

[00:17:27] François Burra
To double down on what Antonia said, like the whole manufacturing, hardware, distribution, end of life and so on and so forth. That represents about two thirds of image emissions of the digital industry, right? So we cannot state enough in this podcast and in our lifetime, how big our impact, how big digital is physical. So to answer your question, Gaël, with a playbook that we co-wrote with Antoine Cabot, with a friend of mine working at Salesforce in BC, Canada. We structure it around five chapters, but maybe we can focus on some of them for the sake of the discussion.
The first one is to, as a PM, embed climate or sustainability as part of your rituals and it's all about how you choose the right metrics, how you track your digital footprint, how you include your planet into your product requirements documents, your briefs and so on and so forth. So that's the first chapter.
The second chapter is how you build in a more mindful way. So thinking about the planet as a Persona, animals as a Persona. How you try to tie your strategy to sustainability, sustainable development goals and so on and so forth and how you avoid obsolescence tactics and how you can leverage AI in a sustainable way because. As much as we want to make sustainability a trend for PMs, right now, AI is like leading the race by far. So we have to see what use from this momentum that they have to do the same for sustainable topics for PMs. So anyway, that was the second chapter.

The third chapter is like how to apply frugal minimalist best practices. So coming back to what Antonia was saying, like how you minimize the amount of data that is being transferred. How you simplify and build a straightforward user journey that avoids all the fluff, remove product loads, you remove features that are not used, you remove data that are not used, you remove scripts and components and so on and so forth and don't forget to kill features.

The fourth chapter is about how to be more carbon aware and or read aware, but just as a concept that normally we should make sure that we consume the least amount of energy, but also the low carbon energy as much as possible. And we migrate your server or your hosting provider to choose a sustainable one and things like that.

And the fifth pillar, and I'm going to stop here because there's so many things that we can talk about about each of those topics is to leverage your influence. As we said earlier, we have a huge influence internally, we have a huge influence in our ecosystem, in our value chain, the way we choose our partner whether it's to transport our e-commerce website, let's say who are we partnering to deliver our product? Are we choosing a provider with sustainable practices or who uses electric vehicles or like bikes even for delivery.

So like all of that is kind of how we can use our influence internally and externally. And I think this is a power that usually we have, but we don't realize that we have it. And there's a big miss opportunity if we don't leverage it to the full extent. So those are the five chapters.

[00:21:03] Gaël Duez
And thanks a lot for structuring it because now I'd like to play a little game with both of you, which is let's go for each chapter and pick one example that you would like to see widely adopted for each of these chapters. And of course, feel free to pick the chapters in whatever order you want. And Antonia, I might bet some money on which chapter will come first, but please feel free to start.

[00:21:34] Antonia Landi
I mean, honestly, there were so many things that resonated with me as you were talking, but I think first and foremost, and this is something that I stress over and over again, right? Sustainable product management is also just good product management, right? Don't build things nobody needs, right? Get rid of that bloat. I love that you mentioned minimalism. But I think to me, this really comes in two different forms. One of them is really actually how we structure the user experience of our products. Like, Netflix, if you let it, it will just keep playing. Like, YouTube will just keep streaming. Same with Spotify, right? They are built to keep streaming high quality, expensive data, right? Because that's how they make their money. But that has a massive, massive climate impact.

[00:22:58] Gaël Duez
And, I really love Antonia's idea of letting the user choose. And especially when you look at all these experiences with, as you mentioned, Netflix, YouTube, et cetera. In their values most of them is like do no harm provide the best possible experience when you say that one of the worst health crisis that the word is actually under and it's completely under the radar is a sleep crisis that we are literally destroying our health because with so much stimulated that we don't sleep enough in almost every country compared to the minimum requirement of our body. You could seriously challenge it if it's that much sustainable, offering people nonstop video and nonstop audio, at least without a message in some kind of action. I say, “Hey, by the way, you've just spent three hours.” It's 2 a. m. in the morning. Most of the people will go to bed at that time. Do you still want to like a bit like on the cigarette packet, but what was it your idea, Antonia?

[00:24:07] Antonia Landi
So first of all, this also broadens the scope of sustainability, right? Is mental wellbeing part of sustainability as well? I'd like to think that's a part of it as well. But the second one, like now you're going into the... so I have made exactly this case of the climate impact of watching Netflix on your phone. Like, you download that episode, you're on a flight, whatever, watching Netflix on your phone. And two things usually happen, right? People are shocked at the impact of something so small and so mundane. And then people despair, right? Because it's like, well, I do this all day, every day. If we're in zoom calls, we're streaming data to each other just a whole entire time, right? What is the impact of that? But I think it's also realizing that yes, you might be contributing to the problem, right? Currently. And yes, there is this initial shock you have to go through to understand just how big the impact of our everyday actions with tech are. But all of this information, like all of us talking about this, isn't to make you feel bad about your daily habits. It's just to allow you to be more conscious in the future, to have that maybe sense of responsibility to have that just extra second where you think, well, hang on, do we really need this? Right. Can we give users an option?

[00:25:48] Gaël Duez
So enable the user to pose and give them an option. I think it's a beautiful statement. François, do you want to go for the second round? What would be a very actionable idea or best practices that you'd like to share and where does it refer to in your framework, in your five chapters framework?

[00:26:11] François Burra
Yeah, I actually wanted to react to what you were saying, because it was so interesting. I think Gaël, you were referring to Netflix and the need to sleep, but I think it was a Netflix CEO that actually said that their biggest competitor is sleep. So I think it shows how problematic it is and how we can talk about sustainability and responsibility, but we do have an impact in many different ways. And that we need to embody that in a more responsible way. And then when we talked about do every new employee needs to have a brand new computer, and what do we do with existing IT fleet and equipment that we handle? For companies that have hundreds or thousands of employees, just thinking about the lifespan of their equipment, if they push, like sometimes there are internal policies that you may have seen every three years you have to change your computer because you have to be the best performer. And, we want employees to be productive. So we're going to change it every three years, right? If you push that to maybe four years or five years, the environmental impact of that measure, that's kind of a simple quote unquote measure. Could be huge in the environment, considering what we talked about earlier about how much it costs the environment and the planet to build new devices and equipment. So that's 1 example that you can take as you could be the CTO in charge of that. There could be many people responsible for that type of decision, but this is super critical. And coming back to the next example, again, about autoplay, which is an environmental disaster, and only because of the example we just talked about, there's two practical ways you can fight against it. And I saw it with a client that I'm working with at the moment for the past few months, they are a media platform. And basically there's two ways you can approach it. Either you ban autoplay or you avoid it as much as possible, which is not necessarily the most acceptable way. But another way to look at it, and by no means it's perfect, right, is to instead of launching the video, the autoplay after three seconds, where the user basically doesn't have a choice because it goes so fast that it just happened, right? Maybe can you extend it by 5 seconds or 10 seconds, 15 seconds? So at least you give the user the control, the power. To reflect on that and maybe there is a chance also to educate the user. Hey, is it time to sleep? Or hey, do you know the environmental toll that streaming has? So the intention here is not to blame users and put the responsibility on them. It's us as digital creators and builders that need to build by default something that is green, right? Or sustainable. But there's so many ways that when you start understanding the problems and become an expert of the problem, and that's all about being a PM, right? You have to become an expert of the problem because before you become. Expert of the solution. So when you add sustainability into your framework, then suddenly you can have new creative solutions to embed into your product. And that's what I find fascinating. It's not like something more that you have to add to your day that is kind of bothering you and you have to make it fit. It's something that can unlock new possibilities and make your product better.

[00:29:25] Gaël Duez
If I'm allowed to bounce back on what you say, François, you use the word framework, and I reckon an entire chapter is dedicated to culture, rituals, etc. And I know for you and Antonia, how pivotal this culture question is starting with you, François , what would be a good idea, a good practice to entrench the sustainability mindset in product management?

[00:29:55] François Burra
There's different ways you can surface climate into your product. And we can start with OKRs. I think we were talking about OKRs before the show started. You can take those as opportunities, right? Either you have a company that is mature enough that you can be sustainable. Or climate related OKRs, like we want to reduce our footprint by 10 percent by the end of the year and then you break it down and you kind of see how you can reach that goal or you have non-climate OKRs, let's say, increased revenue or reduced costs, but when you talk about that, like when you break it down, reduced costs, probably like if you're a big tech company, cloud expenditure, it's probably a big center cost, right? Cost center, sorry. And why is that? Because you store a lot of data and oh, okay, so how can we reduce that data stored and, and see how we can be more intentional in the way we store what we need and what we, and not store what we don't need? And then suddenly like you become more aware of the lifecycle of data and then you can remove things that are not needed because as Antonia said earlier, like you don't need all the information about users that churn five years ago about what they did on a specific day, right? And so when you become a bit more intentional and minimalist and like more specific about why we are storing this? And why are we building this? And why do we keep this feature that serves no one suddenly like you will trim down your product, make it lighter, maybe make it faster, remove the fluff, trim images, compress and so on and so forth. And then, oh, well, we just reduce the cost of our cloud infrastructure by 5, 10, 20 percent and that feeds this. Okay. This is about the bottom line and we didn't talk about sustainability, right? We just did. What is what makes sense? But at the end of the day, we have a climate impact. So I think either you need a conversation with environmental topics, or you just find the opportunities within existing strategy, given that most of I don't want to overgeneralize most of sustainable and climate best practices for PM or for digital folks there. Is good for the business and the product, and there's other ways you can do it, but you can set carbon budget when you release a new feature to make sure that you track this you track and you make assumption and projection about how much a feature could, could wait in, in term of carbon and when it's released, like making sure that it doesn't exceed the sets, an amount of carbon emitted. So you stay within a range of an acceptable amount of carbon emitted. You can look at page weight. There's a page weight budget as well. There's tools out there that can help you to build pages that are not exciting. Let's say two meg or three meg per page. And that's a way that you can embed. The discussion with your folks, like definition of done and acceptance criteria with the designers and developers and start to make them part of the discussion and challenge them with them with this. And that should be something that excites them as well.

[00:32:58] Antonia Landi
Yeah, I think for my side to add to that, like honestly, if you're really serious about this, make it a prioritization metric. Just like everything else, right? You, we talk about complexity, we talk about the size of the problem space, we talk about the projected ARR, right? If you've identified a really exciting new feature that might make you a million in ARR, and was terrible for the planet, are you still committing to doing that? And I think it is. We do have to retain a certain pragmatic approach in that everything's a trade off. Some things you might identify as an organization. We do not want to compromise on the specific part of the user experience, but we're going to do our best to do everything else everywhere else, right? It is right. It's not about despairing. It's not about we're doing everything wrong. It's really just about educating yourself, understanding your trade offs and then making them a reality, right? Like embedding them in the product management process, right? This is the future we've planned. This is how it's going to positively or negatively affect our climate bottom line.

[00:34:14] Gaël Duez
We mentioned OKR. We mentioned how it needs to be ritualized in the definition of dawn, etcetera. I have a low ball for you because I'm still struggling with this one. And don't get me wrong. It's already super hard to get a key results around carbon budget, page weight, carbon footprint, you name it, whatever, but we know that if you're a frontend, I would say product manager and I'm struggling to find a proper key result that could be connected to an overall sustainably objective about how we make sure that we do not contribute to technical obsolescence.

[00:35:02] Antonia Landi
I think the perfect one is going to be difficult, but off the top of my head I would probably more likely look at the percentage of people included or excluded if you move up, let's say an iOS version, or if you move up a certain OS requirement and then it becomes about inclusivity as well, right? It becomes about how many people on the planet can use your product. And at that point, I don't know why people aren't thinking about this more, right? Like I used to work at the startup here in Berlin that had a fitness app and they purposefully wanted to exclude older versions because that was like a more premium thing now. Our app is only for people with new phones, right? But I think I would rather think about the percentage, right? Set a target percentage for the cement of people on the planet who can use our app rather than set specific targets for near specific versions, for example.

[00:36:09] François Burra
Yeah, we tend to agree. I think we can look at versions being like, Oh, I covered the five latest versions of this OS and maybe I could go to five or like six or seven or eight, ten, right? Or we can just be a bit more diligent and thoughtful about, okay, who are our users? Like, how are they distributed amongst OS and versions and so on and so forth. And then, with this kind of idea, like percentage in mind and distribution in mind. Then we can, if we are delivering a good experience and we can be more specific about defining good for each company. But if we only cover a good experience for like 90% of our users, how can we make sure that the 10% others are also, even if they're run on old OS or equipment, then they can have the best version of the app. And if they can, because the device itself cannot support the most flashy features that you offer to the latest iPhone, then how you degrade or adapt rather the experience so that they could do everything that they need to do, but maybe in a more streamlined and minimalist way again, and I will go even beyond and that may be in the sense that by designing our software, we exclude people from the get go. So how can we go even by making our app or product even more accessible? We can increase our target market, right? Because suddenly if let's say we support a bank application, support transactions by SMS or by text messages, right? How much more we can unlock new customers and acquire a new target audience, right? So I think we also have to see the opportunities and not just be constrained by existing users. Let's think about non users as well.

[00:38:02] Gaël Duez
I'm very relieved François because I was afraid I was once again about to make a lecture on the survival bias and the fact that countlessly people were telling me this is our audiences is what we should focus on and I'm what was always like, you know, the survival by years, the plane, blah, blah, blah, World War II anyway, is there any one last darling best practices that you love to share, whether it's about culture, whether it's about onboarding your CEO. You name it.

[00:38:30] Antonia Landi
I mean, for me, like again, it's this ecosystem thinking, right? Like it's not just the digital products we build, it's how we build them. And, this is such a stupid example, but do you have oat milk or do you have almond milk in your office? Right? Like it takes a huge amount of water to produce an almond, which you then squeeze desperately trying to get something akin to milk for your vegan and lactose intolerant friends. What do you have? Reusable cups? Or do you have mugs? Where does the recycling go? Like even at this workshop I was giving a talk on sustainability and there was nowhere to recycle my paper cup. And that was awful to me. And it's just these little details that make up the entire environment of how we produce digital products that matters.

[00:39:31] François Burra
Yeah, absolutely. As for me, I think as we stated at the beginning of this talk we have an issue right now that this is still the best kept secret, right? Like the impact of sustainability of digital products on the sustainability of the environment and the planet. So let's get people talking. There's plenty of people that care about this topic, and the more you dive in, the more experts you discover, and there's experts on sustainability everywhere around the world. So please invite some local folks to do talks at your company, and do a workshop about the environment like there is the digital collage that probably has folks around you that can come and speak about the interconnection between climate and sustainable products, digital products. Sorry. So I really started making this topic more broadly talked about. And maybe one thing that I really want to put a focus on by making your product emitting less emissions by using the least amount of energy you will get a product that will be faster that would perform better if you have an e-commerce platform, it would convert better as well, because the experience would be so smooth, regardless of the design, the device and the user satisfaction would be higher. Retention would be higher. And so suddenly with those product benefits that we're kind of starting to line up together, then they materialize into business benefits because your product will be differentiated. You would increase your margin. You will increase revenue. You would acquire more users, as we just said before. And considering the newest generation like the Gen Z and so on and so forth, they were raised and they are being raised with eco anxiety, so if your brand doesn't care about climate or he's using leveraging greenwashing tactics, it's likely that they probably some of them at least would not like to work for you. So from a talent attraction and retention standpoint as well as customer traction and retention, like climate needs to be part of your strategy. Like all jobs is a climate job and all companies are climate companies because you don't live in a bubble. We live on the same earth, right? So that's really something that I would love people to understand. We're not just like a pure environmentalist, you know, eating grass and feeding yourself with sun, right? There are ways that you can have the right value and serve your career, serve your business, serve your product and your users better.

[00:42:02] Gaël Duez
One last question before we close the podcast. So we talked a lot about tactics at product management levels. We talked about OKR. We talked about the carbon budget. We talked about using some key results, the weight making sure that you can use your apps or your products on multiple equipment platforms. There is still something that I believe is related to what you said about leveraging your influence because product managers tend to have quite a lot of influence within a company. And it's how do you pitch your boss? How do you pitch your CEO? And, you've stated both of you that the sustainability momentum is getting traction, but it's not that big yet. And let's be honest, it's usually not among top business people that it's the biggest. And when you start traveling outside some places, you discover places where it's just simply not there at all. So how do you pitch your boss and do we always have this fight or this competition between sustainability in business and here I would like to set apart an unsustainable business model. Obviously, if you are drilling for more oil and that you have no transition plan and that you want 2 100 to do exactly the same business. You can build the cleanest possible digital products IT stack, et cetera. You've got a bigger issue than just this very specific part of your activity, but for, I would say regular economic activities, is it that much tension between sustainability of business?

[00:43:41] Antonia Landi
I mean, I think I'd go back to what François just said, right? Like it's actually just good business practice. You don't have to lead with sustainability, lead with lower costs, right? Client computing, especially like that, is always a huge bill. Lead with improved UX, right? Lead with more people who can use our product. And then by the way, this also means that we're lowering our footprint. By the way, this also means that we are now more mindful of what we store and how much we store and where we store it. And I've had to do this a lot doing, like, trying to get traction for mission important things under the guise of something else. But it's really just learning to speak the language that will resonate the most with your CEO, with your CTO, right? Getting that buy in and you can do it on such a small scale. You can do it for one feature, right? You can do it for, I don't know, the next AWS migration, because it's going to come sooner or later. I think almost using these valid business benefits as a Trojan horse to get people into the habit of thinking this way. And then honestly, before you know it, it is part of your culture.

[00:45:03] François Burra
Antonia said it perfectly. I don't know what I can add to it, but choose the right metrics that can resonate with them. Because like, as we know sustainable product best practices can really feed into many areas and avoid moralizing. Like no one wants to be on the wrong side of an argument and create for more. There's so many examples that we didn't share today, but like big companies and smaller ones that are doing great things in that area. So look at what's happening around them and create for more, because maybe your competitor is actually starting to implement those practices. And suddenly, people will start to freak out because they're like, okay, they're doing it. So we should do it. And also waves a bit of the flag of some climate risks that come with it. There's a lot of regulation in Europe. There's not that many in North America and we need those to come like GDPR. It just came in a wave and suddenly everyone adapted to it. And so there's also that part of the equation that maybe it would resonate better with some people. And we don't want just negative doom and gloom, but you know, you need to approach benefits, opportunities, and risks to be part of this question. So I think we have many tools basically to be able to convey that point. And as you said, Antonia, if sustainability isn't even part of the discussion, be my guest that's also perfectly fine.

[00:46:21] Gaël Duez
So thanks François , because there were a lot of tips. Fear of missing out is pretty cool. Climate risk and fear of regulation is pretty cool as well. I think finding the right allies is so true. I mean, it really depends on some companies. That's so true that your CFO will be your best friend or the ESG director will be or sustainably director will be your best friend. So that's a very good point. My last question before asking the traditional closing question will be, do you need that much permission to become a climate active product manager?

[00:46:54] François Burra
If I may start on this one, Antonia, it's kind of interesting because I'm giving training at the moment. And the 2 assignments that I give to my fellows are 1 looking at the playbook and the 33 best practices in the playbook and looking at the ones they can implement without permission. And the one they can implement and sometimes it's either there may be, they can influence both implement and influence, and sometimes they can only want to do one of them. So absolutely there's so many things that you can do that are part of your job and you don't need the approval of anyone. And the second assignment that I give to them is how to pitch them internally, which is what we just talked about. And basically helping them to create a slide deck to pitch this topic internally and see how we can be tied to the strategy of the company. So yeah, it's just so on point.

[00:47:45] Gaël Duez
So you can say to your students, no need to use ChatGPT, just listen to the latest Green IO episode and you'll get a good grade. And what about you, Antonia?

[00:47:57] Antonia Landi
Yeah. I mean, I'm all for asking for forgiveness rather than asking for permission. Even in product management, like there's so many of us that wouldn't be able to get to do the things we really want to do. Like, God forbid actually speak to some customers, right? You just need to find different ways of doing it. And like I say, use a Trojan horse if you need to go find it to get your job done without having to ask and don't even let anyone know. Right? Like once you have a strong enough case, that's when you can go talk about it. That's when you can go and say that, by the way, I've actually been doing this for the last month and it hasn't disrupted anything. So why don't we do this for all teams?I'm a huge, huge fan of this approach.

[00:48:46] Gaël Duez
Thanks a lot. I love this approach as well. I'd like to ask you the final closing question, which is, would you share a positive piece of news regarding sustainability, maybe even sustainably in the IT sector?

[00:49:01] Antonia Landi
Actually for me, the positive news is that this podcast is happening, that we're having this conversation, that I now got to know a whole other person who is so passionate about this topic. And I think this is the biggest marker of future success for me, because I think the more people talk about this, the more people with a meaningful voice talk about this and share really specific, actionable, real world strategies, the sooner we can get to a place where this is no longer a niche subject.

[00:49:39] Gaël Duez
Great. I'm going to have a mainstream podcast now. I love it.

[00:49:45] François Burra
I wish. That's all I wish for your podcast. I think my positive news will be in the same sense of what Antonia just said, I think two years back, because I admit by pivot, like not long ago in all respect, you know, like it was two, three years ago. When I talked about it, I was the only one, like, especially if I talk about my context in Montreal, Canada or North America, like when I talk about climate and products, people were just looking at me like, what are you talking about? But now, people reach out to me so that I talk about this topic and it's only my personal story. But I see that the momentum is shifting in North America. Like there's more lights shining on this topic. And before I had to push the topic everywhere so that maybe someone will pick up on it and talk about it, agree to talk to me about it. Now people reach out to me to talk about this topic. And I would hope and I would assume that is the same thing for many other person in that ecosystem, which I think just shows and demonstrate that there there is a momentum happening and that the awareness is slowly picking up and hopefully with the awareness, people will start taking action, which is at the end of the day, what we what we need because t o come back to your introduction, like we need to start acting now and not tomorrow.

[00:51:05] Gaël Duez
Thanks. It's great to see this momentum indeed. It was really cool to have you on the show today. There's very practical insights. I mean, I guess there are a lot of constants to be extracted by anyone working in the product management field. So I would say mission accomplished. Congratulations to both of you and I'm looking forward to continuing our discussion offline.

[00:51:30] Antonia Landi
It was lovely being here. Thank you for the invitation.

[00:51:33] François Burra
Thank you, Gaël. And great to meet you, Antonia. I think we have many more discussions to have together.

[00:51:38] Antonia Landi
Absolutely.

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📈 44 cm water level rise under the IPCC business as usual scenario.This number shows that climate change is very real for Singaporeans and for their data centers, close to 10% of the whole of APAC! 🎧In episode 36, Gaël Duez discussed with Professor PS Lee, National University of Singapore Dean's Chair of Mechanical Engineering and one of the top experts worldwide on data center cooling, the challenges in making data centers sustainable.🔍Some key points of their exchange are:🌡️why temperature rise has multiple downside 🌡️energy challenges that affects the sustainability of data centers🌡️liquid cooling technology as an important option🌡️why lessons from DC operating in tropical climate apply almost everywhereAnd much more!❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!📧 Once a month, we deliver carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents in your mailbox, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conference is in Singapore on April 18th (use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket) Learn more about our guest and connect: * PS's LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Poh Seng's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* Coastal Risk Screening Tool * A Heat Dome Hits Virginia: One Data Center's Story * Singapore Climate 2023: The Year in Numbers * World Without End by Christophe Blain and Jean-Marc Jancovici * Future of the human climate niche * Tan Tin Wee * SUSTAINABLE TROPICAL DATA CENTRE TESTBED * EED

Transcript
Gaël Duez 00:21Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO with Gaël Duez. That's me. Green IO is a podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world one byte at a time, twice a month on a Tuesday. All guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript will be in the show notes both on your podcast platform and on our website greenio.tech when it comes to sustainability, I have a sweet spot for Singapore because of its uniqueness. This is one of the top cities in the entire world which has benefited the most from the global extractivist, highly carbonized and financialized economy, and also one of its most at risk of climate change. Hence a blossoming of initiatives there on how to both pivot towards more sustainability and mitigate climate change impacts. And these efforts apply especially to the backbone of its infrastructure data centers. As we are growing aware that the human body has some physiological limits that can be reached during heat waves where the wrong mix of high temperature and humidity is reached. It's death for people staying outside too long and this concerns everyone, not only the populations usually at risk like infants or elderly people. It was really well illustrated by Jancovici Jean-Marc and Blain Christophe in their international bestseller comics World Without End and based on a 2020 mega study published in Environmental Sciences, a third of humankind is now at risk to live in places where temperature could be lethal several weeks per year. Well, everything that I just said about humans applies to data center equipment which also needs to be cooled down 24/7 for many obvious reasons. Starting with latency and sovereignty, we cannot move all data centers in the world where the air will remain cool like the Nordics. Hence a serious challenge for the tech industry, how to run a sustainable data center and more specifically how to build sustainable data center hubs where tropical climate creates hurdles which are getting bigger due to climate change. To discuss this, I'm honored to have Professor P. S. Lee on the show. Based in Singapore, PS is National University of Singapore Dean's Chair of Mechanical Engineering and one of the most cited scientists in mechanical engineering and transport energy rings worldwide. He has specialized in data center engineering for two decades and he is also a field practitioner. The founder of Coolers DC, what a cool name, which advises top DC operators like Equinix or Meta. He will also be our keynote speaker at the Green IO Singapore Conference in two weeks, April 18 to be precise. One reason among many reasons to join the first conference in Asia focusing 100% on green it and Green IO. Listeners can get free tickets using the Voucher GREENIOVIP and how exciting it is to kickstart my discussion with Professor Lee. Welcome, Poh Seng. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.PS Lee 03:54Hi guys, thanks for having me. So it's my pleasure to be on your podcast.Gaël Duez 03:59So PS, I played again with the excellent Climate Central's coastal risk screening tool, which enables people to simulate the impact of a sea level rise, among other impacts. And the results were already concerning for a 44 cm water level rise, which is the current IPCC best estimator for the business as usual scenario with most of the iconic gardens by the bay in Singapore under the water. And if we simulate a 2 meters rise, a likely scenario. If some tipping points with ice in Greenland or Antarctica are reached, well, the entire Singapore's harbor is at risk. My point is, climate change is very real for Singaporeans. Could you maybe explain to us why and what is more precisely at stake here?PS Lee 04:53Sure. I would like to refer to the recently published 2023 Singapore Climate Reports, which marks an alarming continuation of global warming trends, with Singapore experiencing its fourth warmest year since unprecedented temperatures, especially during the months of May and October. This underlined the urgency of addressing climate change. The report's projection of up to 326 high heat stress days by 2099 in high emission scenarios starkly highlights the impending challenges, especially for industries like the IT sector.Gaël Duez 05:33Correct me if I'm wrong, but Singapore is a very massive IT hub in Southeast Asia, is that correct?PS Lee 05:42Yes. As of two to three years ago, in Singapore, the total data center capacity is actually close to 1, that is close to the 10% of the whole of APAC. So for city states to be hosting that kind of capacity is actually quite amazing, but it's actually important to manage the power and the associated carbon footprint. So it is. Right now, the data center industry is already consuming 7% of Singapore total electricity consumption. And if we don't manage this in a couple of years, this can actually go up to 12%. So that's why the Singapore government has actually imposed a data center moratorium about two and a half to three years ago, which they finally left the year before. Thereafter, there was a data center call for application, which the industry expected to meet very stringent criteria, including PUE, no more than 1.3, as well as the adoption of innovative and sustainable data center solutions.Gaël Duez 06:59You mean that for two years and a half it was not permitted to build new data center facilities in Singapore.PS Lee 07:07That's right.Gaël Duez 07:08And just to make sure I understood well it's already 7% of electricity consumption and it could triple with the current trend.PS Lee 07:17Yes and especially with the interest in AI in other high power workloads. So if we don't manage this in a sustainable fashion, this percentage is certainly going to increase very sharply over the next couple of years.Gaël Duez 07:35So clearly the Singaporean government doesn't want to go the Irish way with the Irish scenario. Where I recall today the electricity consumed by the data center industry is already above 20% if not 25%. I don't recall the number exactly but it was really mind blowing. And so you were mentioning this very strict criteria to build a data center in Singapore, obviously low carbon electricity and also innovative solutions. Maybe it would be interesting to unpack the challenges that data center operators in Singapore and more largely in tropical climates are facing.PS Lee 08:19Yeah sure. I think the first and foremost operating data centers here in the tropics with a high ambient temperature and humidity is actually going to be a very energy sapping exercise because of the constant cooling needs in order to maintain the IT equipment within acceptable temperature range in order to ensure proper and reliable operations. But associated with the heat stress that we're experiencing during the recent few years due to climate change, this has actually imposed a more challenging condition for data center operators to ensure the resilience as well as efficient operation of data center here in the tropics and specifically here in Singapore. So that's definitely going to be they are constantly looking for more energy efficient cooling solution and this goes beyond operational efficiency, rethinking energy sourcing as well and potentially integrating renewable energy sources to mitigate the carbon footprint. And for city state like Singapore in terms of domestic generation of renewable energy is going to be limited as well. I think the only viable renewable energy source here is actually solar and based on a report published by the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore series which is hosted here at NUS. So even if we were to sort of use all our rooftop space for the solar panels, so the percentage of the electric supply that comes from solar is actually still going to be very limited, well less than 10%. So that's why I think Singapore is actually adopting innovative approaches whereby we're actually cutting agreements with our Asian neighbors to look into the imports of green electrons, low carbon electricity. Then I think related to the temperature challenge or the temperature or what we call a thermal management challenge associated with operating data center here, there's also this wear and tear on it equipment because the increased heat stress days will directly translate to accelerated depreciation of critical data center equipment. And this necessitates more effective maintenance and proactive design consideration that can withstand the rigor of a harsher climate, and again, related to a climate. So when it comes to heat rejection, typically we need to operate the cooling towers that actually consume water, then that brings about the water sustainability issues. So given the intensity or the intensification of the extreme weather events. So water cooling, the technologies, while efficient, may actually impose a sustainability challenge. Hence, we are always actually looking at better ways of reusing water recycling along with explorations of air and more efficient liquid cooling alternatives. And these are now becoming imperative. But we are also grabbing with, for example, the challenge of a skilled workforce, especially if you look across the region, Southeast Asia. So the data centers industry is actually booming. So how do we actually adapt and mitigate the impacts of climate change? Data center also means nurturing a workforce which is proficient in engineering and understanding sustainability practices and technology. So there are definitely quite a few challenges that we are confronting today in order to ensure the sustainable growth of the IT industry.Gaël Duez 12:42If I follow you here, in trying to wrap up what you say, I've listed four challenges. You've got the energy challenge, the equipment challenge, the water challenge, and I would say the workforce challenge.PS Lee 12:56Yes. These are the exact four points that.Gaël Duez 12:59I mentioned, and I think it will be worse deep diving on all of them. So if we start with the energy challenge, I've got a first question. So you mentioned solar, and solar not being able to attend more than to contribute to more than 10% of the overall electricity production. But what about wind energy? Is there any ability to put wind from around Singapore or is it just something completely nuts because of all the boat traffic?PS Lee 13:33Yeah. So Singapore is what we call a renewable energy challenge country, right? So when it comes to the wind, unfortunately, our wind speed is actually on the low side. If you were to put in the wind turbines, whatnot, right. In terms of the energy that this can generate will be very limited, right. Because of the low wind speed. Hence comparing the different options, solar is actually the only viable renewable energy option. Although in the recent one, two years, there have been a lot of interest in assessing the potential for geothermal. And there's also talk about going into nuclear, although I think the nuclear question has not been fully addressed because we are in CD states. So certainly the public perceptions, the safety related issues will have to be adequately addressed before Singapore to take a position. So we are very much constrained in terms of renewable energy options.Gaël Duez 14:47I think I'm not 100% sure that regarding this energy innovative approach you mentioned, which is basically outsourcing the production of low carbon electricity, I think you're the one who mentioned it as a geopolitical problem. Could you elaborate a bit on what are the pros and cons of sourcing your low carbon energy elsewhere than on your own territory?PS Lee 15:13So sourcing, renewable, the energy or the low carbon electricity from for example our neighbors. So that actually requires the cutting of bilateral agreements. And if let's suppose the electricity is actually to pass through in more than one country, then that actually requires multilateral agreement. Hence the political issues will then come into the picture. But I think Singapore has been actually very forward looking and over the past year or so, in fact we have signed an agreement totaling more than four gigawatts of clean electricity imports. But obviously the data was in the details. For example, what will be the price that would be paying for such clean electricity? The imports, because our other neighbors also have their net zero commitments. So there are actually a lot of issues. But the one thing is clear, I think once the Singapore government decides on the course of action, they will actually put in all the necessary efforts to realize them. So I feel hopeful that it will be a win-win arrangement. For example, we will collaborate deeply with our asean neighbor so as to sort of increase the deployment of renewable energy projects so that when they have access they can actually look into exporting some of these clean electricity to Singapore. But it may actually require some sort of differential pricing. For example, maybe for their domestic demand the rate will be kept at the lower level, but for those that they are exporting to Singapore, that may actually incur a certain premium.Gaël Duez 17:10What about the infrastructure? I mean, you need a connection cable. Are they already there? Do you plan to construct more?PS Lee 17:16Yes, I think the associated grid infrastructure will be actually critical when we look at linking up the grid that cuts across different countries. For one, I think there may be differences in terms of some of the standards. I think this is something that Singapore will have to work with the neighbors to finance the grid infrastructure and that may actually require quite a big amount of upgrading or the expansion of the existing grid. So I think this will likely be a costly exercise. But I think if this will actually be a win-win arrangement, by adopting a collaborative approach, we can actually increase the renewable generation capacity.Gaël Duez 18:05And if I run a data center facility in Singapore, how does it work concretely for me? Is it more okay, my government is in charge of decarbonizing the electricity, so I consume the electricity that I've got in the grid. That's it, period. Or do they also have to close a deal like purchasing power agreement or some sort of directly with foreign countries?PS Lee 18:32So I think this is the part that is still not quite clear yet. So for example, can you achieve the data center operators, can they cut a direct view, for example, power purchase agreement with renewable generation plants, for example, in Indonesia? So this is the part that is still not quite clear because the agreement that has been cut is still country to country. But I think there's actually a lot of interest from the data center operators to have access to as much green electrons as possible. But the details have not been ironed out yet. But I suppose it will be done in a phase approach. First, country to country, the agreement has to be done then that can actually trigger down to the various sectors. Certainly. I think data centers are one industry that has strong demand for the low carbon electricity. But there are also other sectors, right? So I think the Singapore government will then have to figure out a way. Then when they import such, the green electrons, which sector should it go to? Is it the data center industry or is it the semiconductor industry? Or would they actually allow, for example, the sector to actually cut direct agreement with the renewable, the generation, the plan overseas? So this is not clear yet. So I suppose over the next two to three years, right. There will be actually more clarity. But I think what is clear, Singapore government has always actually had a very consultative approach. So I'm sure they will be actually reaching out to industry, including data centers, to have the dialogue and to sort of come up with a framework, right, such that it will actually benefit, for example, data center operators who have the desire to steeply decarbonize their data center operations.Gaël Duez 20:41And eventually, because I believe the Singaporean electricity grid is fully unified, it's a theoretical question, or at least it's a bit like an analytical accounting question, because an electron is an electron. It's not green or per se, but it's more like between the different business interests, which business interests can claim, between the semiconductor industry, building and heating and or heating, not that much, but cooling. And in the data center industry, which industry will contribute the most to the low carbon electricity sourcing effort? But still. So how many data centers and how many operators are we talking about? Is it a very concentrated market with a handful of firms running larger facilities, or do you still have a lot of smaller or medium sized data centers run by, you know, I don't know, institutions, big companies, etc.PS Lee 21:40I think it's a mixed bag. So for Singapore, the data center industry, it has been reported that there are between 70 to 80 data centers operating here in Singapore. So you look at some of the more recent announcements, in particular, meta -150 mw, obviously it's huge, then, even since they actually consolidated some of the data centers. So they are actually probably in the range of 70 to 80 megawatt. So again, very sizable. And I think there's also the Google, the Microsoft, but certainly there are also the smaller data centers. That's probably in the range of maybe between 10 to 20 megawatt. But I think moving forward, for a mature market like Singapore. We will have to look at the edge data centers, which are smaller in capacity. Maybe we should be actually looking at anywhere between five to ten to 20 maximum in the capacity. And for those data centers, they are handling very high power workloads. For example, if you are doing AI training, I think it makes more sense to actually have this in, for example, Malaysia, in Indonesia, because they have abundance of renewable energy potential, they can then obviously have the green electrons to offset the carbon footprint associated with the very high capacity data centers. So I'm actually very hopeful that the various parties, various countries come together to set up what I call the sustainable data network, whereby we actually work in a very collaborative fashion so as to more effectively manage the carbon footprint of the entire Southeast Asia region.Gaël Duez 23:40Because you're an expert on these topics, whether my electricity is low carbon or not, I think the question of reducing the electricity bill is pivotal here. I would like to ask two questions that are very closely interlinked, as far as I know. How should we build data centers today, or refurbish them, and how should we run them to make sure that we save or we reduce as much as possible, or energy consumption.PS Lee 24:14I think certainly you make an excellent point. There's this constant desire to have access to more green electrons. I think this has to be peltrapped with energy, the efficient technologies specifically addressing the high energy, the consumption associated with operating cooling systems for data center, suddenly we can actually look at innovative cooling technologies, for example, the exploration or the adoption of single and two phase directorship and immersion cooling systems. So these are actually at the forefront of reducing the data center energy use and improving the cooling efficiency. And there's actually another wonderful side benefit that is less reported associated with the use of high efficiency, the liquid cooling that actually allows your hardware to actually operate at optimal efficiency. So, meaning that you'll be able to get the optimal workload accomplished versus, for example, when you are operating your IT equipment under the air cooling mode, which often goes into suggestion like thermal throttling, meaning that you're not able to fully maximize in terms of the performance. So I think adoption of innovative cooling technologies is certainly one of the first things that we want to do in terms of improving the energy efficiency of data center operations.Gaël Duez 25:58Just regarding this water cooling approach, I've got a question, which is how sustainable it is. And my question comes with two faces, and we will talk about the water consumption later. The first, is it mature enough or is it still R & D? Because last time I checked, the moment you put metals in water, bad things happen, corrosion and so on. And that will be my very minimalistic contribution in terms of chemistry. But how much is it like R and D and a bit of hype, or how sustainable it is? And my second question is how big the investment, environmentally speaking. But it also comes with a financial cost, obviously, when you refactor or you refurbish your factory to enable water cooling, because you could have a lot of carbon embodied with the data center facility itself. So hence my two questions, which are two sides of the same coin regarding the sustainability of water cooling technology.PS Lee 26:59So liquid cooling is not new. It has actually been around for a decade. It's just that the data center, being a recent adverse industry, didn't quite adopt it in a big way. But I think we are actually getting to a stage whereby, because of the increase in thermal design power, because of the sustainability imperative, I think we are getting to this stage whereby liquid cooling really needs to be a serious option. And it's certainly well beyond R & D. So to give an example, we actually started a company called CoolDC. We started off with a test bedding at one of the major co-location operators in one of their production data halls. And shortly after the completion of the test vetting, we actually managed to secure a project with a major local bank. And they are actually looking at implementing liquid cooling for 16 racks and this handling production workload. So certainly I think it's actually ready for the big time. But the challenge is actually how do you come up with a system that can scale with demand, when talking about, for example, high power IT equipment, it will not happen overnight, there will be a scaling up over time. So then the challenge is actually how do we configure a cooling system that can scale with demand in a very cost effective fashion, in a fashion that minimizes the disruption to ongoing operations. So I think there are actually ways to do it, because without liquid cooling, in fact there are actually different configurations. It can be air assisted, liquid cooling, which can be pronged into an existing brown fuel air cooled data centers without laying the elaborate piping network. But then obviously, going back to your second question, then what about the impact in terms of the environmental impact, for example, in terms of embodied carbon, so should you, for example, I have to set up new data centers. So again, I think it really depends, right? So we're very innovative in design. In fact, you can retrofit, right? Brownfield Data Centers to be very energy efficient. And that major local bank, the client that I mentioned just now, is actually in fact retrofitting one of their existing data halls. So as to support the equivalent that can be done. It's just that the engagement, the dialogue with the infrastructure folks and the IT team has to happen at an early stage. So as to minimize the disruption because if after talk, then obviously that will potentially lead to the interruption to the IT operation, but then if, for example, you start the dialogue early, you know, when the IT team is planning to have the next round of hardware refresh, it refresh. If you time the upgrading or the retrofitting of the infrastructure to support liquid cooling in line with your IT refresh cycle. I think that can be done with very minimal disruption. And the other initiative that I have been spearheading, the sustainable tropical data center. In fact, what we did is actually we retrofitted a 40 plus year old power substation into a very efficient data center. That's where, so moving forward, that likely will be the model. Because for one, you want to save on embodied carbon. And the fact that for a mature market like Singapore, we are actually running short of power. We are also running short of space. We can't keep continuing to have new build data centers. But the fact that you see we have a lot of existing building stock, I think there's one perception that liquid cooling may actually lead to increased water consumption. That's not really the case because in fact, when talking about direct to chip or emergent cooling, this can be fully the closed system. For example, instead of rejecting the heat through a conventional cooling tower, which is obviously going to consume water, you can actually perform the heat rejection using a dry cooler. In fact, we have actually demonstrated this at that cold location data center that I mentioned. We actually demonstrated that you can actually simply reject the heat using a dry cooler without consuming the water. So again, really there's a lot of variance in terms of how you configure a liquid cooling system. So I think it really needs to be a very early engagement between the infrastructure team, the IT team, as well as the solution provider, so that you can actually come up with a configuration, a solution that is really fit for purpose because you don't want to over design or under design. Then we need to adopt a holistic approach whereby we actually factor in what's the impact in terms of the embodied carbon, what's the impact in terms of the water consumption. Then obviously, what's the impact in terms of the power or the energy consumption, which is typically measured in terms of power. But moving forward, I think it has to be really a very collaborative approach, and the dialogue needs to actually start as early as possible and not as an afterthought.Gaël Duez 32:49I've got a question for you regarding what you said about water consumption, which was one of the four challenges that you've listed. Where do these big headlines about water consumption of main hyperscalers, at least western ones, come from if water cooling doesn't consume that much water? Because, you know, I mean, all of them, Google, Azure, AWS, they've been blamed for consuming a lot of water. So where is the issue here? Because you tell us that, well, it doesn't, you can run a closed system and it doesn't consume water, or at least marginally so can you enlighten us a bit here?PS Lee 33:32One option, as I mentioned just now, is actually to use, for example, a dry cooler instead of cooling the tower, thereby having a fully closed system without actually consuming water. But then obviously there's a trade off, right? So if you operate a dry cooler versus a cooling tower in terms of the PUE, in terms of efficiency, right? The former, without the consuming water, will be actually less efficient, somewhat less efficient then in terms of the footprint. So the space required for a dry cooler versus cooling tower is actually going to be bigger. So I think it really has to be a holistic assessment. So what makes sense? Do you want to go, for example, the best possible PUE, or do you want to have a more balanced so called matrix involving not only the PUE but also the weight? So I think that's probably what's necessary moving forward. So for data center operators, including hyperscalers, to look at things in a more holistic fashion. But then I think the fact is still hyperscalers actually have very high capacity data centers. So then that obviously will translate to a large carbon footprint. Yeah. So I think that's something actually unavoidable in certain sense, but I think as much as possible we will have to then maybe look into the transition from air cooling to cooling because that will bring about a reduction in terms of the total energy consumption. So I think that's something that we do, but I think the other aspect that can be done is actually the end user. So we also need to be probably more prudent in terms of our consumption of digital services. So maybe you want to limit how much TikTok or YouTube that you watch each day.Gaël Duez 35:27It's a bit like the elephant in the room. Is sobriety like digital sobriety a topic at all in Singapore or in Southeast Asia, as far as you can tell?PS Lee 35:37I think people, obviously so here in the news, in social media, that we need to be more sustainable. Carbon emission is definitely going to be something challenging to manage, but it's just that I think some of the things that don't actually trigger down to the individual, to the personal level. So moving forward, we may really need to consider imposing a personal carbon budget so that you're more conscious in terms of how much digital services that you consume. I think it's all part of being a responsible citizen. Everyone obviously is conscious of climate change. We really need to take it upon ourselves so that we are also very conscious in terms of managing our consumption. I think that certainly will be very complimentary to all the wonderful energy efficient technologies that we are deploying in our data centers. Very complementary to the integration of renewable energy. But if, let's suppose we can in tandem manage the consumption while actually managing in terms of the energy efficiency improvement, integration, and renewable energy, I think all in all, that will make the earth more sustainable.Gaël Duez 37:13The example you gave about making people more aware of the need to refrain from digital consumption, I think it connects pretty well with what you've said several times before that. Dialogue is key. And making sure that all stakeholders start discussing on how to make the data center industry more sustainable. And my question is that a Singapore way of doing things like, it seems to be pretty much in the DNA of Singapore business and governments to talk to each other. I don't know if it includes consumers as well as you've just mentioned right now, and how much of the government is involved and how much more specifically does it use the stick or the carrot.PS Lee 38:07So I can frame it as dialogue and collaboration. So I think Singapore has always been very collaborative. I think one, the key reason being that Singapore is actually a migrant society. We have a very relatively short history. So in our 50 years of nation building, I think Singapore achieved a lot. And I think that happened because we are able to rally people coming from a different background, different races, different religions to come together in a very collaborative fashion, then obviously you see collaboration between government, industry, academia, civil society. So I think that really is very much needed when we want to actually address the multifaceted challenges associated with sustainability, associated with climate change. I think the Sierra Leone government probably will soften, or rather usually will first go with the carrot before they bring the stick. I think really helping the industry, helping the public to see the needs to be more sustainable and the need to be more collaborative, I think that will be actually more effective than, for example, imposing the very draconian measures. I'm still hopeful that Singapore will be able to focus more on inculcating or enculturation. They need to be sustainable, they need to be collaborative so that people come together willingly. Because I think that will be more effective than forcing people to comply with certain regulations. I thought that should be probably the last resort but I suppose it needs to be a balance, because obviously there will still be companies that are non compliant. Certain amounts of regulatory advancement will still be necessary.Gaël Duez 40:20And I'm asking you also the question, because I'm pretty sure you're familiar with what is going on in the rest of the world and in Europe. Very recently, an energy efficiency directive has been launched and it was pretty precise regarding the metrics that a data center should now report above a certain capacity. And it goes way beyond just renewable energy and PUE or we also waste use, etc. Do we have this kind of reporting requirements planned in Singapore, in other areas in Southeast Asia, for instance, or nothing to your knowledge?PS Lee 41:02Not to my knowledge, but at some point we may have to do the same thing. Going back to our earlier discussion that moving forward for Singapore especially, we will need to be very selective in terms of the kind of data center, the kind of workload that we are hosting. Obviously, we are very energy constrained. We have very limited options when it comes to renewable energy sources. So I think at some point we will probably need to mandate that the data center operators will actually need to report various matrixes, for example, maybe pertaining to PUE or WUE, what's the amount of renewable energy, the sources that are integrating into their operations, things like that. But I think it will take a while. I think at least for now, I see Singapore, the government actually engaging industry, encouraging them to go through the green transition. And I think that is something that will take some time. But I'm sure the Sambo government actually provides the necessary support, for example, in terms of grants, in terms of assistance, in terms of technology, so that the existing stock of brownfield data centers, especially those that are quite dated, right, can then go through this green transition.Gaël Duez 42:36Now I'd like to zoom out a bit and talk about resiliency and the lessons for the rest of the world, because tropical, or you meet subtropical climates, are pretty widespread around the globe. And for example, in the state of Virginia, home of AWS, this is a subtract tropical climate. And I don't know Pierce if you read it, but in 2022, the reviewer, security technology published a fictional story about a heat dome descending in the summer of 2025. So it's next year near the town of Ashburn, Virginia. Ashburn is called ‘data center alley’ by its folks in the US, because it's by far the largest concentration of data centers, not just in the United States, but in the entire world. And spoiler alert, it ends with a data center manager having to shut down an entire hyper scaler facility facing the cornelian choice of either losing billions of dollars in equipment or entering its history with the first ever cloud blackout. And everything you said in this interview makes this story some sort of more likely because you describe the worsening climate condition that Singapore faces, all the challenges to cool down data centers, etcetera. And my question is: how realistic it is, and what are the lessons for pretty much everyone running a data center facility in the world from the specific conditions that operators in subtropical areas, the one who are the most at risk of heatwave? Well, what could be these lessons? PS Lee 44:30I think certainly the increasing episode of heatwave is going to pose challenges to the data center industry, especially if they are still using conventional air cooling systems. So I think this is part of that kind of dovetails here very nicely into why I think liquid cooling is actually the way to go because one of the studies that we did, which I thought is pretty interesting. So what we did is actually we increased the supply air temperature as well as the supplied liquid temperature, because we actually have two racks, one which is actually an air cool rack, the other is actually the liquid cool rack, both having the exact same IT configuration. So the only difference is actually the cooling method. So what we have shown is actually for the air cooled rack, the server's performance, the energy consumption, it's actually very strong functions of temperature, because when you're operating your IT equipment using air cooling, all your chip temperature, or what we call junction temperature, are actually much higher, typically in the range of 80 or 90 degrees celsius. And that is actually very close to the temperature threshold, because you want to protect the electronics, [for] the server you usually set the upper temperature limit. So once you cross that limit, then the thermal throttling skips in because you want to protect your electronics. But when you actually operate your liquid cool rack, even with an increase in supply temperature, what we notice actually both the performance as well as the energy consumption actually stays relatively insensitive to temperature. So the implication is actually what if you have a liquid cooling system, or rather if you are using a liquid cooling system, even if, for example, there's actually an increase in your outdoor temperature, ambient temperature, whatnot, that's not going to lead to a big issue in terms of the performance of your IT equipment in terms of the energy consumption by the demand. But if you were to actually use the conventional air cooling, then you'll run into serious problems because of the increase in your ambient temperature that actually leads to your ip, the hardware going into more frequent thermal throttling, which is obviously going to affect the performance. That's also going to mean that your equipment now is going to have a higher power penalty. So I think from the resilience standpoint, I think it makes a lot of sense for the industry to actually look into transitioning from air to liquid cooling. So that's actually my personal experience that I can share when it comes to the data center resiliency from the angle of cooling.Gaël Duez 47:48However, you mentioned earlier that transitioning a full entire facility from air cooling to water cooling comes at a price, and you were advocating more for a modular approach. So if, how much would it cost for a per scaler to migrate entirely air cooling to water cooling? I think it will be ace watering without bad word play.PS Lee 48:15It's true. If you have software looking at retrofitting and air cooled data centers to liquid cool, and suddenly there will be the additional CapEx. The fact that you have a sunken investment on your air cooling infrastructure and for you to replace that with liquid cooling infrastructure, certainly there will be additional CapEx, but it may, you may have no choice, right? If let's suppose your tenants come to you and say, I'm going to bring in one rack of GPU service because I'm going to run generative AI workload. If you don't have the supporting liquid cooling infrastructure, there's no way that your tenants can actually operate his high power servers or his high power rack. Even if they can operate it, they wouldn't be able to get the performance that they paid for. So the multiple factors that you need to consider one is actually, what's the cost, what's the ROI the other is actually what is the business opportunity that you don't do it. Because if you can't support the high power rack, high power equipment, your tenants will take the business and go to your competitors. So I think it really requires a holistic assessment. Certainly ROI is important, but at the same time, do you want to future proof your data centers so that you're able to handle the current, the future workload that's going to come into your data centers? So I think operators probably don't really have too many options. If you don't do it, you are going to fall behind your competitors.Gaël Duez 50:05So when economics incentives meet sustainability incentives, I think that's a nice way to wrap up the entire episode. Professor, before we leave this episode, I've got one final question. Would you like to share a positive piece of news with us? Whether it comes to sustainability in general or more specifically, its sustainability?PS Lee 50:32Sure. Traditionally, the Southeast Asia data center markets are not known to be trailblazers in terms of adoption of the most advanced, most innovative solution. But because of the confluence of various factors, including the increase in thermal design power achieved because of the sustainability imperative. So over the last 12 to 24 months, we have been seeing a lot of interesting developments. For example, data center markets in Malaysia and Indonesia are starting to sort of call for liquid cooling infrastructure. So I think that can propel the region, in fact, to be the leaders when it comes to adoption of sustainable and innovative data center solutions. So I'm actually very hopeful that the region can achieve leadership in terms of embracing the most sustainable and the most innovative solution. But going back to one of the key discussion points, it has to be a highly collaborative approach.Gaël Duez 51:42Yeah, that was the key word here, collaboration. And we've got a lot to learn from a small but very powerful state who has to work well with all its neighbors and to source electricity and to find innovative solutions. Thanks a lot. PS, that was lovely to have you on the show. I'm eager to see you on stage for Green IO Singapore. I hope that many listeners based in Singapore and maybe some of them based in Southeast Asia will come as well. Thanks a lot again and talk to you very soon.PS Lee 52:16Sure. Thanks for having me.Gaël Duez 52:19Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, share it and give us five stars on Apple or Spotify. We are an independent media relying solely on you to get more listeners. Plus, it will give our little team Jill, Meibel, Tani and I a nice booster. In our next episode, we will talk about product management and more specifically, how to be a climate conscious product manager with Antonia Landi, a leading voice in the european product ops community, and François Burra, co-author of the Climate product management Playbook. Stay tuned. Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit Greenio Dot Tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. The next one is in Singapore, but you already know it on April 18, and you can get a free ticket using the Voucher GREENIOVIP and you already knew it. What you might not know is that early bird tickets for London on September 19 are already for sale. And what you might not already know is that we opened the call for speakers for London, so feel free to apply if you've got something interesting to say regarding it, sustainability, whether it's cloud data, operation design, etcetera. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you fellow responsible technologists build a greener digital world one bite at a time.
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⚙️Cybersecurity and sustainability do share a complex relationship! The two approaches share commonalities, such as grappling with resistance from teams and executives and prioritizing resilience, but they also seem to split in notable ways such as constant updates in cybersecurity impacting bloatware and equipment obsolences. 🎧In this episode Gaël Duez invited two experts on the field, Mary Prokhorova from InDevLab and Michael Oghia from Datacenter Changemakers, to discuss the nuances of cybersecurity and sustainability’s relationship.🔎Some few takeaways from their conversation are:💡the critical role of IT infrastructure in modern business processes💡importance of protecting critical infrastructure to avoid environmental damage and societal impacts💡significance of investing in digital infrastructure to support the green revolution and highlighting the impact of climate risks on both physical and digital security❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!📧 Once a month, we deliver carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents in your mailbox, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conference is in Singapore on April 18th (use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket) Learn more about our guest and connect: * Mary’s LinkedIn * Michael’s LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website

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Mary and Michael's sources and other references mentioned in this episode: * Reduce, Reuse, Refurbish: Dispelling Sustainability Myths with EmXcore * Sustainability and Cybersecurity: The Unexpected Dynamic Duo of the Energy Transition * Ukraine’s top mobile internet company is down * Guidebook for a Cyber-Resilient Low-Emissions Energy Transition * Europe is bolstering energy sector resilience. But cyber risk remains a major vulnerability * Rising sea level and coastal infrastructure optic fiber at risk * The Impact of Rising Sea Level on Internet Infrastructure * Cybersecurity is an environmental, social and governance issue. Here's why * The Rising Role of Cybersecurity in ESG and How Companies Are Taking Action * Florida water treatment facility hack used a dormant remote access software, sheriff says

Transcript
Gaël Duez00:00Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO with Gaël Duez. That's me. Green IO is the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world one byte at a time. Every two Tuesdays, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. Because access and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes both on your podcast platform and on our website greenio.tech, cybersecurity and sustainability it has been a while since I decided to have a dedicated episode on the complex relationship between the two. On one hand, the two approaches share some common features, such as not always. Being an easy sell to teams or. Executives, or their common emphasis on resiliency. On the other end, there are some areas where they seem to go the opposite direction. Security requires regular updates, having an impact on both bloatware and equipment obsolescence, resident equipment increases the environmental footprint of infrastructure, and so on. Quite a lot to cover in this episode, so I wanted to bring two experts on board, Mary and Michael, with different angles of approach. Mary Prokhorova is the founder and CEO of InDevLab and also the co-founder of Servi5, which is specialized in cybersecurity products. She's based in Ukraine, where she can unfortunately experience firsthand and on a daily basis the vital importance of cybersecurity. Mary has a specialized education in software design and development and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in software and cybersecurity. So right on the spot with our topic. Michael Oghia is a consultant, editor, and ICT sustainability advocate working within the digital infrastructure, internet governance, and media development ecosystem, currently as a Partnerships Manager & Co-producer, at Datacenter Changemakers at Datacenter Forum. In a nutshell, he knows a lot about sustainability, infrastructure, and resiliency. And a fun fact, he was one of the first persons I connected to almost three years ago when I started my journey into sustainability. It was obvious to me that I wanted him on the show at some point and voilà. Better late than never. Welcome both of you to the show. Thanks a lot, Mary. Thanks a lot, Michael, for joining Green IO today.Michael J. Oghia02:40It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me, and indeed, it's been a long time coming, so I'm very grateful to finally be here with you.Mary Prokhorova02:52Yeah, thank you. Nice to meet you all.Gaël Duez02:55Okay, so to start maybe unwrapping all the different topics, Mary, what do you think about the parallel I draw between cybersecurity strategy and sustainability strategy not always being the top priority and the way teams will handle it? It's important, but it's obviously less important than delivering or providing new features or whatever. Can you comment on this? Do you agree? Because you've got a lot of experience with different companies, is it something that you've noticed also or not that much? Mary Prokhorova03:29Of course, I agree. I think that cybersecurity will be a part of sustainability. The main focus will be on sustainability, sustainability for a working model, for general organization development, and general impact on this world. I mean, not only like ecological impact, I mean like something more that organization could bring to our people. Maybe it's also mind-changing. It's also focusing on more important things for our nature. But the general sustainability will also based on security tools. If we are talking about sustainability, for example, for critical infrastructure, if we are talking about electric station or about heatric electric station, we're also about talking about how it works with IT infrastructure. And do we have a risk if something breaks from IT infrastructure, this infrastructure still works and will have not any ecological strategy for nature. It's, for example, from my side, from my experience, I have situations when cybersecurity and it infrastructure have a very big impact on manufacturing. In this part of Europe. We have a lot of manufacturing that work, for example, with windows, with plastic, with different tips. And the station was next something went wrong in infrastructure. And all this manufacturing was stopped. I mean, logistics was stopped, and production was stopped. A lot of plastic was broken. And do you know how much plastic they need to utilisate more than one ton per day? So you understand how much trouble it is for nature and you don't know how to reduce this plastic. So it's also about how infrastructure could and cybersecurity could influence to general production and general ecological questions.Michael J. Oghia06:14I completely agree with Mary's point there, and I wanted to say something very similar in my remarks throughout this episode as well, that there are many different ways that we can kind of paint this argument. Where is the intersection between cybersecurity and sustainability? And one of them that Mary just mentioned is very prominent, which is that if you are a, whether it is a business or a factory if you are struck by an attack, depending on what you're doing or what you're making, you might be then left with a lot of waste or a lot of byproducts that you cannot then produce, you cannot use. So what do we do with that? So I think that's a very specific element that is kind of relevant to this intersection, but that is definitely one of them that I had thought of as well. And if you think about this from many different angles, if you think, okay, well, if you're a factory producing something, let's say, related to plastics, as Mary mentioned, that could be a source of waste. But everything that requires something to be fixed, anything that requires something to be addressed, that is additional carbon emissions, that is additional resources being used to fix a problem that didn't need to happen. It only happens because of often malicious actors, whether state or non-state. And thus it's just one more layer to our very complicated, complex world that we live in that I think is very relevant to this discussion.Gaël Duez08:00I fully agree. And actually, that was an angle I didn't pay attention to before. I was focusing a lot on resiliency and critical infrastructure, like Mary said, on electric power plants. But I never pay attention to it. Yes, actually, when you've got a cyber attack that could create a lot of waste and byproducts that you absolutely do not want. Okay, let's deep dive into this resiliency approach. Because I think sustainability and cybersecurity are very much related when it comes to resiliency. Mary, maybe you want to elaborate a bit on this one.Mary Prokhorova08:34Yeah, yeah, for sure. I also want to focus too that modern business having its part inside. And it's a very nice point to focus on because if we are talking about digital, business development, about business growing, we are also talking about IT infrastructure and IT systems development and growing for this business. And all our modern business is growing with their internal IT system. It doesn't matter whether is it an on-premise solution or a SaaS solution, is it Microsoft Office or your customized CRM system. So if you want to grow, you need to also to develop your IT part. And if you do not secure your IT part, you will not secure your business processes. These business processes are based on all these IT tools. I mean like CRM, like Riverside podcast recording, like email, like your personal data in social network, et cetera. So that's why it's very nice to understand for business how much part they have in these business processes. And what's the influence of this IT part on their modern IT process and for future IT processes? Why I also mentioned about future, because we are right now in era of artificial intelligence and the part of this artificial intelligence will be more bigger each day. And also we need to understand where we could use this tool for our business automatization, digitalization, et cetera. And where we need to protect our data from this big smart machine. What I want to say, is if we want to grow, if you want to make a sustainable business, you will use IT tools, IT instruments, IT platforms and sustainable IT infrastructure. If you want to build sustainable IT infrastructure, you will need to focus also on security questions. When we are talking about increasing security for each organization, first we are talking about hardware and about IT infrastructure, about cloud, about servers and about networks. So if we are talking about companies that have their own IT solution for the market, we're talking about software security. Also, we need to be sure that this software is also secured from internal and external attacks. So if we are talking about how to check this software, you need to provide a cybersecurity audit or penetration testing. Penetration testing is the method when you try to hack this software. And there are three methods like black box, gray box, and white box. And they depend on how much information about this system that you want to hack. How much information do you have? If you have low information, it's a white box. If you have nothing, it's a black box, a gray box. It's a mixed something.Gaël Duez12:39Have something, not the gray box, just Mary, sorry to interrupt you. Just to make sure to understand. Gray box is more the situation where you want to assess the exposure to an internal threat. Like an employee having access to some information, but not all information. When you use the gray box situation, is it this kind of situation that? Do you want to test?Mary Prokhorova13:02Yes, it's one of the cases. Only one, because Gray box was used also with employees that were in your company and that lived in one or two years and tried to hug you because they are not happy. It's a real case when your previous employers do have not good thoughts and they are not happy and they are connected with your enemies and trying to hug you and provide them corporate information about your general structure.Gaël Duez13:45And let's start with maybe one example, which is the bring your own device question. We know in sustainability that the more we mutualize, the better it is. But obviously, when you start with this first layer and actually this fifth layer that Mary described, using that much personal equipment might be good for the planet, might be good for the environment, but that causes some issues with cybersecurity. So we see this tension between cybersecurity and sustainability. Sometimes they're fully aligned and sometimes they're a bit opposite. What are your take on it?Michael J. Oghia14:18Okay, this is a good question because I don't see bringing your own device as it could be incompatible with sustainability, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. It doesn't mean that the company let's say, or whatever entity doesn't have any options, they can choose a partner like Fairphone or refurbish older devices that could work, for instance. I think I definitely understand that there is often perceived as a trade-off between sustainability and cybersecurity, but I don't think there necessarily has to be. There is a neutral way forward in some ways. But I think also recognizing that as something that Mary said, which I think is very important, too, that sustainability and cybersecurity go hand in hand. And they're very complementary in many ways, because the more you're investing in your own cybersecurity, the more you can also think about how you're making your organization sustainable and resilient. And so, yes, going back to the bring your own device question, that's a big question. And I can't say, aside from what I've already said, that I have a specific solution to that because I've never technically worked on that. I would say it really depends also on the needs of the company or of the entity in question. But I would also really suggest then that if let's say, a CTO is saying, no, there is no way that I'm allowing my employees to come in with their own devices, I would then say, okay, well, is there a way that we could provide refurbished devices? Is there a way that we could provide some kind of, maybe we can go and buy devices that are already manufactured or whatnot, so that we're essentially creating less demand for new products, something that's already been made? If you go get a phone, for instance, that was manufactured three years ago, even if that's new to me, that's less wasteful than being like, okay, we're going to provide you with the latest iPhone or whatever, or the latest Android. On the other hand, too, getting a refurbished device can also come with its own positives, such as a lot of times, older devices have a lot fewer bugs because those bugs have already been worked out. So perhaps there are already good security patches and whatnot. But then again, I also recognize that security is a constant cat-and-mouse game where just because you're on top of things, well, somebody is trying to get right ahead of you. So this is a complex question that I think each company or each organization needs to step back and think, well, what are our options?Gaël Duez17:24So it's interesting because what you're saying is obviously, if you need to invest in redundant equipment or if you cannot allow your employees to bring their own device, it will come with the cost, and you can mitigate this cost with refurbished equipment, et cetera. On the other hand, what you also say is in general and the devil is in the details, but in general, the older the better in terms of cybersecurity. So this kind of sentence that you hear all the time, how we need to update, we need to update, we need to upgrade. Because for cybersecurity reason I think it's not that obvious, isn't it?Mary Prokhorova18:06I was born in a family who have a small own business with computers. And with all this equipment I was growing between monitors, between hearts, like video cards, mother plates, et cetera. So my first toy was this hard storage. And my parents were very deeply involved in hardware. And they talk like news, not mention it like the better. And also they mentioned it like if you buy a new device, you will receive new bugs and new issues and you will not use this device a full power. Currently, I'm working in cybersecurity and its field and I could say that they were right. But if you come back to your question, the truth in the middle, you don't need to waste your time for ten or 20 years to renovate your equipment and software. But it does not make sense to run for the latest update. Because also if you are talking about hardware, for example, personal devices, we have artificial absolutions. If I could correct when we need to buy the new stylophone to the new droid, more new laptop, et cetera. But also we receive this hardware with new software that has a lot of bugs, and a lot of new issues. And it does not make your job, your work easy. You will meet a lot of these tips and very fucking bugs in each device. But also I have met in my practice, I couldn't say names because it's a government structure. When they still work in 2015 with equipment that was bought in 1990 years, all these computers and the light test version of the operation system was Windows 97. And they still work. It's not a zoo, it's a park of moments, really stone era.Gaël Duez21:15Interesting that you mentioned Windows because that's a big debate among cybersecurity, security, and sustainability communities about them stopping the maintenance of Windows 10 pretty soon for security reasons. And we're talking about millions, dozens of millions of equipment that might not be compatible anymore. So what you're both saying is that it's actually not the best way to enforce cybersecurity. We know that it's definitely not the best way to enforce a sustainable world. But it might also be a bit counterintuitive to say that it's not the best move to enforce better security for Windows users. Am I right about Windows eleven?Mary Prokhorova22:03Currently, I see a lot of mistakes in the current system, and my colleagues are also trying to work on this system, on their personal devices. And they have a lot of questions and a lot of proposals on how to fix it. And the biggest one is to drop down and stop Windows 10 and stop any updates from Microsoft for a half year. It's also about sustainability. Sustainability for your personal work because if you can't work with your laptop, with your operational system, and to provide any your digital products, it's not useful, it's not sustainable, maybe.Gaël Duez22:56Michael, so we talked about resiliency from one angle, which is the environmental impact of a cyber attack, for instance. But they are much more about resiliency than just this. Could you maybe explain a bit more? Why are you both a resiliency expert and a sustainability expert when it comes to its infrastructure? How do you mix the two in your professional life?Michael J. Oghia23:20This is a great question because I see resiliency as being one of the core ways that cybersecurity and sustainability interact. So how is that the case? One is that infrastructure security is really critical to, for instance, the energy transition. So this is one thing that we need to take into account. You're asking me kind of, how do I see this coming together? The Nord stream attacks in 2022 are a great example of what happens when there is a significant attack, whether it's cyber or physical, on infrastructure that leads to environmental damage, essentially a detrimental impact on the environment. So in this sense, critical infrastructure resiliency is absolutely important. And of course, cybersecurity, to me, includes physical security, and it includes the more technical, let's say software-based kind of security, where, okay, how do we protect our hardware, how do we protect ourselves from software-based attacks? But also, if somebody is trying to cut a submarine cable between two countries, that is also what I would consider a cyberattack. We can debate the semantics or the nomenclature as much as we want, but that, to me, is really relevant for a few reasons. One is because when infrastructure is damaged, alternatives have to be found. If energy infrastructure in particular is attacked, then that means that alternatives have to be found. So let's say a lot of solar is coming online. It is attacked via a cyberattack. In other words, let's say that solar provider is not investing in their cyber resilience, and cybersecurity, then that solar plant might go offline, which means what happens? We might have to start a coal plant. So, do you know what I'm trying to say? In other words, if we're not investing in making ourselves secure, then we have to find alternatives to meet demand. And because the energy companies are prime targets because they have a lot of.Gaël Duez26:07Money.Michael J. Oghia26:10Because they're so critical to society, ransomware gangs, for instance, have been targeting them a lot. And it just means, for instance, that we need to think about how our infrastructure fits into the larger place in society and how protecting them is really vital. Because it's not just about keeping a company online to protect its own stock price or things like that, which is fair enough, but it's also about, well, again, if we're not using solar energy because we can't access it for a week, that means that we're probably relying then on fossil fuels, which are easier to ramp up within an energy system or whatnot. These are the ways that I see cybersecurity as really interacting with or really intersecting with sustainability. Sustainability is the sustainability considerations, being the impact of cyberattacks, the lack of investment in cyber resiliency, and ultimately kind of creating instability that then leads to situations that have not necessarily been planned for or damage to the environment and damage to society.Gaël Duez27:29But that's super interesting. And as you say, there's a lot to unpack. But there is also another angle that I'm wondering how interesting it is, which is building resilient IT systems is also good in the face of climate risks. My point is, that good old SMS should be way more resilient sometimes than authentication via an apps, for instance, because it requires 3G, 4G, 5G, or whatever. And what about climate risk? Do you believe that climate risk is also something that will require us to build a more reliable, more resilient IT system or not?Michael J. Oghia28:17Well, yes, for many reasons. One is that we talk a lot about the green revolution. We talk a lot about the digital revolution. Digital and green revolutions go hand in hand, and you really can't have one without the other. Why? Because much of the green revolution is powered by, for instance, IoT devices. Internet of Things. The Internet of Things is notoriously insecure, which means that the more that we invest in the green revolution, the more we need to also invest in the digital revolution to make sure that they can stay on par with one another. So that's one way that I think there's a bit of a climate risk. Number two is obviously physical infrastructure, which, again, may not fall under a more traditional definition of cybersecurity, which tends to focus on, okay, but are our computer systems more resilient? Is the code less exploitable by malicious actors? That's a very tight definition, a very narrow definition of cybersecurity. But I consider cybersecurity also. Well, what is happening? What about the physical security of our infrastructure? So I remember a few years ago, I saw an article floating around about how a lot of the subsea landing stations on the coasts are at risk of being inundated by water with rising sea level because of rising sea levels. It just goes to show how the environment is very much obviously connected, very intricately connected to the digital and the cyber components. And so as we face more climate risk, as we face more sustainability challenges, it's going to impact the digital either at the physical security layer, such as with coastal or undersea infrastructure, or it's going to impact potentially, let's say, the digital layer, the cyber layer, or whatever you want to call it, the software layer because we're going to be relying on more and more devices to help us manage the increasingly complex system that we're using to deal with the 21st century. But yet that system might be deeply insecure because of the kinds of devices that we're relying on. So, again, that's why it's complex because a lot of these pieces fit together, but they're not always necessarily being given the same kind of weight.Gaël Duez31:13And, Mary, is it something that you agree with, having a broader definition of cybersecurity to incorporate also all the infrastructure and all these new risks?Mary Prokhorova31:23I could only support Michael. And if you are talking about also cybersecurity, we understand that cybersecurity protects all our know-how, all our digital assets, and tips. We need to focus on saving our products from different streets, not only from a human, but maybe from not special destroying, because it's also 100 of service computing people's minds and general coding, design, et cetera. So if we are talking about sustainability and resilience for people at all, we also need to secure their knowledge.Michael J. Oghia32:23I want to mention two things that I think are really relevant to this conversation. One is that we spoke about waste, but there is also something to say that we haven't focused that much on, which is that the lack of cyber resilience, the lack of real cybersecurity protection for especially critical infrastructure providers, is deeply important to the environment. Why? We already have examples where environmental pollution is either being caused or could be caused by either the hacking of something like a dam, a hydroelectric dam, I mean, or, for instance, in 2021, hackers infiltrated a water treatment plant in the US state of Florida, which allowed them to change the chemical levels of the water supply remotely. Thankfully, that was found and addressed before it could cause any damage. But these kinds of attacks on water and wastewater treatment plans are happening elsewhere in the US. It's happened in Australia, it's happened in Israel. And soMichael J. Oghia33:37there is precedence for this, not to mention other attacks that have happened in Iran and elsewhere. So that is seriously something to think about, that a facility could be compromised and that can lead to water, soil or air pollution and other, and not just pollution, but serious toxicity, toxic release, that could really seriously damage communities and its surrounding environments. So this is something to consider that this is a very real and present threat at the more macro level to the infrastructure in general. Now, something that I would like to say to also support some of the things that Mary has discussed from a company point of view, is that I think companies, in particular, must-see cyber resilience as closely connected to their environmental, social, and governance strategy. This is absolutely something that impacts their bottom line. It impacts the people who work at their organization as well as their clients, their customers, and their community in that way. And it really comes down to making sure too, that a company can speak to regulators, can speak to shareholders and say, look, we are taking this very seriously and we are protecting and preserving the value of our company and the stability of the society that we are contributing to by taking this seriously and by really protecting our data, protecting our systems and protecting, obviously, one of the most important things that they have, which is their customers trust in them as provider or as a vendor.Gaël Duez35:33So we're reaching the end of our episode, a very rich and complex episode. I think that the word complex must have been said at least two dozen times. But this is a reality of the world, and this is a reality of cybersecurity and sustainability. So before we stop, I would like to ask you my traditional question, which is, would you share a piece of positive good news about sustainability or maybe about cybersecurity, your choice?Mary Prokhorova36:05In the last year, I have seen a lot of startups with very interesting concepts that merge cybersecurity, sustainability, and green technologies. I mean, also new concepts for data centers, for computing centers where they have a close ecosystem, for cooler water heating, for citizen computing, and all this very interesting part for world data centers where they not only heat our environment, but they provide some new warm water for customers. I also say very interesting project about equipment utilization, I mean hardware storage utilization, because it's a very important point about data destruction when you want to destroy very high-level security data, you need to destroy equipment. And I saw a very interesting concept and working machine and working equipment where they destroy all this equipment in dust, like real dust. And it's very interesting and very nice for our environment also and for general reducing. So I saw that a lot of startups, and most of them are from Europe, are thinking about new nature and new communication between digital equipment and nature. And all these startup founders are very young generation people, up to 35. And also I see very interesting concepts from schoolers, from very young guys like 15, 18 years old. And it's very nice to see such smart minds who are thinking about sustainability not only for business processes but for more long-term periods. So as for me, it's nice news. It's nice news that we are working not only on the digital ecosystem, but we trying to connect our digital ecosystem of this equipment part with our physical world and to make this whole ecosystem much smarter, much more sustainable, and much more from an ecology angle safety.Michael J. Oghia38:51So two things I'll just very quickly reply to Mary, Gaël and then I'll reply to your question. But I have to say, Mary, I completely agree with you. I do agree as well that cyber risk and cyber resiliency are becoming more of a front-of-mind topic across the ecosystem. And I think it's really good that people are starting to recognize, or I can't say people are starting to recognize, but I'm glad that companies, especially governments, are saying, yes, this is really a priority and it's something that we're going to be putting resources toward. And I hope that continues to answer the question that you posed. Gaël, I have to say in general, especially on the sustainability side, I skew more toward the pessimistic than the optimistic when it comes to bright notes and whatnot. But there are a few. First, I would be remiss if I didn't say that there are a lot of really interesting things happening on both the security side and the sustainability side within the Nordics. I've been working on the Nordics for the past two years. The Nordic data center sector is growing exponentially and it's combining a lot of really good natural features, such as its cold climate, with really good people who are working on things like integrating data center heat waste into the district utility grids, who are working on a lot of innovation. So the Nordic data center sector is something that I think is really a bright spot for that intersection between sustainability and security. But then I think the second that is also a bit of a bright spot is the rollout of renewable energy and more serious conversations about nuclear energy as well, especially in Europe. I don't see renewables and nuclear as being opposed. I see them as complementary. And obviously one of the kinds of common denominators across the energy sector, whether it be renewables or nuclear, is security. Cybersecurity is physical security. So I think for me I hope that there will be continuous positive momentum. I would rather be pleasantly surprised and wrong versus correct than live with the impacts of my pessimism, which is a very much worse world to live in.Gaël Duez41:33Oh, thanks a lot, both of you. That's a very nice closing statement. Michael, thanks a lot. And thanks for joining Green IO. A lot of insights are being shared today on a topic that I'm not that familiar with. So I thank you for your time.Michael J. Oghia41:46Thank you for having us.Mary Prokhorova41:47Gaël, thank you for the invitation.
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🎙️In our latest episode, Hannah Smith, the COO of the Green Web Foundation, and Ismael Velasco, the founder of the Adora Foundation, highlight the potential pitfalls of Carbon Aware Computing a strategy that aims to reduce carbon emissions by aligning software operations with the carbon intensity of the energy grid. While this approach has gained traction among the IT industry, including giants such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google, Hannah and Ismael discuss with our host Gaël Duez its complexities and limitations.

💻As they explored the nuances of Carbon Aware Computing, it gave us insights that while it holds promise as a tool for reducing emissions, it also poses challenges that must be carefully considered. The oversimplification of energy grid dynamics and the myriad factors that influence carbon intensity underscore the need for a more comprehensive understanding of sustainable computing practices.

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Hannah and Ismaël's sources and other references mentioned in this episode: * Adora Foundation * CAT (Climate Action Tech) * GSF (Green Software Foundation) * Green Tech South West * Apple device * Google Cloud Platform * MS surface * Don’t follow the sun: Scheduling compute workloads to chase green energy can be counter-productive * Bitcoin’s Impacts on Climate and the Environment * Bitcoin Uses More Electricity Than Many Countries. How Is That Possible? * How Much Energy Does Bitcoin Actually Consume? * Carbon Aware Computing: Next Green Breakthrough or New Greenwashing? * The problems with carbon-aware software that everyone’s ignoring * How Texas’ power grid failed in 2021 * EU countries already hitting some of their sustainable energy targets for 2030 * What Role Will Soluna Play in the Future of Computing? A Recap of the Water Tower Research Fireside Chat Series

Transcript[00:00:00] Gaël Duez: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Green IO with Gaël Duez. That's me. Green IO is the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month, on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes, both on your podcast platform and on our website, greenio.tech. Let me share with you a personal story. Last July, I was on a rooftop in Paris, sharing a drink with a friend who happens to be a former colleague of mine.One of the most talented CTO I had the chance to work with. Loïc was asking about what I was doing in the green IT field and the quick wins I was advising to CTO willing to ramp up sustainability. I mentioned carbon computing as a no brainer and I was ready to move forward when he posed me and asked me what I was referring to, POP, do you hear that sound? Yes, another information bubble just exploded. I was so sure that almost every CTO knew the concept, I explained it, he was enthusiastic about it, and since then, it has been my magical key to onboard CTO and Cloud Ops, folks. It's easy to grab, pragmatic, and actionable. They love it. And they're not the only ones.Almost all cloud providers launch some kind of carbon-aware program. And it's a pillar in the Green Software Foundation course, for instance, to get the Green Software for Practitioners certificate. But a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a remarkable series of articles written by Hannah Smith, based on initial research and insights by Ismael Velasco, about some serious pitfalls with Carbon Aware Computing. It might be another case of micro-optimizations not aligning with macro optimizations, like when someone thinks that it's a great idea to film a live show with a smartphone to get souvenirs, but actually, everyone does it and no one can see the stage anymore. I have been lucky to have already had both Ismael and Hannah on the show, so it was super easy to have them back for an in-depth discussion about Carbon Aware Computing.[00:02:28] Gaël Duez: A quick reminder for the people who didn't have the chance to listen to Green IO episode 26 or episode 5 about Hannah and Ismael. Hannah Smith, based in the UK, is currently the Chief Operating Officer of the Green Web Foundation. She's also a pillar in the web WordPress sustainability community as well as a long-time volunteer for the climateaction.tech community and overall an amazing community builder. Hello Green Tech South West as well as a season green software practitioner. Ismael Velasco is also a member of the amazing community. He's based in Mexico and he's a true veteran in the software industry at large and green software in particular. You should check his API grateful degradation concept. His knowledge and commitment go far beyond Green IT with his involvement in the Adora Foundation, which fosters social innovation across the globe, and recently decided to focus more on the sustainability side of technology. So, welcome Hannah, and welcome Ismael, I'm so glad to have you back on the show.[00:03:35] Hannah Smith: Thanks, Gaël. I knew it was a while ago that we recorded our episode. I didn't realize it was episode five. [00:03:44] Gaël Duez: Wow. Yeah, that was a while ago. I don't know why I've waited so long to bring some of my former guests back to the show, but I think I will do it more and more again. The pleasure of having you both here is great. So thanks a lot. And before we deep dive into both your approaches, maybe it's time to set the stage, I would say. And I would, I'd love to ask you, Hannah, the first question, which is not that easy maybe, what is Carbon Aware Computing? [00:04:12] Hannah Smith: Well, oh, I don't know. I think we can make it easy for people to understand. At its basic level, there are two ways that you can approach Carbon Aware Computing. We do talk about it in the article that we wrote together. There is the idea of time-shifting software, and there's the idea of location-shifting software. And you do both of those things based on the carbon intensity of the grid at any particular time. So what that implies is that maybe you've got an API that you can access that gives you data about what the carbon intensity of a grid is at any given time. For carbon intensity, if anyone's not sure what that means, that simply means how clean or dirty energy is. So you have a high carbon intensity if energy is dirty, e.g. is being produced a lot with fossil fuels, and you have a low carbon intensity if it's renewable produced energy, so it's not emitting as much carbon. So the idea of carbon awareness is looking at the carbon intensity of energy and then shifting your software around, either to run at different times of the day or to run in different physical geographical locations. I think in a nutshell, that's it. I know Ismael, you were involved in writing the, well, I think the very first post about Carbon Aware on, Hackernoon. So I wonder what else would you add to that description? [00:05:38] Ismaël Velasco: Yes, I think that is, there's not much to add really, because it is quite a simple concept. So simple and so kind of commonsensical. It was surprising for us to question it because it just made so much sense the grid is mixed, so when is it greener? It's greener. I run my computer there. Therefore, I'm greener that's a simple, principle, right? If the grid has more renewables, I time my computing to run when the green, grid is greener. And that should mean that my computer is reducing emissions because it's running on that green. And that is the common sense idea that's growing. And maybe just to give some examples, so people can. Envisage it more concretely. Apple released an update for their American US iPhone, where you keep it plugged in, and it only charges when the grid is particularly green in your area. So if the grid is mostly powered by carbon and fossil fuels. Your iPhone will not run electricity, but when the grid is particularly green, then it will charge your phone. And that way it's been greener. Microsoft has done the same for your Windows updates. So your computer will wait until the electricity is greener in your location. And if it knows that it's currently greener, then it will say, update my computer now, instead of doing it, when the electricity is dirty. So those are types of examples of how you might do that. And the theory of change is that by doing that, you are avoiding emissions, which is the theory of change that Hannah and I questioned.[00:07:31] Gaël Duez: And the examples you provided, Ismael, are both time shifting, I reckon that quite a lot of time we hear also the expression chasing the sun or chasing the wind, so do you have also examples of location-based Carbon Aware Computing? [00:07:50] Ismaël Velasco: The people who have done this at the biggest scale are Google. So Google first implemented it internally, and now they offer it to all the users of their cloud. So they started computing, where all their data centers across the world were. And then they started finding out, in which location on the planet, the electricity was greenest. And then if they were to do say a backup and could run that backup from a server in any of 50 countries. They would choose a country that had the greenest energy at that particular time. So instead of just saying, I'm going to wait until it's the right time, like with the Apple phone, they would say, I want to do it right now, but I'm going to run it somewhere in the world where it is greenest. And now if you go, and you have your applications hosted in the Google Cloud you can see Which server is currently greenest and there's an API you can even see and say this one is greenest so you can say, okay, whenever you run a job in my application look in Google and find the location. Chase the sun, find the location where? There's a lower electricity and do it there. So we'll put all our jobs there and again, theory of changes. That way we're reducing emissions. [00:09:19] Gaël Duez: Do you know if the prices across the region vary accordingly I had a very interesting discussion with a cloud ops people who wanted to implement it with another big hyperscaler. Let's not name it. And they discovered that the bill would go up by like 30%. So when you see Google went full speed on this Google Cloud Platform, went to full speed on this solution, do you know if it costs, people to move from one place to another, or if you chase the sun or the wind, actually you don't see an increase or at least a significant increase in your bill?[00:09:57] Hannah Smith: That's a great question. I didn't, I couldn't answer that confidently and say, I mean, generally, you know, the renewable energy, on the whole, is cheaper, but I don't know if that necessarily equates in the way that you're saying it, Gaël. That's a great question. An interesting one. [00:10:13] Ismaël Velasco: My understanding is that generally, it is cheaper because very often It's not always this is one of the assumptions that people kind of take for granted But it is very common that the times when the energy is greenest is also when demand is lower. So It can often be cheaper countries like the UK are beginning to roll out carbon pricing as well around electricity and this is something that's growing. So it varies from place to place there have been places where everybody piling on to green energy, so this happened in the US, for example, they started in Texas, among other places, but especially in Texas, some people install US miners in the electricity plants when the electricity was dirty and demand was high, they were paid not to run any compute. And when the demand was low, they were paid to run it. And it was when it was greenest. The result was the electricity prices for the city rose significantly because US used so much. So it's not an absolute rule, but in general and increasingly targeting the greener energy will often be slightly cheaper.[00:11:34] Gaël Duez: I'll try to research that and put, the answer in the show notes before the episode is released. And I think we, we are good. Because it's a very straightforward concept. It is getting adopted very widely, with several examples from very big tech companies. So, problem solved, and we've got, a word record of the shortest, Green IO episode ever. So is the problem solved and that is the best possible tool to use, to reduce carbon emissions from the grid, or actually do we have a problem? What is actually the issue with Carbon Aware Computing? [00:12:15] Hannah Smith: Yeah, well, it's an interesting question because as Ismael said, right, you explain it in the way we've just explained it, and you're like, oh my god, this is the best solution ever. Of course, we should be doing this. This is like, amazing and so logical. So we were discussing this in climateaction.tech, which we're both, as you mentioned, Gaël, in the beginning, we're both members of, and we both hang around in the Slack group. And Ismael posted this thing saying, Hey, look, I've been kind of looking at this carbon-aware stuff. And when I look really deeply at this, and when I actually think about how the grid works in practice, Ismael was like, I'm concluding that this is maybe not the solution it seems. And Ismael in his fantastic way was really in-depth, loads of examples, kind of really kind of got into the problem. And, I happened to stumble upon it at the time that Ismael posted it. And I was like, Oh my word, I think he's got a bit of a point here. This is actually a little problematic. And it all comes down to this idea that carbon aware. Is looking at a very simplistic metric, which is the carbon intensity of energy, at a given location or at a given time, but it's doing that in isolation from how the grid actually works in practice, which is phenomenally complicated and has a lot of nuances around it. And what Ismael did was kind of present the issues and present some concerns here. So I was quite interested in that and sort of said to Ismael, Hey, let's work on this together. Let's tidy this up. Let's format it. And, let's really explain to people in, in as much depth as we need to go into why we think there's a problem here, but in a nutshell, grid aware.Sorry, carbon aware is not thinking about the realities of managing the grid, of how supply and demand actually work in practice. And what happens when you suddenly just shift a load of stuff from one place to another. So yeah, I think there is a problem. But I think it's really important to say that it's not a problem where it means that the whole of this concept is nonsense and shouldn't be done. I think that that was something Ismael and I wanted to clarify upfront. There's a real benefit here. There's real potential for awesomeness but not in the way it's being done at the moment. So I think the way we turned to Ismael was we talked about these warning labels. We said, Hey, look, there's these warning labels that aren't being applied to these approaches at the moment.There are these nuances that are just being conveniently overlooked and this approach is just a little bit too simplistic at this point in time. But you know, the awesome thing is, it can be matured, it can iterate, it can improve, and that's really what we're, well, what we set out to try and do with this work. And this proposal we came up with on Grid Aware.[00:15:16] Gaël Duez: Ismael, could you enlighten us a bit on that, how the grid works? And then explain to us what are the, the pitfalls or the aspects of the Carbon Aware Computing concept, which are conveniently, overlooked, and Hannah just said. [00:15:34] Ismaël Velasco: Yes. And first I just wanna share one of the kind of subjective elements of this. I began super enthusiastic about this. I sort of worked with the Green Software Foundation to organize the first carbon aware hackathon and, sort of looked at their APIs. I love that. I evangelize, I move people, et cetera. It was great. Then as Hannah said, I've got some confusion here. And the biggest question is actually, again, really simple, which is what made me so suspicious of my own questions. If I run my software, if I consume energy when the grid is very green, am I taking away emissions from the planet? Now, that's weirdly enough the question that no one seems to actually have asked themselves at all. And the key concept is very logical, is that if we were running on 100 % or even 99 % green energy, that might work. But at the moment, the planet has a supply of 40 % of renewable energy, 43, and a demand of 100%. And in every country, maybe not Iceland. It's fractional, right? It's 40, it's 50, it's 20, it's 70. But the point is that every day and every year and every five years, there will be a 100 % amount of electricity used. And the emissions of that 100 % will not come from the green energy, they will come from the extra, right? That's logical. Now, the analogy that helped me clarify this is if you think of the electricity we use each day, each year, pick your timeline as a train with 10 carriages, each carriage takes 100 passengers and each passenger is an emission.Four of those carriages are green, and six of those carriages are dirty. What is Carbon Aware Computing? Imagine those four carriages appearing randomly on the train. On the first day, they're all at the front, on the second day one is in the middle, but there are always four carriages out of ten. Now, most days, I come in at eight o'clock, I go to the train, and I go into the first carriage in front of me. It might be green, it might be dirty. But now I'm going to do carbon awareness. I'm going to make sure that every day I take the green carriage, no matter what, I will move to the place where the green carriage is. I will tie my arrival and I will always go on the green carriage that provides zero emissions. I'm going to come out of that green carriage feeling so clean. I've been clean all week. Every day I've been in a green carriage. My body is absolutely clean. Perfect. But what happens? That carriage is always full. So the day that I came into that green carriage, the person who always comes into that green carriage. Now can't get in because I'm already there and there's only room for 10 people. So she has to go into one of the dirty carriages In other words, you always have whenever I get on the plane or the train There will always be 400 people in dirty carriages. So I'm feeling very clean but the emissions. The total emissions of the train are the same regardless of when I run my computer I will always run it In that maximum 40 percent green period there are only a number of exceptions. How could you do this and actually reduce the number of passengers that come out of the dirty carriages?One is if I don't go on the train. Right? If I reduce a person, I don't go on the train, now there are not 1, 000 passages, there are 999. I've reduced emissions. So if I can reduce the electricity that my computer uses, great. That has been great. The second one is if I use electricity that is going to be thrown away, it's called curtail energy. Imagine that the wind blows really hard in Scotland at 3 a.m. That's more energy than the grid can use. So they throw it away. If I run my job there. Then that's not going on the train, right? Those are people outside the train. I am reducing my emissions but the problem is that that is I've estimated between one and three percent of all global usage. So you'll never run at most you're increasing our green percentage to 46 % it's meaningful but time shifting still not really reducing emissions, and it's not straightforward 95 % of curtailment in Britain happens in Scotland. So we only have 5 percent of curtailed energy. In other words, it could be good if you can time it, but it's not enough to make a really big difference. [00:21:28] Gaël Duez: If I had to sum it up, it would be. That we have a limited amount of, low carbon electricity supply. And if you get some strategy to have access to it, no matter the time, no matter the day, like optimizing, like hell, if we don't manage to either increase the total amount of, I would say clean energy supply to follow your wording or that we don't manage to reduce the amount of demand that will by default might go to a high intensity, high carbon intensity energy. Then it's, yeah, it's a zero-sum game. [00:22:18] Ismaël Velasco: Brilliant. Absolutely. Yeah.[00:22:21] Hannah Smith: I mean, I think one of the key things to think about here with this, something that really helped me is I really liked Ismael's carriage analysis. I found that really helpful. I also found it helpful to think about it like a balloon. The balloon is still the same size, and all you're doing is just squeezing air into different parts of it. You're not actually reducing the amount of air in the balloon, you're not actually making a meaningful difference to the emissions coming out. And that is down to the fact that the grid always has to balance supply and demand. And that's this element of grid management that isn't really taken into account with this approach, is those people managing the grid have to always keep supply and demand in balance. And as Ismael was saying, what they'll do is they'll use as much of the renewable energy as they can, but then they'll top it up with fossil fuels to meet that 100% of demand. And that's always happening, that's always the case. And they create that supply and demand equation through data, through looking at typically when there is a certain amount of demand, so you know that there's more demand during the day, there's less demand during the night, and they forecast that and schedule it and manage the outputs of all the different power plants in the grid to meet that demand. So you're coming along and making a sudden change doesn't actually make a difference to what those grid operators are doing, because it's unpredictable. They don't know it's going to happen, and it doesn't materially make an impact. And what Ishmael said, I'll just say this bit, because I think this is a useful bit to build on as well. What Ismael helped me realize, and what we talked about a lot within the article, was that, furthermore, shifting that demand unpredictably can actually ramp up the amount of fossil fuels going on the grid because the demand suddenly increases. All right? And look, at the moment, we're talking about fractions of percent. So it's not manifesting in a mad way. But one of the things that we were worried about is that if carbon aware is done at scale, what you actually find is grid operators are then bringing more fossil fuels online because they're the quick things to ramp up to meet the demand. So it doesn't really seem to make sense at the moment when you think about that reality of things going on.[00:24:46] Ismaël Velasco: And that's a really important point because it means we have two dimensions to our argument, really. One is, don't assume it's helping. Right? That's the first one. And what you wrote is exactly what the White House report on crypto summarizes. Said the only two ways you reduce your emissions through computing is if you reduce your demand or you increase the green supply. Most carbon aware patterns don't do either, so they're not affecting it. So, one is, are you making a positive difference? The second point that Hannah just introduced is that there's also the question that no one seems to be asking, which is, are you making a negative difference? And what we found, Hannah and I, as we started looking at it, is that there are lots of scenarios where running carbon aware patterns at scale could not only not help, but it could actually create harm. And we've got some examples of this happening. In Iran, for example, bitcoin miners used electricity so much at the same time that the whole grid broke. The same in Venezuela. So you could imagine that if you happen to have the greenest energy at exactly this moment in a place with a creaky grid, like Texas or Azerbaijan also collapsed. And all of Google says green everybody and runs everything there. You could imagine that you might bring the grid down.[00:26:35] Gaël Duez: But playing a bit of the devil's advocate here, I would have two other questions. The first one is, what about market incentivization? So, like, yes, at an instant time, you've got this demand and supply balance, which might lead to not generating a positive impact, even maybe a negative impact. But the adoption of more and more carbon aware computing practices will drive cloud providers, software providers, you name it, et cetera, energy providers, et cetera, to adopt greener practices more generally to supply more low carbon energy. I would say that will be my question number one. My question is number two, could it also be an incentive to avoid curtailment? And I would like, Ismael, if you could maybe explain a bit more curtailment and the example you took between Scotland, to England, for instance. Because what I understood, actually quite a fun fact, is something that we discussed, just the latest episode on open source software, about all to connect which we are building, at least in Europe, but in many other parts of the world, to connect the grids and to avoid curtailments, to avoid wasting the most precious thing that we've got today, which is low carbon electricity. Could it be an incentive also to make sure that we don't waste energy so we reduce dramatically curtailment? My two questions could be summarized as what about the market incentivization in the medium term, not even the long term? And what about the possibility of using in a better way wasted energy today, mostly curtailed energy?[00:28:28] Ismaël Velasco: So I'll give my version of a very brief answer, but I also think because of time, that this is also a good opportunity for Hannah to introduce the idea that we're not just condemning carbon aware software, that we're saying, let's do it properly, let's do it well, that there are improvements and that this could be a really good solution. But we do need to ask those questions, so it's not all doom and gloom. So one of the positive arguments for carbon aware patterns is that one around incentivization, around culture. So, for instance, I got super excited by carbon aware software and it motivated me to dive into all kinds of other things. I eventually arrived at the conclusion that, oh, I think there's a problem here, Houston. We've got a problem like Hannah put it, but thank goodness that I got into it because it opened all kinds of other fields. So that's great. The other argument that is made in favor of it is that by investing and timing it to the green times, you are motivating the market to invest more in renewable energy. And I think that was true a while ago, but I think, weirdly enough, we won that argument a while ago. The market for renewable energy is now cheaper, so people are investing. The news came out today that there are about four or five countries in Europe that have hit their 2040 or 2030 target now, not because of incentives around carbon, our computer, it's just cheaper. But I think there is a cultural incentive around anything that we do intentionally for green issues, for transparency, for clarity, and evidence. So there are ways to do this. And you can say at the end of the day, I reduced my demand. I used new green energy, like curtailed energy. But you've demonstrated that you've asked yourself, and you've also asked yourself, is this having any perverse side effects? No. And I've said it. Google says it, and Microsoft says it. Right when they're doing this at scale, Apple says it. But when nobody says it, then the potential for greenwashing and perverse effect is huge, especially since this is one of the few areas where the big corporations and the really sincere green advocates like ourselves currently are on the same page. So it's very easy for everyone to go, yay. So we need to simply say, do it, but tell us how it's helping. One example of that, just to finish and answer your question, is curtailed energy, which is basically this idea of green energy that is happening, but it's being wasted because it's happening at the wrong time.[00:31:24] Hannah Smith: So I think the question of curtailed energy is a really good one, and I think it's a really awesome incentive. And through the research, and there's this really deep level of thinking that we did on this, we kind of realized that using curtailed energy is one example where Grid, carbon aware kicks ass. It really is like awesome. And that's what we want to incentivize. It makes sense. And it seems to stack up. So when we were writing this post, as Ismael said, we didn't want this to be all doom and gloom. And we didn't want this to be a takedown because it's too easy to take down other people's work. And that's not really how we build sustainable solutions. We want to build each other up and, you know, work, work, work, work, work, work on each other's stuff. So what we did, we were like, okay, we need to come up with a kind of name and way of talking about. The Times When Carbon Aware Does Work. It's a working title, but we came up with the idea of talking about grid aware software instead. And so that really, the idea of that naming was to say kind of, hey look, this is more than just thinking about this simple metric of carbon intensity. This is actually thinking about the grid and all the complexities there. Because actually, that seems to then push you in a more nuanced direction with the solutions.And so what we said was one of those examples, as I mentioned, is using curtailed energy. But not just curtailed energy in its simplistic form, but coming back to something Ismael was talking about earlier, it's using curtailed energy in stable grids in places which can actually absorb this additional demand coming in. And on top of that, I think it's also doing it in a way that is in harmony with the grid. So I think that long term, what we need to start seeing, is APIs and standards and conventions so that data centers can actually agree to use that data, and they can actually, sorry to use that energy. And there can actually be handshakes that, Hey, we've got curtailed energy. Hey, then data center over here. Now is your chance to be helpful to the grid, and to get some demand. You know, get some computer running here and make use of it. So rather than it being like a free for all pile on, I just, when Nishma was talking earlier, I had this like the image of American football where they all, or rugby, where they all just kind of pile on each other, and it all just goes disastrous, you know, and this, this horrible scrum, and it's all just gone tits up. Like, that's not what we want. We want it to be kind of done in a more organized, democratic fashion. Where the curtailed energy, like someone in the grid is saying, Hey, it would be really helpful if right now someone could come along and use that curtailed energy. And then we have these standards and processes in place that people can know that that's available and send their compute there. And that section's missing at the moment. So Gaël, you're right. This question about curtailed energy feels really central to this proposition of making this load better. [00:34:37] Gaël Duez: How operational today is a Grid Aware computing approach?[00:34:42] Hannah Smith: I think there's work to be done here. So in sharing this work, it's popped up all sorts of interesting people discussing this. I mean, I can talk about the UK. That's where I'm based. It's probably the grid that I have the most hands-on knowledge about. Ismael already mentioned, that up in Scotland, we know that that's where the majority of curtailed energy is. Now, if anyone's not familiar with the geography of the UK, Scotland's right up in the North. It's quite sparsely populated. It's very rural up there. And that's where all the wind energy is. It's offshore farms and in some cases onshore, but actually, the vast majority of demand is based down in the South, down in London. So the energy that's being produced up there in Scotland. Needs to find its way down south. Now, the problem at the moment is that as far as I understand it, the national grid is not producing data that tells you where that curtailed energy is in more specific, more specificity. There aren't also ways to know which data center then would be in a good position to use that data. I think there's work happening on it. It's developing. But right now, if you were a developer, you couldn't just go along, pull out a load of data and make this happen. So there's work to be done here, in this field. And, you know, as I mentioned already, there's real potential in this field. To work on those things, this is what we wanted to propose as the next version of Carbon Aware, which we labeled as Grid Aware.Let's get all these amazing minds working on this part of the problem, rather than getting stuck at the first gate, which was, ooh, acknowledging location time shifting is interesting and fun. We need to push this field forward, and we need to do more on this. [00:36:30] Gaël Duez: I was laughing a bit when you were explaining this because I had this image of what Sylvie Daumal recently shared on the episode with systemic design. And in systemic designs, I've got this hearsay that says that solutions of today are problems of tomorrow. And that's just so true here. Once again, this is us trying to jump on a very easy and technical solution and very appealing. And I was like 100% in for this solution and then suddenly posing and saying, in which environment are we truly evolving? In which system in which almost a biosphere, an electrical biosphere, I would say electrical sphere. Once again, systemic design is everything. When it comes to sustainability, I'm realizing that there is maybe something that might not have been 100% clear for some listeners if they're not that familiar with cloud operations and energy. Claim for hyperscalers that yes, almost all of them, except maybe one of them, explained that they run 100% on green energy. And I had this wording, so I would say low carbon energy, but that we really need to understand that when a Google, Amazon or Azure or Huawei data center operates, it is actually plugged into the grid, and it's using the energy that is being made available at this very moment. And when they say they produce 100% green energy, it does not perfectly match the energy they consume. So actually they pay. Ismail, am I correct? Do you want to elaborate a bit on what I said?[00:38:22] Ismaël Velasco: Sure. And I actually want to focus sort of as we close the episode, on four things that every tech practitioner can actually do already to operationalize this well, and that is within our reach. So the first one is to monitor your own net electricity demand. That's the metric you really want to influence. So more than when is this compute job or this computing job running in the grid? The most impactful thing that I can do is use less energy tomorrow than I did today. If I can do that, I will win. If I can't do that because I'm a growing business, can I slow down the rate of my energy demand? So every year, I consume 3% more electricity. Now, I'm still growing, but I managed to grow only one and a half percent every year. Anything that reduces your demand, that's the biggest win of all. That's the thing that we need. So that's a very practical thing. Quantify, monitor, and improve that. The second thing is time shifting. And location shifting can work. If you want to find a metric for time-shifting and location-shifting privilege. Low demand, not grid carbon intensity. In other words, run your jobs when the demand is lowest, not when the grid is greenest. They will very often be the same, but not always. You might have the greenest grid at 12:00 in Brazil, but it's not your lowest demand. So adding a bunch of demand might not be good. In Scotland, yes, if the lowest demand is 03:00 a.m. It's probably the greenest. But if you're going to use an API instead of targeting, when is the carbon intensity the lowest target, low demand, then as a cherry on top. If you want, add carbon intensity. But if you target low demand, the chances that you're going to have a positive effect are higher and a negative effect lower. If you just target carbon intensity, it's very random and unlikely. So that's a simple operational right. If you are going to location shift, time-shift, and you're in a good grid like Britain, et cetera, you're not targeting Texas, you're not targeting Azerbaijan. You target good, strong connected grids, then target low demand first. If you do that, that's progress. We talked about lowering demand. I'm using less energy. Great. The third one is, how do I add more green energy? One is the curtailed energy, but that one is difficult, and small. In Scotland, the bottleneck is less for computing because you could put your machine there. But the problem in many grids is that, for example, that excess energy cannot travel to the south, where it's being used. So unless you're located there, it's going to break. So how could you add more green power? Which goes to your question. So, one way is generating your own power from your own solar panels, from your own wind turbines. The pattern that we have for electricity historically is hyper concentration on massive power plants. The pattern we've had for computing traditionally is hyper-concentration hyperscalers. But both are distributable. You have distributed electricity and distributed computing. And for the global south. The future is microgrids and distributed computing. And for resilience, they're investing in Texas, because then the whole thing doesn't break if you've got microgrids. So if you were able to power your computer from your microgrid or your solar panel, you are adding extra generation directly. That's brilliant. Has huge potential. And then comes the answer to your question, but what if I run it on Google? Aren't they 100% green? They have done very good things. But what you say is absolutely true. Their data centers are powered by the same grid as everybody else's, which is mixed all the time. So they cannot say my server is actually powered by the sun. They're being powered, but what they do is that they buy what they call additional electricity, which is good. The bad pattern of those things is you're generating green electricity. I'll buy you and I'll take the credit. But actually the demand hasn't changed. Instead, these people are paying someone to build a new wind farm to generate the same energy they will consume. So it's new, it's additional. They can say it is added, but it's not direct. That has also the risk of side effects. So it's not perfect, but it is okay. It's acceptable as long as you are going for additional energy. The fourth one is what you are doing. We need to talk about this. For me, the biggest shock in this process has not been the discoveries, but that I haven't found this conversation happening virtually at all. It's been quite shocking to me that there is no very clear point of reference. Even now, since I published the Hackernoon article, I've had talks with some of the very pioneers of these patterns and no one seemed to actually say, is this reducing emissions? Does this have side effects? And I also want to share that someone in one chat wrote, when this came through, I was going to make a post about my concerns with carbon aware software, but I was afraid to do so. There is a lot of commitment to this idea and a lot of investment in this idea, emotional and economic, from both environmentalists and companies. ET was interesting. That's one of the things that most excited me about working with Hannah was that I just thought, I'm nervous. How do I communicate in a way that is clear-cut enough that we can say there is a problem, but that also doesn't sound like I am hating on people? I've been a bit more direct on the hacker noon one because I think we need to be very direct. But basically, above all, I think we need to create a space where we are talking about this and writing about this. I would love to be proven wrong. That'd be even better. But above all, I think nobody should feel a hesitation to say this might be problematic. As I've been following this thread, I am beginning to question some of our carbon emission metrics for software that we've been using. So it's like a little threshold. We're also exploring with the Mayan people here in Mexico, some experiments with distributed energy generation and distributed compute. So we might be piloting those things. There are companies like Soluna in Morocco, there's a company in Paraguay who do exactly this. They go to power plants and they install servers. The servers help the power plants, and smaller plow plants manage their demand response and monetize it. And they're able to sell server space at a fraction of the hyperscalers. So there is some work going on, all of those things, but it's mostly invisible. So if we can agree to demand evidence from industry, just to demand evidence of impact and risk assessment, just those two things. And if we can explore grid aware software or whatever, or carbon aware software 2.0, but just talk about it, we're still on time, I think, for this not to get out of our hands, but it's a small window.[00:47:10] Gaël Duez: Yeah, I agree. Thanks for mentioning the podcast. But actually, this is really what I'm trying to do here, is having nuanced conversations. And the main thing that we've been trying to achieve with this discussion is not throwing the baby with the bathwater. Usually, I ask my guests to close the podcast with positive news on sustainability, or even better, on green it or digital sustainability. And I think for the very first time, because this is a first, this is the first time I've got former guests coming back in the podcast over. The very first time.I'm going to be the one answering my own question about how rude it is. But I think what I actually find very refreshing and energizing, and which brings me a lot of optimism, is that I strongly believe that three years ago, we would never have this kind of nuanced in our way to tackling its emissions and having the ability to say, okay, so we are doing things, and we are doing things at a large scale, enough to start to see that the pattern is not white or black and that we can really kick-start some continuous improvement process, which is actually how it works in every industry. You don't do things perfectly right from the start, and you've got this discussion, and even in the orange industry, you can think about all this ongoing discussion about software development practices, the agile methodology, you've got ongoing discussion over and over trying to fine-tune things, et cetera. And for me, starting to see this kind of discussion happening for green software and more generally green, it is very positive because it means that we're getting a scale where we can see the details, the nuances, and that goodwilling people can debate without any prejudice to each other and try to find what will be the best way. So that would be my closing words.[00:49:18] Ismaël Velasco: I think carbon aware software done well. Time and location shifting are the future. I think that the more we depend on renewable energy, the more integrated will be time and location shifts in computing to what is called demand response. What Hannah was saying about how the grid has to constantly balance. And when you had fossil fuel only, it was very simple because you had complete control. You open the tap, you close the tap. You open the tap, you close the tap. The reason we have curtailed energy and the reason we have all kinds of risks is that we can't open the sun and close the sun, open the wind, and close the wind. So one of the challenges is when you move to 70% renewable energy, 70% of your energy is unpredictable, which means that we, and this is already happening in many places, will have computed and other forms of event-driven electricity consumption integrated into the grid. So every time the sun goes down, there's low demand, we will have more compute, et cetera. So this kind of. I do think that carbon aware time shifting, and location shifting are intrinsic to the future. And the good news is that the only thing where we're doing well in climate action is the energy transition. That's the only bit where we're ahead of the curve, where we're accelerating. So I think that has implications for us. And as long as we ask enough questions to do it responsibly, I think that all the work that's been done on this will prove to have been visionary and very long-lasting as part of the new societies that emerge.[00:51:20] Gaël Duez: Okay. That was great to have you on the show, Hannah. I'm so happy that you've been back again. Let's make sure that we meet in London. No, that won't be the case, but in Paris for the Green IO Conference. Thanks a lot for joining. It was a pleasure as usual. [00:51:35] Hannah Smith: So thanks, thanks so much Gaël for having us on the show. It's amazing to be able to chat this through and it's really nice to speak it out loud because actually so far my involvement in this work has been written. So actually being here and verbalizing it is a really, really fun activity, and it's been really, really useful to do this. And I love the work you do, and I can't wait to meet you in Paris in December. It's a long time to go, but we will, we will catch up with each other then. [00:52:08] Gaël Duez: And thanks a lot Ismael also for joining the podcast with your energy, your refreshing perspective, and your humility you didn't come here saying, Hey, this is how it works. And this is the problem, but more, maybe we should ask questions. And this is what I found so far. And I will be so happy to be proven wrong, which is. I sincerely believe in the very basics of a scientific approach. So thanks a lot Ismael for, for, for joining in bringing us all these insights and, have a good day, in Mexico today because it, we call it still quite early for you, and hope to see you soon in the podcast.[00:52:48] Gaël Duez: Bye bye. [00:52:49] Ismaël Velasco: Thank you. [00:52:50] Hannah Smith: I'll see you soon. [00:52:51] Gaël Duez: Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, share it and give us five stars on Apple or Spotify. We are an independent media relying solely on you to get more listeners. Plus, it will give our little team, Jill, Meibel, Tani and I, a nice booster.[00:53:10] Gaël Duez: Today, I had former guests coming back for the first time. And in our next episode, we will have another premiere with a member of the European Parliament among us, Kim Van Sparrentak will join us as well as Max Schulze, the founder of the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance to talk about regulations in digital sustainability. What are they? What to expect? But also have they been built in the Bristol Maze? And yes, we will also discuss lobbying. And yes, it matters to people outside Europe because of the long arm of European regulations. By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more. Visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. The next one is in Singapore on April 18, and you can get a free ticket using the voucher Green IO VIP. Lucky you. Looking forward to meeting you there to help you dear responsible technology purchase build a greener digital world one byte at a time.
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🔍How open source software slashes energy consumption, extends hardware lifespan, and drives sustainability?🎙️In this episode, Gael Duez unravels the intricate relationship between open source software and IT sustainability together with Oliver Cronk, the host of Architect Tomorrow podcast and Sustainable Technology practice lead at Scott Logic (UK), alongside his software engineer colleague Katie Davis. 💡Discover how open source software (OSS) and hardware (OSH) are not just benefiting companies, but also driving global sustainability efforts. With insights from a recent HBR study revealing OSS's monumental impact on reducing software development costs, the stage is set for a game-changing conversation. ⚙️💻Katie breaks down the key to OSS success: transparency. Learn how freely available code empowers developers to make efficient, sustainable choices, while Oliver highlights the importance of common hardware standards and circularity to combat waste and inefficiency.📊Dive into the battle for open-source data transparency with Katie, and explore Oliver's vision for the tech community's future direction. From reducing emissions with initiatives like the Tech Carbon Standard to innovative projects like the Open Compute Project, the episode is packed with actionable insights and inspiring solutions.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss our episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here.

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Oliver and Katie's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* Scott Logic’s Technology Carbon Standard * Harvard Business School Strategy Unit Working Paper No. 24-038 on Open Source Software * Open Compute UK * Tristan Nitot's talks about eroom * GSF Carbon Hack * Boavista Cloud Scanner * Cloud Carbon Footprint * EU Energy Efficiency Directive * Climate Q&A * Built and planned electricity Interconnect across Europe * Viking Link: Interconnector from Denmark to Great Britain * Reporting requirements on the energy performance and sustainability of data centres for the Energy Efficiency Directive

Transcript
Gael 00:00Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Every two Tuesdays, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. So today we're going to talk about a relationship, a deep, pivotal, and yet troubled relationship. Open source and IT sustainability every person I talk in our sustainability field takes it as a no-brainer. Open source is good for sustainability. But which open source are we talking about? And is this link? Is this correlation so strong? For instance, is open source software always more frugal or sustainable in the way it is designed? We don't know. Let's investigate it. But there is at least one certain thing. Open source software is big. A recent post made by Sasha Lucioni, one of my absolute favorite thought leaders in AI, caught my eye. A recent HBS study found that companies would have to spend 3.5 times more on their software development if open source were not around. And we're talking about an $8.8 billion estimated market. So open source is big. Let's see how it connects with sustainability. Today I am delighted to have two guests to talk about sustainability. Who has done open sources from the trenches? Oliver Cronk is a fellow YouTuber. Now I can say because, yes, Green IO launched its YouTube channel a week ago to offer a wider choice for accessing its content than traditional podcast platforms like Apple or Spotify. Anyway, Oliver is the Architect Tomorrow host, a channel for enterprise and platform architects with a soft spot for sustainability, among other topics. He's also a tech strategist at Scott Logic, a software and data consultancy based in the UK, and has a significant track record in both IT and energy. As an example, he built carbon calculators, air quality databases, and industrial emissions reporting systems, which made him experience firsthand the issue of accessing open, transparent, and reliable data. Katie is a software engineer with a Math’s Degree, so not easy to mess with her when it comes to data and statistics, and she is a driving force in this sustainable technology practice at Scott Logic, especially involved in the recent release of the technology carbon standard at open UK several weeks ago. A standard under the Creative Commons license, of course. By the way, they will present it at Green IO London on September 19 this year, but that's a different story. Welcome, Oliver. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today. So, are you on your bike or more comfortably sitting at your desk?Oliver 03:02No, today I'm stationary. I'm at my desk.Katie 03:04Thanks for having us.Gael 03:06You're welcome. That's nice to have you on the show. And welcome, Katie. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today as well. That's vegetable time, not food time. I guess because you love to garden and to grow your own food. That's a very nice angle for sustainability. Katie, maybe the first question will be for you, with your academic track record. When we talk about open source, it can actually cover a lot of different angles. Could you give us your definition or your way of approaching what is open source?Katie 03:40Of course. So when I think about open source, I always think about open source software. So this is software whose source code is freely available to modify, to distribute, deploy, and even extend it into their own projects. So I think one of the key parts of open source is that it's transparent. You can view the methodology behind the code. There are also types of open source, which I think maybe Oliver could expand on.Oliver 04:08Yeah, no, happy to. So I think you've touched on open data, which is an important one. But then open hardware is really interesting as well when it comes to sustainability. So at the open UK conference, you mentioned, Gail, there was a great presentation about open compute, the open hardware sort of initiatives to ensure that there are sort of standards for hardware. And there are companies now taking the used hardware out of the big hyperscaler data centers and reusing it because it still has a life. Right? The big hyperscalers no longer want it, but you can easily get additional life out of it by hosting it in another data center and getting other people to run workloads on it. So there's a whole host of different strands of the open source kind of ecosystem, really. Software, hardware, data, significant ones.Gael 04:48I think that would be a good way to define these pillars of data, software, and hardware. So, Oliver, you started with hardware, not maybe the most obvious when we are in the IT world. What are the progress today that you've seen in open source hardware?Oliver 05:05Yeah, I'd love to throw to Katie to talk about the sort of data that's available, hopefully in the future, in more of an open form about hardware. But in terms of hardware itself, I think there are some really interesting developments. Like I talked about, the open compute project, they have a whole sustainability division that's looking at the circularity of the hardware. I think having open standards when it comes to hardware is important because otherwise, it's the compatibility challenge. Right. If everyone is inventing their hardware to kind of be unique and proprietary, it just means we have a whole lot of potentially wasted components that won't work with other systems and we're producing lots of different types of components that only work with one particular platform. So I'm a really big proponent of the open compute project also because they're looking at things like can we increase the ambient temperature of data centers, for example, to reduce their cooling requirements and things like that. So they're doing some really clever stuff in that area. But I think also open hardware is interesting when you look at the sort of hardware hacker sort of culture that's created as well. Right? What can you run on an embedded device like a Raspberry Pi? How can we extract every last efficiency out of a couple of watts that a Raspberry Pi runs on? So I think there's some really interesting sort of things that come out, the constraints that you impose when you look at sort of consumer grade hardware and the open source movements around that.Gael 06:20Yeah. And just to not close, but to comment on the hardware topic, it really resonates with the new battle of my good friend Tristanito, who's one of the founders actually, of Modzia Europe. So he's been in the game for quite a while and he's got his amazing talk now that he's given several conferences already about Moore's law is dead now it's eroom. So that's kind of reversing the Moore name. The idea is every year you don't double the size of your computing power, every year you divide by two the size of your code. So every year you can run your code on lighter and lighter machines, which means older and older machines, which means saving potentially millions, avoiding building new computers that actually don't need. But anyway, Katie, you wanted to elaborate a bit more on the data side. I think this is one of your main battles, isn't it?Katie 07:18Yeah. So especially with the sort of manufacturers of hardware, the data they provide themselves, often the figures they're given, these, it's not clear on how they actually calculate them. So for example, if you wanted to find out the typical energy consumption, they might provide this figure, but it's hard to find out where they're getting this from. How long are they running the device to arrive at this figure? Additionally, there's another sort of documentation that these manufacturers provide, like product carbon footprint, which gives the emissions from each use stage of the lifecycle. So manufacture transportation usage, end of life. But again, it's just not clear how they get these figures. So the benefit of open source is having that methodology transparent to everyone to see how these figures are arrived at.Gael 08:06Yeah, the big issue if you've got quite diverse hardware estate is that we might add apple and orange because the way one manufacturer would calculate things is not the same as the others. And eventually, these numbers don't make sense at all. What do you see as a potential path to overcome this very big difficulty in data sustainability?Katie 08:34I think open source is key, just having a sort of level playing field for the methodology that we use to calculate these things. So I mean, I think we'll probably discuss it later, but like tools like Cloud Carbon Footprint, sort of having that methodology that you can use across cloud providers, so it's more comparable, easier to track your improvements across the estate. And I mean, that's just one part of the standard.Oliver 08:59Katie touched on a really important point there, which is at the moment because the manufacturers can essentially almost makeup, I'm exaggerating a little bit to make a point, but because they can almost make up their methodology, their numbers, it almost becomes a marketing exercise to make it look like their product consumes less energy. And it's a bit of a game, right? So if you come up with a really creative way of measuring the power consumption of your device, I mean, we've seen servers, for example, with different sort of load ratings and energy consumption, different load ratings, and each manufacturer seems to sort of measure at different loads. So some are at 20%, some are 80, some are 100. It's like, okay, well, you can make yourself look cleaner by just presenting the characteristic that your model of hardware tends to perform best at. And of course, then you don't really know whether you're making an improvement or you've just bought better marketing when you change suppliers. So I think that's why what Kate is saying is really important. This apples-for-apples comparison is super important because we already have the same with the cloud. Like you run AWS's cloud carbon tooling versus Azure's versus Google's, they all have different methodologies, and so they're not comparable.Gael 10:04And that's a point with carbon footprint. And I'm very happy you raised both of you, actually, you raised the point. Is that true? It's a very powerful tool. Cameron was on the show last year. I'm a big advocate of CCF, among other open source tools, but at the end of the day, they have to recalculate things that should be provided by hyperscalers. And I think here we've got two very serious issues. The first one is the methodology. Tools like open source tools like Boa Vista cloud scanner or CCF, obviously the methodology is transparent, so at least we know how they manipulate the data. But then there is the issue of the data itself. I mean, do we have the granularity to calculate things in a wise enough way? And I'm not always sure, because for cloud. But Katie, I will let you elaborate on it. For cloud, it's always a question of transforming financial data almost all the time, financial data, into sustainability data. And some data would be more, I would say, accurate, like starting with CPU usage or GPU usage or whatever. But what's your thought on it, Katie?Katie 11:17So with regard to cloud, one of the key issues is that each cloud provider has their own tooling, but the methodology is not the same. So I think one of the main challenges is to do with sort of greenhouse gas scopes. So I think AWS, especially, doesn't include scope three. I think that one of the benefits of the cloud carbon footprint tool is that it provides a way to at least try and estimate that proportion allocated to scope three and sort of compare on the same level with those from Google as you are. I think Google does provide data on scope three emissions. So I think it's sort of just picking the right methodology for your estate. So, for example, if you just had Google Cloud, maybe you just go with their tool, since it's probably more up-to-date and includes scope three. Whereas, if you had multi-cloud or AWS, you might want to look at a tool like Cloud Carbon Footprint.Oliver 12:14But I think the point, Gael, around using financial numbers to come up with sustainability metrics is an interesting one. Clearly, it'd be great if we could trust the native tool, like Katie said, to use the Google tool, the AWS tool, because they have access to the underlying data that allows them to more accurately calculate the emissions. The trouble is, there's a trust thing there, isn't there? I think it's how transparent are they being and how much we trust them to kind of calculate this fairly, rather than just putting forward a polished view of their emissions, a managed kind of view of their emissions rather than reality. And so this is where I think the open approaches really would help because if they were open and transparent about what went into providing the service that you pay for, you would be able to make a more informed decision. And I think the calculations would be far more robust than basing them just on billing data. Ideally, you find situations where you save money, and you save carbon, but those two aren't necessarily going to go hand in hand in all cases.Gael 13:12Yeah, absolutely. I had an issue with a client very recently when we made the calculation that the bill would go up by 20%. And then you have also the question of how do you calculate a clean energy region. Because I don't know if you've seen this beautiful post from Mark Butcher migrating from Scotland to Ireland, where almost a time six difference in the carbon intensity of the electricity grid. If you do very basic math, you will still double your carbon footprint. Still, I would like to go back to it. Okay, so we claim that open source and open data because we are 100% on this open data subpart of open source here should be there, but the question is why not? One of the pushbacks I've heard from Isposkella representatives is like the business secrets and that they don't want to share because it's sensitive data. But what's your thought on it? And do you believe there are other obstacles, I would say on the road toward mods transparency, at least from the data perspective?Katie 14:18I think that sort of garden data for a commercial reason, especially with regards to sustainability, is just not really the way forward. I think to sort of make sustainable software key and forefront, we really need to be transparent, so people can build on methodology. It's not really any good sort of reinventing the wheel when there are already so many good established, like data point methodologies out there. I think as well, open source projects, have such a large user base, especially compared to some enterprise software, especially internal sort of company software, not always, but sometimes. So I think any efficiency gains that we make to open source software can have a real downstream impact.Oliver 15:05Yeah, Casey's kind of moved on to one of the other key kind of conversation points we have around open source. Right. But before we go there, my take on what you're saying, I think the commercial pushback is an interesting one, and I'm not convinced it's as simple as if we just reveal some more data, and all of a sudden the cat is out of the bag and everyone will know how we're running our data center. I think the reality is running a modern data center, certainly for a hyperscaler, is super, super complex. Right? And they're even using AI to optimize. Google and Meta, for example, have used AI to optimize their cooling and stuff like that. So I think to think that if you just release some data about your energy consumption and the high-level waste footprint and water footprint and all that sort of stuff, that that's going to be commercially dismantitious if you release that information, maybe to a point, because it will reveal perhaps to your competitors how efficiently you're running things. But yeah, I think it's just an excuse that they're hiding behind, quite frankly. And I think what will happen if they continue to drag their feet is the EU will regulate. And I think the EU is already regulating. Right. If you look at the data center regulation that's coming out, if you're running a data center over a certain power consumption now or in the near future, you will have to start reporting on more data. So I think that the reality is if companies continue to drag their hills on being transparent, regulation will follow. And it's probably better to kind of get ahead of that.Gael 16:27Yeah, you're mentioning the energy efficiency directive, and actually I will put the link in the show notes as everything that we've discussed so far. But is it the only way forward? Is it okay to regulate? I'm a big advocate of better norms and more transparency, but do you believe this is the only trigger that will force big actors to become more transparent? Is there any other way?Oliver 16:51I think Google has shown that this can be a competitive edge. Right. I am pretty sure that Google is still the only ones that give you near real-time carbon intensity information of the different regions that they operate in. Why is Google doing that? In my view, they're doing that because they are probably still number three in terms of enterprise cloud adoption. Like it's AWS and Azure, depending on which stats you look at, are the leading two. Right? Google is still trying to compete. So in order to compete, I think they are offering more transparency. They're offering more options around sustainability than the other two are, arguably. And so I think this can be a competitive edge. I do wonder whether if Google went a bit further in the near future, the EU companies might all of a sudden go, do you know what? We're just going to adopt Google Cloud because they just give us the data we need for regulatory compliance, for example. So I think the regulatory lever can be really powerful. But you're right, it probably can be too big a stick at times when actually industries can get ahead of that by just saying, do you know what? We'll just be a bit more transparent, a bit more open, a bit more sensible and pragmatic about how we operate, and then that way the regulators won't have to force this out of us.Gael 17:58I think it's pretty obvious that the European Union has a... I don't remember who coined the word, but I really love it. The long arm of EU regulations that you also see in California, etc. That is when the EU regulation actually doesn't stop at the European border, and it goes pretty much everywhere in the world, as we've seen with the privacy laws. First, the European Union is not as powerful economically speaking as it is today, even still a very, very big market, obviously. But what about the UK? Because you're both based in the UK. The UK is not a European Union member anymore. But on this specific aspect, do you think that whenever the European Union regulates, somehow it will lead the UK to adopt a similar pattern? Or is it a different way of doing things in the UK now?Oliver 18:48So I think the reality is, as much as the UK thinks it's left the European Union, the reality is we still live in Europe and Europe is one of our biggest trading partners. And so, therefore, whatever Europe does, we'll almost certainly have to follow in some regard. So I think we haven't abandoned GDPR, for example. We still have that in our law, a very similar law to that. And I think it's a matter of how much we want to sort of stay in harmony with our biggest trading partner or not. And I think we've got political changes probably happening in the next few months for the UK, and it will be interesting to see quite what happens there.Gael 19:23Regarding the link that you made between kind of transparency, a competition I would say on one hand, and regulation on the other, I think it's a very interesting point that one will lead the other. Do you believe that, except maybe for Google, there are other cases where transparency could become a competitive advantage?Oliver 19:42I definitely think hardware, like the end user hardware. I honestly think if there are organizations that are far more transparent about the supply chain and the kind of full lifecycle analysis of their products, and they do that in a way that you don't have to fight free PDFs and extract information from data sheets, but actually, they perhaps provide an API or an open standard or something where you can just get that information. I think that fairly soon will be a competitive advantage. And so I think the first organizations that do that will win. I also look at companies like Fairphone that are more modular and repairable with the right to Repair Act that the EU has also just put out. I honestly think that there is scope for innovation in repairability, and it will be really interesting to see, for example, how Apple responds to that regulation. Do they do it to the minimum or do they go beyond and be more transparent about the supply chain and so on at the same time, I think that would be amazing if someone chooses to innovate on that angle? And I think they would find a lot of success in that space, in honesty.Gael 20:45We'll see. I think it's some kind of pattern. Usually with Apple, it's like they pour tens of millions of dollars in lobbying against, then they drag their feet a bit, and then when everyone starts to follow, they put tens and millions of dollars on moving forward and then claiming they're the best. And I simply don't understand why they don't skip the two first parts of the dance. But that's a different story. So we talked a lot about hardware, data transparency, methodology, and transparency. But Katie, you mentioned before the correlation, not that obvious correlation, between open source software and sustainability. And please could you elaborate a bit on it?Katie 21:25Yeah, of course. So as I was saying, open source projects can often be adopted widely by many organizations and can also be extended or used in their own projects. So I think due to this scale, sort of any efficiency gains or sustainability improvements that are made to the code can have a real impact downstream. So like a ripple effect. What might seem like quite a small optimization, like in the core code base, can have massive impacts downstream on the community. So sort of reduce the environmental impact across the ecosystem. So sort of reduce the environmental impact across the ecosystem, baking in these sustainable practices into the actual open source code. In the same way, sorting other nonfunctional requirements like security have already been, would be hugely beneficial, something that we're missing at the moment.Gael 22:19Do you have some examples of maybe communities, open source communities on a dedicated software starting to pay attention to that? Or is it way too early stage? At the moment, I think it's pretty early.Oliver 22:32Right. But the comparison I would make to this is a bit like when you buy your laptop, what power profile does it ship with? Right? Does it ship with the high-performance profile enabled by default or the power-saving profile enabled by default? And I would encourage all open source software contributors and maintainers to think about that same sort of thing. When someone downloads your software or includes their library in their software, what mode is it running in by default? And does someone have to specifically go and tune it for either efficiency performance or security? Because for security now it's pretty frowned upon, right? If you ship your open source software in a way that's unsecure by default, I would say that Katie was encouraging us to think about our open source projects and making them run efficiently by default. And maybe if you really need to crank the performance out of it, then, yeah, you go and tune, and you go and make optimizations. But that is something I think that could have a massive impact. And Katie's right, the scale at which open source libraries and software are deployed means that any savings that we make there are going to massively outweigh perhaps any optimizations we might make on our enterprise code. So we do a lot of work with big government and big financial services customers, but even still internal applications for them are hundreds of users, maybe thousands of users. They're not the millions of users that open source projects have. So where do you focus your optimization efforts as an open source developer? Do you optimize your own code that's running on your company systems, or do you optimize open source? So I would say as far as coding efficiency goes, think about what code you're optimizing.Gael 24:08And especially knowing that we have only to target like 5% of open source developers because it's like 5% contribute to almost 90 to 99% of the code base. So we can target very active developers. My question would be, is it a bit different as an end user, obviously a developer, but downloading some kind of libraries, whatever, et cetera, do I have today all the information? And honestly, the answer is no. So I'm kind of self-answering my question, but what would it require being able to understand, okay, this is kind of a frugal design or low carbon open source code. There is nothing in I'm pressure like 99.99% of the MD in GitHub or any other repository that doesn't mention the carbon footprint at all or any kind of environmental approach. There is this project, I'm kind of thinking out loud at the moment, but is the impact framework provided by the Green Software Foundation the right approach? Or any other tools that could be used or leveraged to access this information. What do you think about this?Oliver 25:20I think the impact framework shows potential to have a standardized way of calculating things. It's very early and we're excited. We're going to be part of carbon hack this year and that's all about the impact engine framework. And we're going to be, for example, probably looking at how you measure S3, the impact of S3, the Amazon S3 service using impact framework. I think what we need though is more of a standard, and you've perhaps given me a bit of an idea here of where the carbon standard that we launched recently could go, right? I mean, we've primarily designed it as a way of navigating the technology space and working out where your emissions live in the upstream operational and downstream sort of categories that we have sort of touched on throughout this episode. But actually I do wonder whether there is almost a metric that you should be looking for in each of those. And I think we're signposting open source tools and standards. But I do wonder if ultimately that might be where we lead. Is giving people an easy, almost like an eco label for software or a bit like the calorie counting you get on food, right? We need something as simple as that for someone to go red, amber, green on a library or a piece of software. We're not there yet, but I hope we get there.Gael 26:29Yeah, I think that was the idea behind the API green score, main french companies. It's an open source approach as well, but it's more like a best practices checklist. Like, okay, is my API management clean? Do I provide information on carbon, et cetera? And then you've got a score. I kind of like this approach. It's very straightforward still, it requires pretty transparent methodology and data to be sure that we compare Apple with Apple. Once again, I'm really about fruit salad. Katie, as a developer, because you are, what would you like to have when you use open source code to make sure that you're using a very efficient one?Katie 27:12I think the idea that you discussed, Oliver, was really quite a good one about sort of the comparisons to calorie counter. I think having that sort of metric, just so when you're looking and researching what you actually want to use in your code, you don't really have to dig in too much. That would be really useful if you could just see high level. What sort of sustainability level has this library got, for example? And for a developer, you want to be looking at how you can code. So I think learning from how upstream dependencies, open sourced libraries have been coded efficiently is a really good way to learn.Oliver 27:49I think that exemplar approach is really interesting. It would be nice to see those sort of standards sort of applied. I think in most cases you could argue they are right, because lots of open source libraries have been optimized for performance, which means they should be fairly efficient. But that's necessarily, that's a big assumption. Right? And so I think what we're talking about here is something that validates that and ensures that there isn't excessive memory usage or excessive CPU consumption, perhaps polling anti patterns. I think maybe we aren't that far away from maybe being able to take some of the Green Software foundation principles and standards and patterns and maybe running some tests because that's the other part of this. We talk a lot about coding, but the testing is really important as well. And so we're equally looking at other software development lifecycle roles, like testing to say, should there be a test suite for efficiency, for energy consumption of code? So part of your pipeline, your builds break if energy consumption is over a certain level or efficiency is not hitting the bar. So this is the sort of bigger picture software development lifecycle thinking we're also doing beyond just sort of classifying emissions into their different buckets. It's also thinking about how does each role play its part when it comes to building more sustainable software.Gael 29:07I'm very enthusiastic about what you describe, and actually I know that there are a few projects in CI CD pipeline trying to automate it. So, full disclosure, I've launched a project with my good friend Benoît Petit at the Boavizta association, but that's not public yet. But we've released the version zero of our repository of green it tools because we want to increase the transparency in the landscape. So the idea is not to assess if the tool is good or bad, but just to assess how transparent is the methodology, the data used, and all the information that will help people choose the right tool. And that's something that I will at Green IO Singapore and in forthcoming podcasts. It's really a transparency battle, it's not an assessment quality assessment battle, and a good practical exercise to close the podcast. How would you launch this open source initiative if you launch it?Oliver 29:59Well, we'd certainly come back on the podcast if you have us. Katie, what are your thoughts? You're more in the development world than I am these days, I think in.Katie 30:09The sort of same way as projects like Green Software Foundation, I think sort of co-pilot tool. It's the same sort of thing. So the way that Green Software foundation have sort of promoted their principles and their green coding patterns sort of promote the tool in the same way.Gael 30:28But when you launch an open source, mean you have an idea you want to launch. Obviously you will create a GitHub repository and the license, blah blah blah. But hey, you're still two or three of you. I don't know how many people actually, how many people will join from Scott logic for that kind of project? Will it be only the two of you, or are you?Oliver 30:53We have a team of about ten people working in this space at the moment, but people have rotated in and rotated out as we're a consultancy, right? So when we have client projects, people will go on to client work. So it very much depends on what client projects are going on at any one time as to how many people are involved in our R & D initiatives. But ultimately we're rolling out sustainable software thinking across the whole of the company and that's 500 people in total, about 450 or so consultants. Not all of those are developers, of course, but this mindset and these best practices are being pushed out across the organization because we don't want this to be a bolt on, we want this to be how we just work by default back to the sensible defaults thing. So I think yeah, for launching it we'd almost certainly launch it internally, we'd alpha test it ourselves and then I think we would look to kind of work with friendly clients and then kind of use open source ecosystems. We're part of like Linux foundation and Finos. So shout out to Finos that we do a lot of work with. They're a great organization for financial services, open source adoption. So I think yeah, it's kind of use the community, right? I think would be the straightforward answer to that one because that's the beauty of the open source effort, right, is it's always community driven. So kind of embrace that community approach.Gael 32:06And does it respond well, the community, to that kind of project?Oliver 32:10Well, it's interesting, right? My presentation at OpenUK, I would have hoped for a slightly larger audience, but I was competing with AI. There's a lot of AI talks and everyone, I think if you put an AI talk on everyone wants to go to that talk right now because it's just so hot. It's kind of ironic that everyone wants to go and listen to the really power hungry, hardware hungry topic of the day rather than talk about how we can tread more lightly. I do fear there is a culture war, Gael, happening like some of the tech meetups I've been going to recently there's almost two camps, there's people that are almost falling for the techno optimist manifesto from Marc Andreessen Horowitz and just think, growth and energy consumption and increasing energy consumption isn't a problem. Why is it problem? And there are others who are more aware of the issues that we have around. We don't have endless power sources that are renewable.Gael 32:58Sadly though, the trick, and I will do it in London again, is that my keynote speaker for closing the day was Théo Alves da Costa and he's the co-founder of data for good, and he's the one who trained the ChatGPT for climate. I think it's climate Q&A, but they didn't use the ChatGPT tool, the model they use. Another one, I think it was. I don't remember which one it is. S hungry energy hungry model. But anyway. And the idea, know if you train a chatbot on IPCC, report only usually the answer to the question is pretty good. So that's a good usage. And so I managed to get some people in there because it was artificial intelligence and sustainability. So we will do it in London again, don't worry. But anyway, Katie, some thought on what we've just discussed.Katie 33:54I think what you've just been discussing there about the sort of war between AI consuming so much energy and sustainability. It's really interesting because I think they're both so forefront at the minute, not so invested as I am in sustainability. For example, I think that my sort of passion for sustainability has really grown last few months, especially just even coming to terms with the terminology and the language of it. It's a whole world really, that I'd never really thought about. It's really shifted my thinking, especially not just within development, but everyday life.Oliver 34:30I'm living a Jekyll and Hyde personality day by day at the moment. Right, Gail? Because I am spending almost equal amounts of time on AI R&D and sustainability R&D. So at some point the two streams will cross, and it's interesting to hear about Climate Q&A. That's great. I didn't know that existed. So thank you. And almost, yeah, what we'd love to do is almost to create a climate Q&A for technologists. So that the bit like we were just talking about earlier, the know, that's the sort of ultimate goals we have at AI for good. But yeah, I do struggle with this. And in fact, I've got a blog in drafts that I'm not sure I'll publish. But it's sort of talking about this conflict I have between technological progress using AI and on the other hand, all the power consumption and the sustainability impacts that that will have. So I do have this sort of schisms in should we be embracing this thing or should we be being more cautious? It's a really fascinating time, I think, to be a technologist right now, like the different challenges and opportunities that we have in front of us, it's incredible. Yeah.Gael 35:32And I fully agree with you. And I think actually it's also a good thing not to be made in one piece of wood, I would say. And because our world is complex, it requires subtility. And even if it's not very comfortable coming up with subtle approaches to the big questions that we have, and not having one single answer for every question. I think it's a good approach, whether it's AI or. I don't know how to say it, but yeah, kill the tech or whatever approach, or go back to the stone edge, I don't know. I don't want to use it as a caricature. But you see my point. We're thinking complex, and it's very uncomfortable because I think we are more and more aware of how complex is the world we live in. And that's just us adapting to the reality of our world. So quite a lot has been covered here. To close the podcast, as usual, I would love both of you to share one piece of good news. Sustainably related, even green it related, but sustainably at large is cool. Something that makes you happy about our path towards a more sustainable world, I would say.Katie 36:44I think for me because I'm quite new to the tech space, especially the technology sustainability space. I think just seeing the community growing, it's really positive. Seeing all the initiatives that are out there, whether they're open source. I think just like seeing the work that our team's been doing as well, the tech carbon standard, I think it's all really positive. It's going in the right direction.Oliver 37:08I'm going to choose something that's not tech, but it's energy. So I'm probably as much an energy nerd as I am a technology nerd. And the thing that really excited me the other day was the announcement of quite a big electricity interconnect between Denmark and the UK. Right? And I hadn't heard about this, but a huge investment, like we're talking billions of pounds or euros investment to create this undersea link between Denmark and the UK. And it makes a lot of sense because both Denmark and the UK have a lot of wind power, and because of the time difference between Denmark and the UK, our peak electricity demands are at a different time. So there's a lot of sense in this interconnect, because when it's windy in Denmark and there's lots of demand in the UK, they can send their wind power to the UK and vice versa. And so I didn't know this thing was even being built. And it's gone live literally in the last couple of weeks. And it's significant, I think it's like at least a gigawatt of interconnect. So a serious DC power interconnect between the two countries. And that just made my day, because I knew we've been rolling back on various sorts of environmental policies, but this has just gone live and I didn't even know they were building it.Gael 38:09And that's really, that's actually, that's so fun because I stumbled on a map of all these new connects being built across Europe, both for sustainability reasons, also for security reasons, after the Russian aggression against Ukraine and all the energy issue that it raised. And that was mind-blowing that there is already a lot of being built and even more being planned. And as you say, that's just perfect. It's sharing energy and low-carbon energy as much as you can. So I really love it. I think I will try to find the map and put it in. That'd be great. Thanks for sharing it. That made my day as well. Super cool. So it was great. I will put all the references in the show notes as usual. And what is also super cool, is that there is like a very good deal of chance that we will meet in London in September. So thanks for joining. Talk to you soon. Keep up this amazing work with a very open source technology, carbon standard but sustainable pilot idea. I love it. So let's stay in touch. Thanks a lot for joining and have a very nice and sustainable day.Katie 39:17Thank you.Oliver 39:18Thanks for having us.
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How can we make systemic design operational for sustainable design?

🔧Systemic design is dedicated to handling complex systems, complex questions, and complex issues.

Sounds familiar with Sustainability? But if things are so complex how digital product people willing to design sustainably can embrace them?

In this episode, we dive deep into the world of systemic design and how it can help us increase digital sustainability. Don't miss out on insights from Sylvie Daumal (acclaimed author of 'Design d'expérience utilisateur' ) and Thorsten Jonas (founder of the SUX Network), as Gaël Duez discusses the operationality of systemic design in Tech.

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📣 Green IO next Conference is in Singapore on April 18th (use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket) Learn more about our guest and connect: * Sylvie’s LinkedIn * Thorsten’s LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website

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Sylvie and Thorsten's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* SUX network and its SUX podcast * Design d'expérience utilisateur - 3e édition: Principes et méthodes UX * Apple’s Mother Earth video * Future Wheel * The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization * Systems Archetypes * Sahel : le recul du désert * Sécheresse, désertification et reverdissement au Sahel * Pour une Hydrologie Régénérative * Can rock dams combat climate change? * Structured dialogic design * Dialogic Design Science

Transcript Gaël (00:17.)Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Every two Tuesdays, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.You know, when I discuss with fellow digital sustainability enthusiasts about sustainable design, I often hear these statements. It's systemic. We need to see the big picture beyond our own company, our own clients. We need to fundamentally change the way we think about design, if we want to design for a better future. We must move from human centered to planet centered design. I couldn't agree more. But I also recall a conversation I had some months ago with a researcher in economics. We were talking about Donella Meadows’ book, « Thinking in Systems », and her position was, well, let's say abrupt. It's a good idea on paper, but it's not operational. You cannot modelize it. So, I was wondering, how operational is it for us working in the digital sector? How do we transform into actions the statements which I listed previously? And to answer these questions, I'm glad to be joined today by two experts in systemic design: Sylvie Daumal and Thorsten Jonas. Sylvie is based in Paris and she is somehow a rockstar in France when it comes to systemic design, a field she has been invested in since the early 2000s. She wrote a book last year, « 58 tools for systemic design », a very technical book, which has been acclaimed in the French design community. And on a more personal note, I'm so happy that we managed to record this episode, which has been rescheduled four times, I think - record broken.Gaël (02:20) Thorsten is based in Hamburg. He has been in UX design for almost 20 years, if not more than 20 years, and he founded Sustainable UX Network two years ago. A community who has gathered an impressive momentum with more than 2000 very active members across Europe, and all over the world. We share quite a lot with Thorsten, who is a fellow podcaster, a fellow speaker, a fellow community builder, and whom I see the name popping up on every cool event I'd like to join. And yet, we didn't manage to meet until today, despite me spending quite a lot of time in Hamburg when I was working with my former colleagues. So, welcome Sylvie, welcome Thorsten. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO here today. Thorsten (03.01)Thank you very much for having me. Sylvie (03:04)Thank you, Gaël. Gaël (03:07) So, the big, big question I stated in the introduction: how can we make systemic design operational? And maybe, before jumping on the question, maybe we should remind ourselves, what is systemic design and why is it useful? Sylvie, do you want to start maybe with some kind of a definition?Sylvie (03:32)Systemic design is dedicated to handling complex systems, complex questions, complex issues. It is used mostly when you have questions about any kind of subject that involves many people, that involves many bots. The fact is that systemic thinkers are people who have a special angle to see things. The system is not really existing on its own, it's just the way that you see things. And what is the big characteristic of the system, is the fact that to identify many, many parts in a situation and all the parts are in interaction, one with the other. That's the reason why it is most of the time very complex, because it creates what we call causal loops. It means that one cause can have a consequence. A consequence will have a cause on another part of the system and so on.So... at the very end, you can see that every action, every interaction has a consequence on the whole system. So, it's a way to really envision the whole situation. But most of the time, all the problems are complex. Gaël (05:11) Which makes it useful also for digital design, digital services. Thorsten, I think that's something that you've advocated again and again and again in your public speaking these last years, that we need to embrace systemic thinking also when we design digital services. Could you maybe elaborate a bit on this?Thorsten (05:36)Sure. I think one of the key things of UX design is that we focus on the user, right? We want to build great experiences, great products for our users. And that's what we advocate for. And that's what we try to make other stakeholders understand, that it's valuable to focus on the user and to fulfill the user's needs. And we have been doing this for many years. The problem is, by focusing so much on the user, we totally forget about all the other actors that are somehow influenced by the product, by the experience that we build. So all the tools we use in UX are not taking into account the systemic context of the product, of the experience that we build.And another actor could be a human being could also be the planet, the environment, whatever, everything that is influenced by what we build. And I think this is a really big problem, because very often someone or something else pays the price for the good user experience that we build for our users. Let's say I build a nice service and a nice app for ordering my groceries from home. There are several big services out there that do this, and their advertising is pretty aggressive. You could say, it's a good user experience and it's very convenient for the user. I'm just sitting on my couch. I can order my groceries via app and then maybe 30 minutes later, someone shows up at my door and the only thing I have to do is walk up to my door and pick up the stuff. But who pays the price? Well, it's the delivery riders that are not paid well, that for a long time are even not employed, but so-called ‘self-employed’. These services have a very aggressive pricing policy, so it cannot be matched by the small grocery stores we have here in our big cities, etc. So, for the convenience and for the great user experience, someone or something else pays the price. And that is something I think we in UX for too long have not taken into account. And as I said in the beginning, it's not part of our tool set, and we need to enhance our tools and maybe create new tools to put this into our work, in the first place, to understand the systemic context, to understand the consequences, and maybe the unintended consequences of what we build, in order to be able to do it better, do a better job there and in the end do less harm. Gaël (08:36) And how would you do that? Do you have some tools that you like to use? And I know we could drop it later, but let's drop it earlier because it makes some impact, I would say, in the design world, with Apple in its last conference using, I think, at that scale for the very first time, a non-human persona there with ‘Mother Earth’. And I'm not going to comment on the message itself, but more than the way they conveyed the message, which was using a non-human persona. Is it a tool that you've been using some time, Thorsten or do you think about other kinds of tools? Thorsten (09:23) This is one of the tools. Because the great thing about non-human personas is that we use a tool we are very used to, from our daily work, and just reframe it a little bit to give other actors in our system, let's say, a voice. And it's always easier to use an existing tool and to enhance it, than introducing a totally new tool. It's easier for all of our processes. It's easier for our work with stakeholders. As you said, there were so many wrong things about this, but still it was very helpful for people like us because now people like us can go to clients or wherever and say, hey, what about non -human or non-user personas? And maybe in the past people laughed at us when we said, hey, let's make a persona for mother nature or for the environment or for trees or the river. Now we can say, hey, yeah, but that's what Apple did and nobody's laughing anymore. So, I still see a big advantage that Apple does this. But this is just, just one tool. And something that's very helpful for me is, when starting working on a product or on an experience, we are focusing so much on the user and user needs. And then maybe we try to align this with the business needs that someone else finds very important. And so, this is what we do. And I think we need to add here, what are the unintended, or maybe even known consequences of these things. So what are the negative impacts of these certain user needs? So this is a tool I use pretty often and, and actually a framework I was, and I still am, working on, to be able to see the user needs, and the business needs and then the same framework or in the same canvas, see, okay, but what are the negative consequences on a societal, on an ecological and also on a single human level? Because very often, we also build great user experiences, which are in the end harmful for ourselves. Looking at endless scrolling, looking at TikTok, YouTube, etc, trying to keep us inside of the platform as long as possible and stealing our time. So, this is a very helpful tool for me, mapping our user and business needs to the negative consequences of them. And the third tool I use very often is, and that's what I use before building the non -human personas, actually, it's also very simple mapping. Think about putting your product or your experience in the middle, and then think about all the actors, direct or indirect, that are influenced by the product that is built. So, it's a very simple exercise, but it creates a lot of transparency and visibility. And this is, from my experience, very important to do in the very beginning of the design process, because it helps open up our minds that are so focused on the users and so helps us to understand that there is so much more that we need to understand.And one last tool that is very helpful is to use the user journey. We use this a lot in UX, and also adding additional layers. So, for example, which actors are influenced at this step in the user journey? What is the environmental impact at this step of the user journey? It breaks the very high level view from the beginning, down to certain steps in the user journey, which helps us to work on certain ideas to identify where we can do things better.Gaël (13.39) So, if I wrap up the four tools you've listed, there is obviously the non-human persona. You would say that the first one you use is this kind of actor mapping, like full scale actors, both, direct and indirect, being impacted by the service.Thorsten (13.58)Yeah. Gaël (13.59) Okay. And then you have this mapping and this is that's quite hard to explain. Thorsten (14.04)I call it unintended consequence mapping. Gaël (14.07) Okay. This is what you, you go from the business need and the user needs and you go to the environmental and societal impact. Thorsten (14.17)Yeah. You can, you can do this in two steps. You can also map the unintended consequences without the user needs and business needs. So this also works. But then the next step that is very helpful is to try to find connections to these metrics that we use every day. The user needs and the business needs. So that's why I put this in there, but you can do this in two steps. But yeah, it's unintended consequence mapping. And then the second step, map these to user needs and business needs or connect.Gaël Duez (14:50) Sylvie, do these tools resonate a bit or do you tend to use other tools? I know that you've got 58 tools at your disposal, so you've got quite a lot. But does it ring a bell? Or are there different tools that you use? For the listeners, what I didn't say in the introduction, is that, of course, you know digital design quite well, but you're also an expert in the brick and mortar world, I would say. Sylvie (15:20)Firstly, there are much more than the 58 that I described in the book. I had to do a selection, so I could easily add probably 40 more. The second point is that my question is a bit different from Thorsten’s question. My main concern is about the fact that in 2015, all the parties met in Paris for the COP21. And they all decided to sign what is now called the Paris Agreement. And according to this agreement, we now have six years to divide our greenhouse gas by two. It means that for me, any project that you can have now in a country, in a company, and could be any kind of territory, in school, wherever you work, must be in this trajectory. There is no way to think about the fact that everything that we are doing must help us to divide our emissions by two. My question is much more about how do we guarantee the fact that every project helps us to attain this goal? My question is very different from does it hurt someone. My question is, are we sure that we are going to a place where everyone can live? Gaël Duez (17:31)You work as a consultant with many companies. So how do you manage these very important goals to be taken into account, and how systemic design tools help? Sylvie (17:55)The fact is that you start with carbon assessment. I cannot tell for Europe, but in France it's mandatory. That's your starting point. And you check, from this document, that is most of the time a public document, where are the sources of emissions, and you work with all the people who are involved in this emission. It can be producers, it can be providers, it can be the company itself, it can come from many, many parts and you start asking the question, how can I do better? How can I remove things? Yes, the starting point. Also, most of the companies today are facing a lack in many things. We all know that all the raw materials, their prices have been increasing incredibly during the last few years. The question is, how can we still produce what we are producing if the prices are still increasing in the next months or in the next years? And the last point is, how can we be compliant with all the new rules and the new laws that are arriving, and that are also putting a big pressure on the companies? And for the tools that you use, you have many tools that have been created by a guy called Hasan Ozbekhan, when he was working with Alexander Christakis. These tools are called Structure Dialogic Design. They are based on the fact that you need to gather all the people who are concerned and make them talk and really discuss and make them imagine the solutions. And yes, that's the kind of tools that you can easily use when you're working on such issues. Gaël Duez (20:18)And among them, could you give us one example of a tool you used, just to grasp it, because it might sound a bit blurry for people not being familiar with a systemic design. And I know that for you, it's extremely concrete. Sylvie (20:37)Okay. Like in UX, Design, systemic design starts with research. So a long time researching, exploring the issue and from this research you create what is called a ‘white book’. And a ‘white book’ is a kind of synthesis of the problem, of the situation, of the context. This tool is given to all the people that participate in a workshop. This is a very simple tool. You can create it in, I could say, almost any kind of design project. But the fact is, that it gives to all the participants pieces of information that most of the time they do not have, because they have their own expertise, but they do not know everything about the subject. It helps to align all the participants of the workshop to have the same level of information. That's a very easy and simple tool that any designer can create. Gaël Duez (21:51)Thorsten, the emphasis that Sylvie has put on people talking to each other, is it also an issue you've experienced? Or is the flow of exchanges more natural within tech companies? Thorsten (22:20)It's a very good question because, well, let's start with how do people work together on digital products. And that's a whole topic on its own. And as long as I do my job or my work, I see these problems everywhere. How do people work together and how good and how do people try to understand other stakeholders in the project, etc. So this is still a big problem space. And what I find very interesting about this question, finally we are talking much more about it. We have these fundamental environmental and societal problems that we need to solve, and we need to create or make sure us and even more so the next generations, that we have a future. So how can we better work together on these problems?In an ecosystem, like a company, where we already sometimes have problems working together efficiently, or let's say in a good way. That is a huge challenge, I think. How can we bring people together? And that means not only people from one profession, like the designers, but all the people, in my case, that are somehow involved in the digital product. And so one thing that I found is that we need to find ways and tools where we can gather people around.One example from my work, I named it before, is the user journey. The user journey is a tool UX designers use every time. It's a very good tool to bring in other people from other professions, because it's very easy to understand. If you have set up a user journey already, you can easily use it to discuss, like I said before, the negative consequences, the impacts of certain steps of the user journey, with all kinds of stakeholders. And that's, I think for us, as designers, that's an important role that we have. I think we can be the connectors. We can help bring people together, and work together on these problems, because we have the tools that help to make things accessible and understandable for all kinds of different stakeholders.Gaël Duez (24:55)We have the tools, both Sylvie and you have listed some, with different flavors and colors, which is very interesting. But do we have the mindset? Don't we still have very often today a pushback, that everything that we do in a sustainable way is more expensive, is more complex, is more efficient, is more sexy, whatever. Isn't it that we are facing an issue with a narrative around sustainable design, and beyond sustainability at large?Thorsten (25:32)We definitely do. And that is a huge problem. We need a mindset shift in, well, first, as I explained in the beginning, for us as designers, how do we see our digital design? How do we see user experience? So that's a personal mindset shift for us. But we also need a mindset shift. I mean, that's one of the big, I would say, societal questions. What is value in our society? And this is, this is a huge economical, huge topic we could talk about for hours, but I don't want to make it too big an issue here. But the thing is, as we said, the big problem is that especially from the business side, there is the strong narrative that acting sustainable is a good thing, but it's expensive and that it's not necessarily good for business. And well, the thing is, this is in fact not true. Sustainability is good for business. See Patagonia, for example. And what I also often say is, that especially in the EU, where regulations are coming, it's essential for your business to act sustainable, because otherwise you will get huge problems with regulations. And what I often do is I tell people, or ask people, hey, you might have heard about the regulations about accessibility, about web accessibility. And everyone knows about these challenges. And the same thing will happen with web sustainability, for example, or with digital sustainability. And then people will understand the need of doing these things. I think it's important for us to work actively on changing these narratives on helping people to understand, on stepping in, and countering wrong narratives, because there are many wrong narratives, such as sustainability is just expensive and nothing else. And this is also an important part, not only for designers, but for all of us. To step out of our comfort zone, to step out of our standard daily work. And I sometimes say it's not about designing the next product or the next experience. We need to use our gift, our tools, our knowledge, to design the world around us. And we design things with stories. We are all storytellers, and there are so many wrong stories out in the world nowadays. And I think we need to use our gift to tell the true stories, and to change narratives for good actually. And this is a huge challenge I think we all face (not only designers), but one where we as designers also can play an important role. Gaël (28:38)Staying with this mindset idea, something stuck in my mind - it was something that we discussed also previously before this recording - is we need to reduce everything, we put something in production, so we should get rid of something else. And this is a very counter-intuitive narrative compared to, I would say the gross culture that is still the majority approach, in almost all companies and even public services. So how do you manage to change a bit the perspective, to change a bit the mindset that, hey, when you release something, you should also consider getting rid of the equivalent, if not more? Because as you said previously, the Paris Agreement, minus 50 % carbon emissions, on top of many other environmental impacts to be reduced, so how do you help people having this slow painful change of mindset? Sylvie (29 :45)I wouldn't say that is a painful change of mindset. The point is, as I said, companies are facing many, many new constraints. The first one is, as I said, the shortage of raw materials and the fact that the price of energy is increasing incredibly. So the point is for the same amount of production they pay more, and they cannot have the price of their product increase in the same way. So most of the time the people that I meet are already aware of the fact that they need to change the way their business is run today. They know that they are facing shortages, they are facing many other different issues, like the fact that the European Union decided to have a plan called the FIT 55, which means that they decided that our emissions must be reduced by 55% in 2030 - it's in six years, it means there will probably be many, many new European rules, and companies know that they will need to be compliant with these new rules. So to me, they already know that they need to be much more sober than they used to be, and they also need to find a way to keep their business flourishing in a very difficult context. To me it's not a big deal, because people in companies are aware of all this. So the questions they are asking today are how can we have energy bills that are cheaper? How can we save energy? How can we do things better? And also they need to recruit people and it's very difficult to recruit young talent today if you're not engaged in a very social and environmental policy. So yes, it's also very good for their, what we call the, the brand of the company. Gaël (32:29)So that's interesting, because both of you, you've listed external pressures such as legal, recruitment issues, supplier prices, as triggers for action. And eventually it's not a question of how aware am I that climate change or biodiversity collapse is a threat to the survival of humankind, but it's, hey, it's already on us, so we have to do something. But to do something, we need to embrace a new way of thinking and re-incorporating those external constraints in a way to design things, products, and services. Am I right to draw this parallel between what you've said to both of you? Sylvie (33:18)Exactly the point. It's not about a moral point of view. It's much more about the business concern. Thorsten (33:27)One problem that I see very often is, and I agree with you Sylvie, that there is the awareness of let's say the big problem of the climate catastrophe, for example. What I see very often is a missing awareness on the level of, okay, but what's my part in this in detail? Change, unfortunately, is still too often driven by economic pressure. That's the way we all need to use to push business leaders and decision makers. But I would also love to have this discussion about, okay, what can be the additional values to the existing ones or to the existing big value of growth that we have? And how can we align them with these? And I have no answer to these, but I think that's a core question we should work on, or have to work on. Gaël (34:26)And there is also the question of the timing of this value. My point being what we value today, like making energy affordable for the entire humankind was a very core value of the development policy in the UN. And we realize now, and I think this is something that Sylvie, you told me before, that very often, systemic design today's problems are the consequences of yesterday's solutions, and the same goes as you carry on into the future. My point about affordable energy for everyone, which in itself, is a goal that I would fully support, is that it created a massive boom in energy extraction, and energy consumption was even an indicator of economic and societal progress. So when we value something today, how do we make sure, or how do we at least start thinking that it might not be what we value tomorrow? And it could be one of my final questions. How can some systemic design tool help us answer this question of the ‘future versus present’ assessment of what is valuable? Sylvie (35:58)I would say that probably we must not think about tools, we must think about processes. Actually, the point is not only about tools, it's about the fact that you succeed in gathering all the people around the table. It means that when you are organizing a workshop, and there are many, many tools that you can use in a workshop, the big point of systemic design is you need to have people that represent all the parts that are involved in the problem, and you need to have them discuss and exchange, not only fight you know, but exchange, because the main point is, you need to have in your workshop the people that will implement the solutions that they are thinking about. That's the main point. It means that it's not a top-down process where you have tools, and you think about anything, and you design on your own as a designer. The point is that your work is to make people work together, exchange and imagine different solutions. And from this work, they will implement and give themselves the solution that can work. And that's the main difference, because in systemic design, you are not designing anything. You are just designing intervention in a system. And your work is to have people concerned. Osbekhan said something, that it is not ethical to intervene in a social, technical system without the permission of the participants, of the parties, of the stakeholders, and without their active participation. And that's the main process that we follow. And we have many tools that we can use in workshops. It can be a causal loop, where you show people how things are all connected. It can be leverage points, inspired by the work of Donella Meadows, where you can identify the places that are crucial to change the system. It can be many different kinds of workshop tools, as designers are used to having, because most of the time we have many, many tools.But the main point is how can we gather people that are representing all the parts of the system. And our job is mainly a facilitator. We reformulate, we synthesize, we plan, we organize, but we are not designing a system.Gaël (39:12)So a designer in systemic design, doesn't design, but structures the discussion about the system. Sylvie (39:20)Yes. And the intervention into the system. Gaël (39:25)And I really love the question about bringing everyone around the table, which leads me to something super connected, which is: who's representing the future generations? And that might sound a bit crazy, but actually I know that in Wales, for instance, you've got a Commissioner for Future Generations, which means that there is someone whose job is to speak on the behalf of the people who are not yet there. So is it something that you played with a bit, because you mentioned it's very similar to what Sylvia described, but it was at the very beginning of the episode when you mentioned mapping all the actors, et cetera. Did you ever happen to map someone from the future? Thorsten (40:14)Not yet, but I love the idea. Because I think it's a different level. And the first thing I wanted to say was, there are so many people looking from a UX perspective and looking from, we are focusing on the users so much, there are so many actors that are underrepresented or not represented in all the work we do as UX designers. So there is so much work to do to give them a voice. Gaël (40:48)So, you know, for both of you, my idea might sound a bit crazy, but you could actually leverage it as an overtone window move, which is where you arrive at the workshop and you say, oh by the way, we need to gather everyone, including everyone from the future. And you've got this big reaction, what, what, what, what !? Ah, okay, okay, okay, I got it! So not everyone from the future, but at least everyone from the present. Okay, okay, that's good enough. That's good enough. And suddenly, boom, you've got a big win.Anyway, Sylvie, you know, in your book, there is this chapter, system archetype chapter, which I love so much, because it's so useful to model big interactions etc. But my question is, did you ever manage to use it to go back to, for example, some executive committee, a mayor, a city council, whoever, and say, okay, you know, the issue you're facing at the moment is a tragedy of the commons, is the winner wins all? How actionable are these systemic archetypes? Sylvie (42:04)We exchanged with Peter Senge, the writer of a book called the Fifth Discipline, who identified, I would say, patterns, because there are patterns in systems that are not working, these are patterns of dysfunctional systems. One of them is called the tragedy of the commons. And most of the time, it's something that you can meet when you have a common good for people, and everyone is using it and at the very end there is no more left for other people. It can be water, it can be whatever. What is interesting in Peter Senge’s work is that for each pattern we call the archetype of this dysfunctional system, he also identifies strategies. So, the ways that you can intervene in such a dysfunctional system. Most of the time we as the systemic designer know them, but we do not necessarily put them on the table with the clients, because sometimes they are very complex, and the clients are not able to handle it. It's not an easy tool that you can use in a workshop. So, most of the time we, as designers, have this pattern in our mind. And it helps us also to identify the good strategy. But it's not necessarily a tool that we share with all the people around the table, which is different from, I would say, a persona, or a customer journey, that most of the time are very publicly edited and publicly displayed.Thorsten (44:13)So, my first thought actually was that, taking the user journey or something else is something that is highly manipulated by many people and we want many people 12around the table, I still think from my very personal experience in doing many workshops, that as a good workshop facilitator, you are moderating, but you're also leading the workshop. And there are quite often situations where, as Sylvie also said, we don't say anything, or everything that we know, but try to give the context that is helpful, without throwing everything on to the table. And I think we do this as well. Also, if we work on the user journey, we want to bring all the stakeholders to the table, and we use this tool as a common ground to work on. I still think we, as the designer, we are not giving up all of the control of the situation. So therefore, my thought was, that it's maybe not so different because if we would give up full control of the tools that we use, and let everybody do whatever they want to do, it won't work. Maybe it's not so different. I don't know if this is a good answer, but that's my thoughts. Gaël (46:07)This is definitely a good answer. I think we can close our very deep discussions on all these tools, and actually the focus should be a bit less on the tools and a bit more on the mindsets and on the way we gather people together rather than just focusing on the tool because if you gather just two people in the room with the most beautiful tool, I think we will miss the point with the systemic design approach. So thanks a lot, both of you.But before you leave, I'd like to ask the traditional closing question, which is, would you like to share with the listeners one positive piece of news that you have heard or come across recently to create a more sustainable world? It doesn't necessarily have to be digital related, but of course, if it's digital related, it's always good. Who would like to start? Sylvie (47:09)I can start. I have two ideas in my mind. The first one is an article from the UN that I read recently, about the fact that the Sahel is re-greening, for many reasons. The first one is that they have more rain there. And the second one is because they change the way they grow plants. So yes, for me it's very good news. And the other one is about regenerative hydrology, which is a subject I explored recently. And there are many very interesting experiments. So yes, it's very encouraging. Thorsten (48:03)One thing that immediately came into my mind and which is not directly connected to ecological questions is, you might know that here in Germany, we have a huge issue with an extreme right-wing party. And there was this research recently, about a meeting, and how horrible things have been discussed there. And what gives me a lot of hope is seeing how many people were going out on the streets last weekend, the weekend before, and so 100,000 people going out there. So, the majority of the people have the right mindset. And maybe we all have different ways of doing things in detail, but we have the right mindset. And it's about how we can activate people. How can we make people understand, okay, here's a problem, we need to tackle this. And seeing that so many people are understanding that there is a huge problem, and this is a dramatic problem, we need to act now. And then people leave their comfort zone and go out to the streets. So, similar to what we have seen with the Fridays for Futures some years ago. Seeing this power of the people gives me a lot of hope, and it gives me a lot of hope to see we have to find ways to activate people for these major problems that we have, but it is possible. Gaël (46:07)Yeah. And because they're minorities, they tend to be more vocal than the majority, but yeah, the majority of people are just good folks, especially when it's about surviving or making a species survive. Okay, so thanks a lot. Both of you. It was very interesting to have you on the show. I think I'm going to reread your book, Sylvie, with a new angle and re-listen to some of your talks, Thorsten, with the same approach. I think the overall approach and the. mindset with which we should embrace this complexity of understanding things in a systemic way rather than in a narrow silo way. Yeah, that was enlightening. So thanks a lot, both of you, for being on the show, and as usual, all the references to the books, the articles you've mentioned, etc., will be put in the show notes. And now it's time to say goodbye. So thanks a lot. Thorsten (51 :03)Thank you, Gaël. Thank you, Sylvie. Really enlightening for me as well. Thorsten (51 :07)Thank you very much, Gaël. And thank you Thorsten. It was nice.Gaël (51:12)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. In the next episode, we will talk about norms and standards. This is what everyone is asking for in the Green IT community. We want clarity on norms, clarity on standards, clarity on what is truly required. And I realized that, hey, not sure what is actually a standard or a norm. So I will be joined by Audrey Himmer, who's a former lead at AFNOR, the French representative of the ISO network, to talk about what are the norms and the standards which could be applied in the digital sustainability area. But most importantly, How do you build a norm? How do you build standards? Who are the stakeholders? How does it all work? And why do we have different standards, different norms? What are the different approaches? So it is a very unusual episode, but one that will bring light on a much needed topic, as a lot of us are required to boost digital sustainability.And before you leave, a small message from our sponsor. No, I'm kidding. Green IO remains a free and independent podcast. So, we still need your help to keep it that way. We have zero marketing budget, so you can really support us by spreading the word. Rate the podcast five stars on Apple and Spotify. It’s very useful as well as when you share an episode on social media or directly with a relative. It's a very good idea. So thanks a lot for your support, it means a lot to us. Others being me, but also Tani Levitt, our amazing podcast producer, and Jill Tellier, our amazing podcast curator. 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How do we tackle the Green IT blind spot?
🏞️ In many big corporations, IT is never number one, number two, even number three for GHG emission sources (and other environmental factors). But everyone working in the digital sustainability sector knows that, actually, little streams make big rivers with the digital sector accouting for around 4% of global emissions.
📏 In this episode we explore a very concrete case of measuring IT footprint in a massive corporation: ABB Motion with Thomas Mosser (ABB) and Fiona Leibundgut (SparkIT Consulting). How to kick start, how to leverage the Resilio tool which they chose, how to scale, etc. And the insights shared can be used in smaller organisations as well!

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📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Fiona's and Thomas’ sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* ABB Motion * Spark IT * Climate Fresk * Resilio * Fairphone * Framework

Transcript Gaël (00:08)Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the Tech sector, and beyond, to boost digital sustainability. Today we're going to talk about a curse, the Green IT curse. Sorry, it sounds a bit dramatic, but that's actually the point, that IT especially, in large corporations, is very often a blind spot. And this is due to the fact that we are never number one. We don't pollute, we don't emit enough greenhouse gasses. Such a bad thing. But everyone working in the green IT sector and overall in the digital sustainability sector knows that, actually, little streams make big rivers. And I would say actually little streams of greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution make massive rivers of greenhouse gas emissions. It is widely acknowledged that the environmental footprint or the greenhouse share of emissions by the IT sector overall, including devices, obviously, is around 4% of global emissions. This is as much as the global road freight.Gaël (01:31)But as you can imagine, not every company owns big lorries or trucks, and not a single person has, except for a few exceptions, a delivery van in his or her garage, which is actually the case with IT. So this is why, actually, for the same weight, when it comes to a sector like IT, it's much, much harder to tackle its environmental footprint than road transport, for instance. Hence, my very dramatic approach talking about the green IT curse.And to fight this curse today, I wanted to get my feet back on the ground. We had a wonderful episode with Max Blondeau in December 2023, where we explored technology and cosmology. Then last month, again, I explored digital marketing, which is a topic that I'm not familiar with. Gaël (02:19)But today, I really wanted to talk about green IT, and how you deploy and start measuring how to reduce the environmental footprint of an IT system, but in a big corporation, where actually it will never be the number one, the number two, even the number three for emission sources, yet still has a lot of impact because of this ’little streams make great river approach’. To stay with the dramatic tone, I looked for, I would say, two vampire hunters, or at least two very experienced people in the IT sectors with a soft spot for sustainability.I was also looking for a very tangible, very concrete case, and I managed to find both Fiona and Thomas, who worked on the measurement of the IT footprint of a massive industrial corporation called ABB. What is funny here is that we have quite a lot in common with both Thomas and Fiona. Thomas, he actually studied at the same time as me in the same city of Lyon, and now he works in Switzerland. He's a very experienced IT guy, a senior IT manager who leads operational effectiveness, compliance, etc at ABB. And Fiona has the same background as an IT manager. And that's very interesting to see all these common paths, I would say, towards sustainability, where you gather some experiences and knowledge in IT, and at some point you say, wait, I want to do something positive with sustainability. And Thomas obviously is the lead of this big, big project of IT footprint assessment at ABB. And Fiona, basically, she quit her previous functions and now, like me, focuses 100% on IT sustainability, which is really great. I love this approach that once you've gained enough experience you try and do something good in your own industry where you can have the most important leverage. So let's welcome Fiona Leibongut and Thomas Mosser to this very hands-on Green.io episode. Thomas (04:11)Thank you, I'm glad to be with you today.Fiona (04:15)Happy to be here. Thanks for having us. Gaël (04:16)It's a pleasure. Before we deep dive on why, how, all the feedback you can provide to anyone working in a pretty big corporation and trying to implement some measurements or some evaluation, sorry, the Boa Vista folks, about your IT footprint, maybe Thomas, what is ABB and it's not a rock band? Thomas (04:39) Yeah, thank you, Gaël, for asking it. A very good question. Well, ABB is most of all an industrial company. So we are actually technology leaders in electrification and automation. This is the credo. We do manufacture industrial products in the electric domain. So it goes from the motor, I think medium sized motors to a very large sized motor that would be wider than the room you're probably sitting in. We do manufacture robots as well. We do process automation, enabling factory end-to-end processes in some of our businesses. So we're having a broad range of electrification and automation related services. And I think beyond that, we're also trying to do this in a very sustainable way, and enable mostly business-to-business partners and customers. The business I'm operating in is actually Motion Business Area. So we have four business areas as part of ABB, and Motion is the one manufacturing motor and drive. This is where the whole Green IT story started. Gaël (05:47) So you're a wonderful guest because I've got my transition all cooked up already by you. Why did you start focusing on Green IT strategy, the Green IT journey? I don't know the word you use at ABB…Thomas (06:02) Well, we started with humility. So we started by calling it IT sustainability assessments. I think we need to spread a project beyond. And the why, well, it's a bit of a long story, because you don't get into it like in a snap. It actually takes some time, takes some change management understanding of the issue beyond. There's a couple of dimensions I'd like to touch on. One, obviously, is the broader organizational targets. ABB does have some sustainability targets for 2030, and that makes it very tangible at the group level, that we need to reduce the CO₂ footprint on the Scope 1 and 2, on the Scope 3 as well. So we have a broader mandate given by the organization targets, but I think it really takes a couple of passionate people and a broader understanding on the IT side on how sustainability is actually becoming crucial to make the needle move. So this is what really got us into this green IT or sustainable IT journey. And it didn't start from one day to another. It really took a couple of years, actually, to get there. The very inception from my standpoint started with the Climate Fresk. So we started with a colleague deploying and promoting the Climate Fresk internally in 2020 at ABB. And what started from a very small climate-fresk call out in France, I think, then expanded, broadened, and really got into a very structured type of workshop event we called ‘Greener in Motion’ that has been deployed in many countries, in India, South America, US, Europe as well. And that really helped while educating people on climate change and the consequences, obviously. But from an IT standpoint, I've been facilitating a couple of sessions. And this helped me to identify some allies, some people actually concerned with the topic: ‘Oh, we're learning about something, but what can we do to improve the overall IT footprint?’. So this helped us to create a tipping point with a couple of people feeling involved, getting ready and creating a momentum to initiate the green IT journey. Gaël (08:14) So the Climate Fresk triggered a sense of awareness or a sense of actions within the IT department, is it what you said? Because did they feel a bit left alone? Like, you know, most of the sustainability is obviously all about the manufacturing process and everything you buy from your suppliers. How did they connect the dots between ‘hey, we receive all this information about climate change’, and on the other end, ‘we're in the IT department, so we're not where the main battle is at fault’. Thomas (8:48) People actually go to a climate-based workshop and they take three, four hours to really understand the climate change mechanism and the impact on human life on the planet. So it's a very tough understanding and process. And once you come out of it, you don't necessarily make a clear connection between what's the big problem and what you can do at your own level in IT. Some people make the connection, but the challenge being you don't necessarily identify what's the big impact. What can you do? What are the most meaningful activities you need to start doing? So the Climate Fresk helps us to create a common understanding at the IT level for a couple of people to raise awareness. And we saw the people coming. Some people had a passion, some genuine interest in the topic. And they came to us because we facilitated the Climate Fresk. And by doing so, you get some people along and you start building a sort of momentum, a sort of a team; you create energy as well and some dynamic in the organization. So we translated this into what we call a community of practice, having once per month or once every few weeks, a regular alignment call, and try to understand, okay, what do you do in your organization? Because ABB is a massive organization. We have 100,000 employees. We have more than 2,000 on the IS side. Their colleagues might be doing some initiatives on the end user device, on the sourcing side, on training and so forth. So the intention was to build this community of practice and start to understand, okay, what is happening in a not so visible way already, but is starting to happen. And by putting this small river together, you understand there's more energy, a team ready to work and do something. And the next step, well, you quickly realize that we've got so many people interested in the topic, ready to do something about it, but do we have a clear baseline? Do we know where we are? Do we have clear priorities? No, we don't. And that's really what got us into this need to start measuring. So let's go and measure something. Do we need to measure the 100,000 employees? Maybe not at once, it's too big, but let's start by taking a pilot country, and we took Switzerland, and captured the footprint, trying to understand what the big rocks are, and what we can do to start moving them. So we had a bottom-up approach. We also had top-down ABB framework targets, sustainability targets. And at some point, we needed to get management buy-in and approval to move ahead on this one. So this is where Motion and especially the Motion CRO - I'd like to thank her in this process because he's been extremely supportive of the process - he was convinced. He's been playing the Fresk at some point, she was also ready to support us and get the baseline. If you look around, there's actually a few either passionate people or people who trust about the value of data. And this is where you can find the best management to buy in. Say, ‘Hey, we have a sustainability target at the group level. We have some people ready to do something about it. Where do we start?’. So rather than going in too many directions, let's prioritize and be clear on the big topics. Let's measure the footprint we have currently. Gaël (12:01)Fiona, you've worked with several projects and not only with ABB. Is this kind of approach where you've got kind of step one, raising awareness, some kind of a bottom-up momentum with people saying, hey, now that I'm aware, now that I understand better, we need to do things and self-organize and connect the dots with top management, and getting some support, including financial. Is it kind of the three steps project that you often see or is it very specific to ABB? Fiona (12:36)I think it would depend on the industry, and especially for a company, like ABB which is heavy in industry, and you said this very well in your introduction that it's not the first, second or third priority for whoever is in charge of sustainability. Where this movement comes from is something I really empathize with, where in your personal life, you really care about sustainability, you start to practice sustainability in your personal life, and then you start looking at your professional life, and you don't see how you can make the connection and you're struggling a little bit with this disassociation of ‘I have my personal values, I have my job, and how am I bringing sustainability into my job?’. I'm sure hundreds of your listeners feel the same thing. And I'm guessing this is where Thomas's inspiration came from as well, to start looking around ABB, what it is that he can do, in the remit of his position, to bring more sustainable thinking, especially to IT. And this disassociation is something I saw also in my early conversations with the Motion CIO, which you mentioned Thomas, and what was great, is that he was able to see the proposal laid out by Thomas, and say, okay, here's a practical approach. We're not going out and hugging trees, but we've got a really practical view of what it is we need to do. It aligns with our corporate strategies, so it aligns with my position. And I have somebody in my team who is passionate about it, who is knowledgeable about it, and knows how to find the resources that will help them, and become that mobilizer and influencer within the organization. Gaël (14:18)Yes, it resonates with some situations. At some point, if you don't have this buy-in or even limited support from C-level, things start to get a bit complicated and you hit this glass ceiling where people believe that they can change everything. They're like, I cannot go that (far) up. So, Fiona, how did you get involved? Let's talk about this assessment project in detail. But first of all, how did you get involved in this project? Why did they need to bring you in? Fiona (14:50)So I've been having conversations with ABB I think my entire career, even before I was working in sustainability. I was working with ABB, pretty much for the last eight years, I'd say. So when I started my own company, Spark IT, I naturally started to continue these conversations with my contacts and who I knew. At the same time, I was partnering with Resilio because we have a similar vision. And for me, for my own personal company strategy, I didn't want to build another tool that could do measurements. I know there are tools out there that do it really well. And my personal skill set lies much more in change management and company dynamics, organizational structures, governance, in that direction. So there was a great resonance between the skills of Resilio and what I was able to bring on top of my experience of ABB and understanding the immense complexity of this organization, which is not an easy one to navigate. Correct me if I'm wrong, Thomas. Thomas (14:58)I'm fully with you, Fiona. I think what really makes it valuable for us was the good combination of a solid technical platform. I think we're relying on the existing norms, regulation, providing a life cycle analysis and simple to use on the residual side. And your skills on the change management and engagement level. I think having someone able to translate the results into something that we can actually have the organization on the people side actually makes a lot of sense. And we're struggling to see these things on the market really. When I look around I can see a lot of good robust solutions available to get the baseline, to get the numbers out, CO₂, water, mineral resources, so even on the different planetary limits and impact. But translating this into tangible findings and projects that people can use to turn the findings into reality is not so easy today. And that's probably a big step forward; the large organizations such as us have to be, have to do in terms of maturity to understand where are we and start planning in concrete terms where do we reduce and where we start.Gaël (17:12)So talking about this kind of the second step of the project, but at the very beginning, so you've picked Resilio to start this assessment. What did you do concretely? How did you crunch the data? What kind of indicators did you choose to follow? And yeah, we might talk about the pitfalls a bit later. How did it start concretely?Thomas (17:41)It’s interesting process I must say, Gaël (17:45)Interesting because the European way or the American way?Thomas (17:49)I think both ways actually you'll see that there's a lot of positive benefits but challenges by the way as well. So we started the project so we started with a budget and an RFQ (request for quotation) to understand what's on the market. What is the right tool we can pick and to help us in this overall green IT sustainable IT journey at ABB in order to do a first evaluation. So on the scope, the scope was defined from the beginning. It was clear for us that doing it at the entire group level was too ambitious. And picking a country, a location, where we know the service could be representative of the rest of the group landscape, was much more agile and simple to start with. So limited scope, 1,500 users. It's 2% of overall ABB, but again, similar usage. And then trying to find a supplier. Finding suppliers was actually not so easy. There's a lot of interest today on the market for sustainability solutions. So we had a lot of different partner suppliers coming to us and offering solutions. We felt the value was not so much in buying the skills and competence, but actually embedding this into the ABB DNA, into the IS ways of working.If you really want to make that sustainability journey sustainable, and to last for more years, because I mean, we're only at the beginning now. We need it for the next 10, 20 years to keep going. And getting the skills internally was quite crucial. So we privileged the technical solution, a robust technical solution platform, and again, reasonable pricing overall. And that's how we got into Resilio. There were a few good candidates on the table. Once we found this platform and signed the contract, well, you actually get into the data collection phase. And the data collection is also interesting in both ways, meaning it's not so simple. If you have a high quality CMDB, you know your assets, you know your server, you know your screens, you know the network, you know the data center you're using, fine. But in reality, there's often some gaps. Typically, the accessories registration was a bit of a gap for us, even though Switzerland was doing it in a rather proactive manner. And the granularity also matters very much. So one, the data you have, the overall comprehensiveness of the data, and second, the granularity of the data. How deep down can you go? And for this assessment, again, we wanted to keep things small and simple enough. We didn't look at 100% data quality or granularity. We felt if we capture the big rocks, the big items, this is enough for us to take the next steps. And then we can reiterate and go more granular, refine the data as we go. So we looked at the big portion. Data center, typically. We have five different vendors globally, with a lot of different locations, server closets in the factories, and a local data center in Switzerland, global hyper-scaler and partner. So we took an overall average on the data center side because we felt that was good enough to start the journey. Gaël (21:09)So you provided to Resilio a comprehensive list of all the servers you've been using on-premise or was it an average? I didn't fully understand this kind of average data centers that you talked about.Thomas (21:23)It's a hybrid if you want. If you look at the landscape in Switzerland, we have offices, we have factories, we have R&D centers. So depending on where you look, you have different types of setup. I think the closer you get to the manufacturing process, the more local servers you might find. So we have a couple of local servers being locally managed. And then we have a large data center provider. What we found out is that the larger the data center and the more external, I think, externally provided it was, the more incentive there was to actually make it really sustainable from the beginning. So economies of scale, overall sustainability measure, and commitment from the vendor. The large data centers were actually not doing too bad in comparison to the local ones. So what we did, we took the server from the local server inventory, the data center inventory, the virtual machines we're using, and so forth. We collected them all in a file, and then we calculated an average impact. So we looked at the key machines, the key configuration, and said, oh, configuration one, we have three of them in the cloud and 10 of them locally. Or configuration two, we have 50 of them in the cloud and two of them locally. And we made an overall average, knowing that this was the first iteration. So I think the very intention behind it is to make this process iterative.Gaël (22:52)This is your idea of a sustainable digital strategy. You create a process, it's not just a one-shot of measuring things. Am I right? Thomas (23:03)Exactly. Gaël (23:05)Fiona? Fiona (23:06)I think it's important to mention that when you're measuring, it's important to know why you're measuring and to focus on that. It's very easy to get lost in the details and want to be as accurate as possible. And it is important to be accurate, but is it important to know for every single server the exact footprint. In this scenario, maybe not. And there's something one of your previous guests has said, which really stuck with me, which is that a lot of it is logic, when it comes to green IT. More servers means more energy consumption means less green. In this case, it was important to get a set of data that was informative and gave a view of priorities, of what can be changed and what can be impacted. It wasn't a preparation for an audit, for example, where you would need that extreme precision. Gaël (24:01)That's why you've chosen to get some, I would say, standard configurations across the different use cases, so that you can go back to the people and say, okay, we know that you are in the R&D department. Your standard configuration is a bit like this, a bit like that. You use a bit of AWS, a bit of GCP, and you might have some on-premise machine or whatever. So this is kind of your persona, I would say. And this is a footprint, and this is what you can start working on.Fiona (24:35)Exactly. And it's also important to bear in mind that this is the first time that we've gone through this exercise with ABB. And of course, there's going to be data gaps, because nowhere before has this level of granularity been needed in terms of reporting information for the organization. So this learning from the first time of what are the challenges, what are the gaps, what are the inconsistencies, there's already a higher data quality now than there was before. And next time, it will be even more. So even data gaps of, well, we don't have all the information we maybe need from our vendors.That's something that we now know there's a data gap there and we can work on that to make sure that information is starting to be provided.Gaël (25:22)And how did you identify, track and remediate this data gap? Thomas (25:29)That took a bit of a project management type of organization. So to really make this assessment happen, the timeline is we started back the RFQ in February 2023. We did the vendor selection from March to June, and we signed the contract in July. We then started a data collection. So data collection took us two good months. So that was August and September, with regular data check and data review. So every two weeks, we were sitting with the team. It's been a team effort, not an individual effort. So for data, you need a data center specialist. Network, you need a network specialist. And user devices, I think it's the same story. There was a team of a few people meeting every two weeks and saying, ‘okay, where are we today on the data collection process?’ Initially the very first review was very much driven by the structure, do we have the right structure in the tool to capture, to have the right configuration? Do we have the right assets being reflected to capture the usage we're having today in ABB? And I think the further we go, the more we get into the precise data. So no, it wasn't only about the structure, but what data? So do we have the right number of servers? How do we make the count? How do we make the average? There's some debate on how to do this, it's not easy because there's a lot of sustainability claims on the market as well. So how do you account for software as a service, for example? Do you take the vendor commitment and copy/paste that into your assessment or ? Because we're still missing, I think, a solid regulatory landscape to provide reliability of the data. Do you reassess that and factor it in a different manner? So this debate happened through the data collection process. Gaël (27:22)Yeah, I can imagine. I had eight NGO talking about that in Green IO, Paris, and they were like, we need to have something, but it's a long road ahead of us. But coming back to this data, and how you structure it…Goodness, I have thousands of questions, but lets pick out three for clarity for our listeners. Did you only measure carbon emissions, or greenhouse gas emissions? Or did you start with other environmental indicators, like water, material use, pollution etc?Thomas (27:59)I think this is one of the great values of the Resilio solution, which is to provide an overall life cycle analysis, and not only carbon, but also planetary limits related measurement criteria. So it's really going beyond the CO₂ impact. I mean, CO₂ climate change is happening now. We need to do something about it. That's where most of the metrics take us to. But there's a lot of different other impacts on the raw materials, on the water usage. And, yeah, this must be coming into the picture because there's a lot of education to be done about that.Gaël (28:37)And did you spot pollution transfer or any kind of mis-actions that could have been triggered if you had only focused on carbon? Or, overall, everything you do to reduce your carbon emissions, both during the use phase and the embedded carbon, is kind of aligned with water consumption and other environmental impacts?Thomas (29:02)As Fiona put it just before, I think there's a natural way of looking at it, a rather logical way of looking at it. The less you use, the less devices, the less data center capacity, the less impact you have. And that's true for the carbon impact, but also for the rest. So if you use less devices, or use devices for a longer time span, you actually have a lesser footprint in terms of CO₂ and raw material and water. Because one of the big learning aspects we had was very much about the life cycle stage. Most of the impact, 80% of the device impact, comes from a manufacturing process. So manufacturing is really the big item. You can use it (a device) and the longer you use it, the better it is, because you can depreciate this overall manufacturing impact over a long life span. Fiona (29.53)And I think, just bear in mind, that for a lot of people, it's the first time they're seeing data around this. And the measurements for CO₂ as individuals, we're starting to get familiar with it. We start to understand what a carbon footprint is. But when you see a measurement for toxicity or water usage and you don't even know what the unit is, and there's some configuration on the slide that says it's bad, it's very important for this data to be put into context. So you say it's X amount of this bad stuff which compares to something else, you're able to put it into context and understand the gravity of it. Because otherwise this data is useless. And I think we saw a lot of that when going through the data together with ABB and Resilio. If you don't understand what's on that slide, are you really motivated then to make that change that we need to make? So we spend a lot of time focusing on how we are communicating the data.Gaël (30.56)So do you talk in swimming pools? A lot of the time, when you want people to understand water consumption, you need to translate it into something they can picture, because nobody really knows what four tons of water is. I do it a lot, but I'm not the only one at all. For example, how many swimming pools do you use per day, per month, just to build a chip, for instance, or build servers or whatever? How did you make, for instance, regarding water consumption, things intelligible for people?Fiona (31.27)It's exactly that; for every metric we put it into context. Thomas (31.33)Regarding water we talked, we didn't talk about swimming pools but we actually talked in terms of family usage. So if you take a family of three in a given country, an average western country, it's close to 100 cubic meters per year. And if you realize that your average yearly consumption of water for ABB IS services in Switzerland is already 200 cubic meters, two households of three people could actually live a full year with the same amount of water. I think this is already starting to provide a bit of impact and to put the number into perspective.Gaël (32.09)I would have loved you to start doing the math with Geneva Lake. But you have amazing leverage, and if you have a global contract, is the plan to change the procurement policy right now, or is the plan to do the assessment, scale the assessment, and then change the procurement policy, to be able to better measure any savings? How do you plan to do this?Thomas (32:34)If you are asking me personally, I would like to do both. Why? Because measuring is not an end in itself. Why do we measure? We measure to reduce. We measure to understand what we have and where we need to start reducing, to calibrate the ambitions. But we really need to focus on the active reductions, so touching back on the previous questions, scalability, yes, we need to scale. In terms of contract or procurement, this is also the number two finding. A lot of the sustainability impact depends on the supplier. So, engaging with the vendor, with the supplier in an active discussion relationship to, one, get sustainability commitments and criteria in the contract. And two, getting meaningful discussion on the potential solutions we can jointly put in place is really something we need to do. That must be on the roadmap. Gaël (33:35)And Fiona, from a change management perspective, scaling from 2%, I know it's not like 2% to 100%, but, how would you plan for such a big step in such a big organization? Fiona (33:49)So now we've said it a couple of times, but the question of why we are measuring and scaling the measurement is super, super key. And what Thomas has described in terms of scaling the scope of measurement is looking at what it is that we need to be informed about. They're not trying to measure every single IS component of ABB, because that's not the purpose of the exercise. The purpose is to understand what we've seen in Switzerland, is that still relevant globally? Are our assumptions of this extrapolation correct? What are the other areas that we may have missed that are relevant to other countries, but not to Switzerland? And in the meantime, the findings that we have, let's get started on those. And what we talk a lot about in terms of change management is two levels on which we're addressing it. There's one which is implemented change and the other is mindset change. And they have two very different approaches. The implemented change is very much based on the data. What are the gaps? What is it that we need; engaging with the suppliers. And starting to embed steps in our governance and our processes that take sustainability into consideration, and take these data points into consideration. The mindset change is much harder to get at. And it's something that a lot of these awareness platforms are really good at. And what we look at for mindset is how are we communicating the findings? How are we getting people engaged in that as well, in their day-to-day job? How are we inspiring them? And doing all of this with consistency. It's not just sending out a slide deck and saying ’look what we found, have a good day’, but really building up the knowledge of employees. And I don't just mean IT employees, but anyone who's engaging with technology (which is typically everyone); building up their knowledge of what it means when they get a new phone every three years or every four years, or why should it not be three years and why should it be four years. And working together with the leadership across the organization that will set the tone in terms of this communication. Gaël (36:08)And did you already see some pitfalls or some issues ? Yeah, how do you communicate? Because you say like, it's not about just sending the decks and say, hey, here are the findings, do something about it. So, what is the typical way for you to communicate with other countries, for instance, or another department.Fiona (36:28)I think the biggest challenge is that this is an initiative that has really been driven bottom up so far. And if you're sitting and you're doing your job and someone comes from the left side and says, look, I did some research and I got some really good data, I think you should change what you're doing and how you're doing it. You're going to look at them and say, well, my job as per my boss and my contract says ‘no’. So it's really much more about how the leadership is living the change or living the data, and believing it themselves, and communicating it to the teams. So, you might come across detractors who, maybe, even in their personal life, they don't really believe in sustainability or there's this also, I don't know if you've both of you've come across this as well? There's a bit of fatigue around sustainability. People are like, oh yeah, okay, fine. Someone else who wants to talk about sustainability, good on you. Let me get on with my job. But it is really more about the channels of how it's communicated, that it's not a personal project that Thomas and the team are doing, but this is really part of ABB strategy, part of ABB IT strategy and beyond. So it should be present in everybody's day job. Gaël (37:46)And so how do you tackle this sustainability fatigue, as you said, and do so in a concrete manner?Fiona (37:55)Yeah, me personally, I do it with pragmatism. I think a lot of people associate sustainability with a sort of blue sky thinking, or big ambition, or we should stop oil today, but a lot more what needs to be done, what's pragmatic, what's realistic, a lot of empathy. And Thomas has a lot of this mindset as well, which is really great, where especially with the conversation about extending the life cycle of devices, there's a lot of resistance to that, because there's no other real reason to do it other than, well, it's sustainable. But looking at what's practical, you know, starting with when is the next contract renewal date? Gaël (38:40)It's like a big ambition. Oh, we've got vendor lock for the next five years. Fiona (38:45)Exactly. You know, we don't want to come in and say, stop everything you're doing and, and now start being sustainable. That's not at all how people work. That's not how organizations work. It's more, what are we doing today and how can we start changing it?’And then what are the big milestones where we can do something a little bit more transformational? So, we're keeping ambition levels high, but also not sort of bowling in this, this change that will not be accepted. Thomas (39:11)And a good way of doing so, what we're actually going for after the results have been shared and to the project team, we're actually engaging, so that there's the specific team with the highest impact. So if you think, for example, of the end user device management . This really came up as one of the top-run findings in the report, the highest impact. And probably one of the quickest wins if we really manage to change and adjust to prolong the lease period. So we'll be having a dedicated session with the people who manage the end user device across the group, with different colleagues, and we'll dive into this result. So we'll spend two hours and a half that Fiona and the Resilio team will be facilitating, to look at, okay, this is the data we have, the precise one. Let's sit down together and discuss what would be the next potential solution. What's realistic in the current landscape? There are probably a few bridging solutions we can put in place now, maybe extend or prolong by one year. That can be easy, but maybe it's more about communicating, but there should also be some bigger shots we need to look at. At repairability. A typical example is we actually need modular laptops, we need modular devices, which we can easily repair or change, add RAM, change the battery etc., as we go forward. I think the framework laptop or the Fairphone mobile, we need more of this on the market. So again, it goes back to raising the change, doing something internally, but also finding a broader fix and a strategy with the vendor and partnering with the broader ecosystem to put something in place that can fix it.Gaël (40:47)That's a good point. And actually, what do you think about the green IT ecosystem at the moment? You mentioned two brands that are quite famous within this niche, of green IT devices. But you're part of a very large group, Thomas and Fiona, you've both worked across Europe and even beyond. So are we a victim of the information bubble symptom or is this ecosystem growing? And what are the positive aspects of it and what are the pitfalls at the moment for this green IT ecosystem?Thomas (41:28)I can try from an ABB standpoint. I'm sure that Fiona would be happy to complement me from a broader perspective. But what I see, if I take Fairphone, if I take Framework, I think they're designing an excellent product, going for modularity, going for sustainability. So they're really setting the way where we all need to go. Can we scale this up and bring it in at 100,000 company level on a global worldwide operation? This is where we need the broader ecosystem to actually inject this criteria into their manufacturing process as well. Gaël (42:04)Is it an option on the table? I'm not talking about like ‘give me the number’ because obviously that's confidential, but is it an option on the table to say, well, in 2025, 100% of our laptops or 100% of smartphones should be provided by Fairphone, because at the moment they're pretty much the only one doing truly repairable and as sustainable as it can be smartphones, or is it just non-scalable for the moment?Thomas (42:30)I'd like it to be an option. I don't see it as scalable. Probably we can try, at different levels, pilot it and see how modular it can become and use it to pass that mindset change also, to raise awareness on the modularity of the device, what we can do. And I hope that Fairphone and Framework can actually scale up, or that other vendors and suppliers can scale up and bring modularity in their devices.Gaël (42:53)But why cannot they scale up today? I mean, they cannot supply you with, I don't know, 1000 or 2000 smartphones at once? The issue is the geographical coverage? Is it that they're not fit to work with big corporations, and request for proposals? What are the pain points?Thomas (43:12)Well, to be honest, we haven't gone the full way of going for an RFQ and evaluating how we can do that. We have just finished the assessment now. So regarding looking at the device scenario, it is on the table. That's something we need to investigate further in 2024. And yes, I think this should be part of the discussion. This type of partner should definitely be involved in the scenario and perspective. Will they be able to meet the ABB standard and support us globally? I don't know. I think it will be difficult for them. It will be a bit of a stretch, but it's also maybe setting the path towards a more greener IT landscape. Gaël (43:53)It's a kind of a virtuous cycle. I mean, I've seen it countless times. The moment you start having one or two big brands, whether it's B2B or B2C on any kind of product, it's kind of, okay, I'm not the first one trying it. So, if ABB has bought 10K framework laptops, I can do the same, even if I'm a big company. No one will fire me, because I've picked a small supplier. But anyway, I'm not kind of promoting for these two brands. It's just that the two more iconic, I would say. Fiona, what's your thought on it? Fiona (42:25)So, I think the topic of green IT is booming. If I compare where we are today to where I saw the topic a year ago, there's a lot more conversation publicly from organizations, from companies talking about what they're working on. There's a lot more conversation at conferences. There's a boom in technology around it. There's a boom in companies setting up services around it. If I look at classic consulting companies, they're all starting to look at this, what is this green IT topic and should we have an offering around it? So there is a boom. I think it's going to continue what's lacking and it's sort of the typical change curve where you have the first peak and then a trough. There's a lot of ambition, and there's going to come a point where it's going to collapse, and we're going to start looking at things like, great, we have all of these ideas and ambitions and NGOs and companies doing all these things. But realistically, how are we going to do this? So there's going to be this more pragmatic upwards curve again, of whatever companies are working on there will be different things floating to the top and the ones that can't keep up will sort of get absorbed. That movement will come with the regulation, or that movement will drive the regulation. That consistency - and a lot of the topics that were discussed at the Green IO conference in Paris, where there are all of these ideas and thoughts and happenings worldwide - but how are we bringing that into consistency in the industry, even a simple terminology agreement? That is going to start to have to come, I hope, next year, and the year after.Gaël (46:13)And before we close the podcast, I have one question I want to ask you. And I'm not sure you will, you will agree, but, can you share some numbers? Just to give a sense of proportion, not super accurate numbers, it could be a range, for example , 2% of the ABB information system when it comes to water use, greenhouse gas, et cetera. What is it? Thomas (46:37)Yeah. Keeping in mind that it's a first iteration again, so not, not the most granular detail, but overall, for the 1,400 users we've seen, I think we're above 500 tons of CO₂ per year, which translates to 365 kilos of CO₂ per user, and 200 cubic meters of water. This is really the number coming off the top of my head. I think there's more below on the material usage, for example. This is equivalent to five to six smartphones being used and thrown out every day, every year by users. So impact. If you look in terms of the Paris agreement of two tons target per individual in 2050, for example, that's a significant piece. I think it's about 20% of the whole 2050 target. So there should be a real incentive to reduce. Gaël (47:32)So that was very insightful and thanks for being that honest with the numbers, the granularity challenge, the definition of the scope, and Fiona, I got it, your favorite word is pragmatism. So I think you can print it on your t-shirt, or whatever, a dress or a piece of equipment you want to use. But I kind of like it as well, because otherwise big expectations fall very fast and very short of doing anything, and changing anything. So I would like both of you to share another piece of good news, because Fiona already mentioned the Green IO Conference. Thanks a lot for this and thanks a lot for attending by the way, with low carbon transport. So both congratulations two times over. But could you share one piece of good news which made you optimistic recently about a path toward a more sustainable world? Thomas (48:34)It's not that fun, but I think the regulatory landscape for me is actually bringing some positive news. I see regulation coming into play, for example the European CSRD, and I think there's some French regulation as well, which are really setting precise criteria and ways to measure the IT footprint.So in my view, this will really help us to gain a lot in terms of maturity and reliability of the numbers we see around us. Gaël (49:01)Thomas, you know, I'm trying very hard here not to jump on a cliché, by having a cool conversation between a French and a Swiss person, but honestly, you don't help me with this one. It is definitely not the most sexy news that you can share. Like regulations and law and norms. But it is so Swiss, and actually it is so true. And this is why there are so many great NGOs and norms happening in Switzerland, because yes, obviously this is great news. But yeah, not everyone will have the kind of bottom up approach with a green light from top management that you have experiences at ABB, or other companies. So sorry about the cliche. And Fiona, you want to share maybe one piece of good news?Fiona (49:50)Sure. So as much as I love regulation as the next person or as Thomas does. Gaël (49.58) Regulate me. I think we should maybe change the jingle of the podcast. You know, use Regulate by Warren! Fiona (50:09)So I'm not going to pick regulation for my good news, even though I do see it as becoming very important. What I love to see is these movements of people, and how natural leaders form out of ideas. And what I'm really enjoying seeing is the growth of the topic of green IT outside of the French speaking world. So, seeing it bleed into the German speaking part of Switzerland, where I work, but also across Europe. And just seeing the passion that has stemmed a lot of, you know, a lot of the good work has been led by the French speaking world. Seeing that overflow now, across, is much more exciting for me than the regulations. Gaël (50.58) You need that at some point. I mean, if you've got 1 million passionate foot soldiers willing to tackle a military objective, that could be an option to provide them with some tanks. And sorry about the military image here. And obviously, regulation is like a kind of tank. That's great to have millions of people starting to get really into these green IT topics, but with a bit of help and better weaponry. I would say it will not be a luxury. Thanks a lot both of you for joining. I think it was a very in-depth episode, and thanks for being that honest about what you managed, but also what you didn't do yet, the processes, which are even more interesting than the actual results, despite the fact that you've shared them. Thanks a lot for that. I hope it will inspire a lot of people working in big corporations where green IT is not considered, it’s not figuring amongst the top three environmental impacts. Let's talk about it next year, to actually have good tools and good examples to start moving right now and not the next year. So thanks a lot to both of you for joining. Fiona (52.05) Thanks, Gaël. It was nice. Thomas (52.05) Thank you, Gaël. It was nice to have this podcast.
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0.9g of CO2e. It’s pretty ridiculous when you think about it. According, the French SRI association this is the carbon footprint for a 10K prints digital campaign with a 200k image. So not a big deal?
Not that simple because we’re talking about volumes in trillions per day here. So maybe it’s a good idea to dive a little deeper on the environmental impact of digital marketing after all.
Hence we brought 2 experts in AdTech with a soft spot for Sustainability: Diarmuid Gill is Criteo’s CTO since 2019 and has been in Digital Advertising for more than 15 years. Audrey Danthony has also a long career in AdTech, she started her first company, Oxeva, during the dot-com boom when she was still a student at engineering school. And 2 years ago she pivoted and founded with 2 partners Impact+ with the aim of reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions in digital advertising.

Learn more about our guests and connect: * Audrey's LinkedIn * Giarmuid's LinkedIn * Gaël'swebsite * Green IO website

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

Audrey's and Giarmuid's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* IAB Europe * NegaOctet database * Criteo * Impact+ * MCJ’s episode with Netflix CSR Emma Stewart * 55' study on the carbon footprint of media campaign * Dimpact * Scope3 * Solitaire Townsend’s TED talk: Are ad agencies, PR firms and lobbyists destroying the climate?

Transcript [00:00:00] Gaël: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists, building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And before we start, I would like to thank the hundreds of Green IO listeners who joined the first Green IO conference in Paris on December the 8th.

[00:00:29] Gaël: It was great to see so many of you and the discussions covered a wide range of topics, as well as the feedback shared. Get ready for more conferences in 2024 because we will come back to Paris in December, but we will also launch our first Green IO London conference September 17th and 18th, and we might have one in Singapore as well if we have enough traction there. Ping me if you're interested to talk or to partner in any of these three conferences.

[00:00:58] Gaël: 0. 9 grams of CO2 equivalent. It's pretty ridiculous when you think about it, and that was a result I got after playing with a calculator based on the French SRI association methodology for a 10k prints digital campaign with a 200k image. 0.8 actually with a French energy mix which is quite low carbon, so not a big deal, I guess?

[00:01:24] Gaël: But not that simple. Because we're talking about volumes in trillions per day here. Moreover, in the past couple of years, several solutions have appeared on the market to tackle greenhouse gas emissions from digital media companies, like Scope 3, the Dimpact framework, and Impact Plus solution, to name just a few.

[00:01:46] Gaël: And the potential savings in GHG emissions they promote are significant. So maybe it's a good idea after all, to dive a little deeper on the environmental impact of digital marketing. Hence, I decided to bring two experts in from tech with a soft spot for sustainability to enlighten us. Diarmuid Gill is Criteo's CTO since 2019 and has been in digital advertising for more than fifteen years. He even worked at AOL, remember?! And today at Criteo, he is in charge of serving more than, I guess, five billion, so quite a tech stack behind it and some carbon emissions involved.

[00:02:30] Gaël: Audrey also has a long career in IT. She started her first company Oxeva during the dot.com boom when she was still a student at engineering school. And two years ago she piloted and founded, with two partners, Impact +, with the aim of reducing greenhouse gas emissions of digital advertising. They already have several global brands as clients, starting with L’Oréal or Heineken.

[00:02:54] Gaël: And for the record, Audrey used to live in the Reunion Island where we met, and we have had multiple occasions of discussing life cycle analysis, the subtlety of brand campaign versus reach campaign and so much more. So welcome Audrey and Diarmuid, thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.

[00:03:12] Audrey: Thank you, pleasure to meet Diarmuid and Gaël today.

[00:03:15] Diarmuid: Thank you very much Gaël, pleasure to be on [the show].

[00:03:18] Diarmuid: The pleasure is mine. So, before we deep dive in how to measure, how to reduce, what is the momentum in our digital marketing industry, how can carbon emissions be measured from digital advertising, and why does it matter? Maybe Audrey you want to share some thoughts on it?

[00:03:39] Audrey: Yes, with pleasure. So as with any product and service, it's perhaps more convenient to speak about evaluation than measurements, because everything we evaluate about these impacts are based on models, and most of them are based on the principle of life cycle assessments methodologies. So when it comes to evaluating the impacts of digital services, the idea is to take into account three tiers. The first one is about the servers which are used to deliver an ad. The second tier is the devices, the end user devices, used by the end user, the client itself who will see the ad. And the third tier are the networks which are used to deliver the ad through the servers to the end user.

[00:04:36] Audrey: A lot of digital services tend to focus on only the impact of the servers themselves, but it's really important to take in account these end user devices because according to a Green IT report, more than 40 of these impacts are due to the mining, the manufacturing, the transportation of the servers, the routers, but also the end user devices.

[00:05:00] Audrey: So that's a very huge part of this. But when it comes to evaluating all these impacts, we take in account not only this life cycle part, meaning the manufacturing of the devices, but also the carbon emissions due to the electricity used by the servers, networks, and end user devices. The idea is to evaluate this electricity consumption and combine this with what is named the carbon intensity of electricity.

[00:05:32] Audrey: It's how much emissions are due to the production of one kilowatt of electricity. And this can depend on the electricity grid of a single country meaning that in France, it's low because of the nuclear plants that are used in our country, but in other countries that could be much higher, because, for example, in Asia, a big part of the electricity can be produced with coal plants.

[00:05:58] Gaël: And what about digital advertising itself? Can you share with us an order of magnitude? How many tons are we talking about?

[00:06:07] Audrey: So, what you must take into account and what you have already mentioned is that it's a question of volumes. The global digital ad spends is a market of about 700 billion dollars per year.

[00:06:23] Audrey: This represents trillions of ads delivered every day. This also represents something like 70 percent of the total advertising investment in the world. Digital advertising has been evaluated as much as 60 million round trips from London to New York by plane. And that's the total, the same total emissions of a country like Ireland. So that's a huge volume of emissions.

[00:06:57] Gaël: And just to keep on understanding the landscape Iwould say, before deep diving on more concrete solutions, who are you talking to ? Diarmuid, same question for you. Actually, maybe Diarmuid first, because I’m very happy to have a CTO around the table to discuss this, but I had a conception, which is maybe a misconception, that this topic was mostly followed by chief marketing officer or chief sustainability officer, and that was not that much a tech or product led topic. So, who are you folks mostly talking to when you're discussing this carbon footprint of digital advertising?

[00:07:43] Diarmuid: Okay, well starting from the point of view of Criteo and from my perspective, I've been CTO since 2020, and people who I talk to most about sustainability are actually employees.

[00:07:57] Diarmuid: We have our ESG groups internally known as Criteo Cares and one of our communities is the green community. It's all about reducing the impact of our business on the environment and really, you know, with some internal colleagues who have been really putting this to the forefront. They're a very intelligent, very well-educated workforce, and they're very aware of some of the negative impacts of advertising and digital marketing on the ecosystem. And so that's primarily the first kind of cohort, I would say, you know, people who are very, very concerned, and they do this in their daily lives and they want to make sure their professional lives follow the same kind of set of values.

[00:08:45] Diarmuid: Secondly, it would be the leadership in general. This is something that's very important for a company like ours that we're seen to be doing the right thing and that we are actually doing the right thing. And it's part of our global CSR report. We've been reporting on these metrics every year. The last one was April of this year. So, showing exactly where we are and giving details on what steps we're taking to improve. The board of the company as well is something [important], they ask quite a lot about this and are very interested in our hosting strategy and what we're doing to reduce the impact.

[00:09:21] Diarmuid: And then externally, more and more, we're starting to see our clients who are asking, as part of your RFP process, to want to know that we're doing, you know, what efforts we're doing on this, as well as our partners, all of our ecosystem supply chain partners and so on. And this is something that I haven't actually measured, but you can see year over year, the number of people who ask us what we're doing in this area is increasing both internally and externally.

[00:09:52] Gaël: So, you're kind of blessed, because you've got the beautiful alignment of all the planets. Usually, when I meet colleagues, clients, etc., you don't have this strong alignment from the colleagues to the board, but maybe it's due to the very nature of your activity. And Audrey for instance, the people you interact with, when we discussed, obviously you put on the table and you did a bit of name-dropping. That's a fair game to play, talking about L'Oréal or Heineken, but are they representative of your clients? And who is investing time and energy to decarbonize digital marketing? Is it mostly pushed by big brands, big corporations, or actually is it another misconception of mine? And you've got also, you, medium sized companies, even small PR agencies.

[00:10:40] Audrey: Yeah, I would say that it's not dependent on the size of the company at all. We work at Impact + with a lot of different types of companies that could be very small and local and network or at tech that would be global companies, such as the ones you mentioned previously.

[00:10:59] Audrey: Actually, a recent report by the IAB Europe, said that sustainability is one of the top three challenges for digital advertising, and that includes advertisers, agencies, technology providers, high tech, and so on. I think that now everyone, every company, is concerned about this, basically because of the consumer themselves.

[00:11:28] Audrey: Another report mentioned that 77 percent of people globally say that in five years, they will only want to be spending money with brands who practise green and sustainable advertising. So that's huge. And that's driven by the consumer itself first, but companies are also under pressures from their investors, and from regulation.

[00:11:54] Diarmuid: We've seen more and more companies who invest in companies like Criteo. So Criteo is a publicly listed company for 10 years. And there are a lot of funds which now have a policy that they will only invest in sustainable funds, companies who meet certain criteria. It's really important, for us, in terms of ensuring that we're looking after our shareholders as well, that we make ourselves eligible for those.

[00:12:22] Diarmuid: And that's actually, you know, one of my team, Guillaume, had made me aware of this years ago, where he talked about from his own perspective, every time he has some money to invest, he always makes sure he only ever invests in sustainable funds. And so you get something where you get the nice synergy between something that is good for the environment that looks good, but that actually is good.

[00:12:47] Diarmuid: And so it's really encouraging good behavior, from the perspective of the company. Then it gets back to the point you raised, which is, you know, how do you qualify for this? And so how do you make sure that you're able to do all of them, you know, kind of hit the right targets. It goes back to some of the points that Audrey raised about, kind of measuring your exact impact on the environment.

[00:13:13] Gaël: Well, it's a deep dive in one or two concrete case studies. Let's imagine that I'm a CMO, a chief marketing officer, and I'm getting really concerned about greenhouse gases. What can I expect? Let's start maybe with Impact+,what can I expect? Why should I knock at your door and what will be the step-by-step project that I should follow to get the answers I'm looking for?

[00:13:45] Audrey: So first, what you can put in place is to evaluate a baseline of your total greenhouse gas emissions due to digital advertising. The idea is to evaluate as many campaigns that you can in order to know what your current status is about greenhouse gas emissions. And then you can put in place very simple levers to begin very rapidly to reduce this impact.

[00:14:17] Audrey: Basically, you can work on your creatives, perhaps limit the duration of the video that you will transfer and that you will deliver to users. You can work with your creative agencies to optimize the images that would be shown to use the users, that's on a creative part. You can decide to deliver more ads on smaller screens to reduce the electricity consumption due to the delivery of the ad on TVs, for example.

[00:14:51] Audrey: And you can begin to test. So, maybe test it on your campaigns, verify that these reduction levers have no impact on your media KPIs, because as a marketer, that's your main KPIs. So efficiency, like the video viewed by the user, the viewability, the click-through rates, the transformation rates every, advertising, KPIs that you normally have a look at when you deliver it.

[00:15:21] Audrey: And then after having validated that these levers have no impact on your media efficiency, you can then put in place a plan to deploy these actions on every single campaign that you deliver. And this process, we put this in place with many advertisers, and so now, from the first step that they did, starting in France, they began to evaluate one or two campaigns And now they are deploying this reduction lever at scale in more than 20 countries. And perhaps in more than 40 countries next year. The idea is to set a baseline, test, learn, and deploy at scale. That would be the steps that I would recommend to any marketer.

[00:16:08] Gaël: So those three steps beautifully explained :create the baseline, test and then deploy scale, for all your campaigns. Maybe we should unpack the three steps one by one . So the baseline - how do you calculate the baseline? What are both the ingredients but also the hypothesis ? For instance, do you account for embedded carbon? If so for servers, for digital devices. What are the assumptions regarding energy consumption? Are you only focusing on carbon? Could you tell us a bit more? And do we have in this area a commonly agreed methodology so far to measure a digital advertising footprint?

[00:16:57] Audrey: No, not yet. About the methodology, there is a methodology and standards framework actually, that has been built by the IAB France and SRI, so the Alliance Digital and SRI in France. A few years ago now, I think that the first version has been launched in 2021, and this is currently in evaluation and validation from a lot of other sustainability groups in our industry, meaning IAB Europe; the WFA said the organizations that represent the global advertisers are also evaluating and comparing many methodologies these days. So for the moment, there is no global evaluation framework that has been deployed at scale, but we hope that this will happen.

[00:17:56] Audrey: Our recommendation to marketers and that tech is not to wait for this () because the first discussions have begun in 2020 it's now three years ago) to begin to act. We need to act rapidly and there are some proxy information KPI s that could be used to reduce the impacts , that could limit the volume of data which are transferred, it could be using greener electricity for your servers, it could be planning your campaigns in a different way so that you use greener electricity, actually, depending on the day of the week or the hour in the day. There are multiple things that you can do without waiting for a global framework to be adopted at scale.

[00:19:00] Diarmuid: Yeah, it's actually very bewildering the amount of different ways to measure and the different approaches that you can take. And so my hope would be at some point that some standards body like the ISO or maybe pushed by the W3C will be able to come up with a standard that you can actually measure. Because one of the problems is with all of this data, depending on your perspective, you could see two different measurements, which are saying exactly the same thing, but, you know, kind of that are almost impossible to compare. And so I think that's something that's really, really important.

[00:19:41] Diarmuid: To Audrey's point, I don't think we should wait. I think we already have enough information within each individual company to know what it is we do today. So obviously we need to increase the rigor in which we approach all of this, and not just to look at single metrics.

[00:19:59] Diarmuid: So Audrey talked about some of the really important things specifically around ad serving. So reducing the payload, reducing the complexity, reducing the duration and stuff like that. And all of those are good, but they're somewhat only the tip of the iceberg with respect to what happens in the overall kind of creation of an advertisement.

[00:20:19] Diarmuid: So, you know, in a company like Criteo, we collect a lot of data on a daily basis, which we use to make the decisions on which advertisements to send. And so we do machine learning. So that obviously requires a lot of processing. And so at each step it's really important that we as a company are optimizing as much as we can to try and reduce that now that is a double benefit in terms of, from my perspective as a CTO , that being efficient reduces costs , being efficient increases our efficiency or how we serve our clients and doing all of that actually reduces our carbon footprint . So it's like a win-win, but at each step, taking into account, you mentioned about the carbon footprint of the machines themselves, so the frequency at which we renew our servers is something we have to take into account.

[00:21:16] Diarmuid: And so, at some point, to be able to come up with a measurable concrete figure that we can publish, that we can show to our clients, and then at some point, probably through regulation, but, maybe it won't even need that, that every company engaged in digital advertisement will actually publish their carbon footprint as a result of this, so, you know, it's not just the advertising industry itself, but all of the companies who advertise online. It would be really great if you went on some of the big brand advertisers that we all know, and we could actually see exactly, you know, how they're advertising changes from year after year, and we could see the efforts that they're making through their whole supply chain to reduce their impact.

[00:22:00] Gaël: And that's super interesting, because with you we can see under the hood. Do you have the top one, top two or top three, in your own experience, what were the most effective ways to achieve efficiency?

[00:22:16] Gaël: So one of the things that happens with software development is you develop features organically over time. So you know, you start with a simple application and you extend you extend you extend and it's a little bit like if you built a house and then you kept adding extensions to it. After a period of time, you realize that you've got this kind of crow's nest of the coupling of dependencies and so on. And every once in a while, you need to kind of go back and do some spring cleaning. And so what we found was we had lots of things with redundant code, or inefficient code, or duplicate code.

[00:22:53] Gaël: And so going back and taking the time to refactor, to re-architect, and sometimes to actually redesign, really generated a lot of benefit. Now the challenge that we would have, and every software development company would have, is that you get pressure from the business to continually add new features, because new features means you can provide more value to clients to get more revenue and so on.

[00:23:18] Gaël: Whereas, you know, refactoring the code very often you're looking at just a cost efficiency. And so it's really making the case. So me, as a CTO, I need to work with my partners in the product organization and in our commercial organization and say, I need to keep a certain bandwidth of my team's available time to be able to work on improving our code, right. So it's having that constant looking-at, so that we don't let the code get so bad that it becomes inefficient, that it becomes slow and that it's generating costs. It also helps with respect to employee morale. People don't like working with old legacy crappy code. So that also helps as well.

[00:24:03] Gaël: So we're trying to incentivize good behavior whilst at the same time trying to show to the business the benefits of spending time on this versus just adding feature after feature after feature.

[00:24:16] Gaël: So if i'm one of your customer , either Citeo or at Impact + customer, do you have today, we said, all the knowledge you've gathered, the ability to tell me, okay, if you want to run a one million targeted people campaign video based, something like ten seconds etc., if you run it that way, you will use that many servers, that we will consume that much energy, and eventually that will emit that much greenhouse gas and play a bit with a different scenarii, or is it a bit too much science fiction?

[00:24:53] Diarmuid: So I would say we're not there yet, and part of it goes back to what Audrey talked about in terms of not having an established framework, because, you know within the ecosystem, clients often will compare us to other people in the ad tech space. And so my answer would be, it depends on what you choose to measure. And so if it's purely just related to the serving of the ad, well then that's how many bits and bytes you're sending over the pipe and the impact that it has on our servers, on their website, on the devices of the end user.

[00:25:29] Diarmuid: But then there's the question of, do you take into account the embedded carbon of the machine itself. And do you take into account the amount of energy that we use on a daily basis and so on. So I think part of that really depends on going back to where we talked about, which is having like an industry standard.

[00:25:48] Diarmuid: So that if they come to a company like Criteo and they compare us with the alternative options, that they're able to have a concrete measure where they can see who's doing better than the others and that they can rely on those numbers.

[00:26:02] Audrey: About the way the ads are delivered from servers to servers, a lot of the ads also, not, not the biggest part because the biggest part of digital advertising is still delivered through social platforms and video, video ads on the media part. Part of the digital advertising ecosystem is built on what is named programmatic advertising, meaning that there are a lot of different players through the supply chain between the publisher who will deliver the ad to the user and the advertiser who is buying the ad. And there are many different technical systems named DSPs or SSPs ad-exchange in this supply chain. And so that's difficult from an advertiser's point of view and even from the publisher point of view to know who is involved. In this supply chain, it's not fully transparent and it's not at all transparent, actually, for most of these people, the advertiser, the publisher, and so this non transparency of the supply chain makes it very difficult to understand who is involved and how much data is also transferred from the advertiser to the publisher. And this leads to difficulties in evaluating the whole impact of a digital ad. And that's one of the biggest problems of our industry.

[00:27:32] Gaël: But your tools provide dashboards, and I’ve seen them where you say, okay this campaign has admitted that much etc., but what are the shortcuts that you have to take in order to provide numbers that will be consistent and coherent?

[00:27:46] Audrey: So, let's say all the evaluation services are based on the same kind of modeling of this supply chain. Including a number of intermediaries, including a number of connections, for example, between the website and the different SSPs or DSPs. And these are all based on models, and that's why also I'm pushing to use evaluation, instead of measurements. It's because nobody has the full view of this. Every single evaluation tool is relying on data declared from parts of the supply chain, but don't have the full view of that. And so we use this evaluation to show that for a given ad, there should be more intermediaries because we know it, as an average, but for a single impression, that's a bit more complicated to know.

[00:28:45] Audrey: And for sure, no one from a brand perspective or from the publisher perspective has a full view of this, especially on the number of servers that has been involved as, Diarmuid can have on his company level data, but on the client side and the seller side, we don't have this full transparency of how many resources have been used.

[00:29:11] Audrey: Do you manage to incorporate somehow the embedded carbon from the professional equipment involved, like server or router, or is it something too blurry? No? Yeah, you manage?

[00:29:24] Audrey: Yeah, there is some data that has been published by the ADEME and a consortium named NegaOctet, which has been also published by the ADEME, actually. And that's a great resource to understand how much embodied emissions you can have on the device, the end user device, the servers and the networks.

[00:29:52] Gaël: And what about the very tricky question of end user devices? Do you take into consideration some estimation of the energy during the use phase? Do you take a chunk of the overall embedded carbon? That's almost a philosophical question within the industry. I mean, the digital industry.

[00:30:11] Audrey: We integrate both the embodied emissions and the electricity consumption of the user data. So that's for the evaluation itself, meaning that when we speak to an advertiser or to a tech, we must show everyone. A big part of the emissions are still on the embodied emissions on the device side, and this has an importance because, for example, on the AdTech side, you can work on your SDK to lower the amount of resources that would be used on your individual devices, limiting the number of end user renewal.

[00:30:46] Audrey: So this is important to explain to everyone that a big part of this of these greenhouse gas emissions are due to the embodied emissions. But when it comes to the reduction, then we focus our clients on reducing the electricity consumption itself, because we think that any level of optimization that you can put in place actually won't have any real impact on the embodied emission, meaning that if you decide to target smartphone instead of TV, we assume that it has no impact on the renewal on the TV or on the smartphone itself. So, yes, we take both but not in the same use case.

[00:31:30] Gaël: And just wrapping up what both of you said if i understood right, the top three things that if i were absolute beginner in the digital marketing area would be pay attention to the size of your content like video vs image vs text etc., (not necessarily in the right order), pay attention to on which device it will be delivered, make it compatible for smartphone rather than big screen etc., because of the embedded carbon footprint, and the third one would be make sure that when you deliver whatever it is world-wide, do you manage to do some carbon awareness that it's when the grid is - and I'm sorry to use this ugly word because very misleading - but the cleanest possible, I would say, or I should say the proper word, which is the lowest carbon possible. Are these the three main levers or am I missing some very serious one as well?

[00:32:29] Diarmuid: I would add a few more around that. So, one of the things Audrey mentioned was around the number of different partners or the number of different players who get involved in the chain. So, there's a thing called supply path optimization, where you have to remember everyone who gets involved is a commercial company.

[00:32:50] Diarmuid: And so, going back to the FinOps point of view, every one of those is somehow taking what's called the digital tax. And they're adding to the cost somewhere. They're taking value out of the system. So the minimum number of loops or connections that you have, actually helps increase the efficiency of your spend.

[00:33:10] Diarmuid: So, if you come at it from a financial perspective, you're actually kind of making the overall end to end much more efficient, which will reduce the number of servers, which will reduce the overall impact.

[00:33:23] Gaël: This really resonates. I should hopefully not forget about it, because that's something that surprised me.

[00:33:29] Gaël: I guess you both of you, you're familiar with a study that was published by 55 and, the two main leaders are also Shift project members, and what surprised me is that the number of layers has a huge impact actually on the overall carbon footprint and we tend, as Audrey, you mentioned, and I should have remembered that it was pretty impressive, how adding an extra layer, it's not exponential, but adding an extra layer brings some extra kilos of CO2 each time.

[00:34:03] Audrey: Actually, what you mentioned at the very beginning of your question are simple levers, but that's not something that should be done without testing. And also, you should always link these levers to the right KPI to be evaluated. And so, this is important as a brand or publisher. When you deliver an ad, you are aware of what you try to achieve in terms of KPIs, meaning that there are some clients, sometimes some brands, who are still buying video ads to drive clicks. And so, this leads to volume of impressions of videos that are huge and they don't drive any clicks at the end. And this is a total loss of energy. There are also numbers, huge numbers of ads, which are still not viewable, meaning that when you buy an ad, this is not viewed by the end user, but this is delivered.

[00:35:04] Audrey: And so, there are places where they have a lot of waste actually. And you buy ads that don't achieve your objective. So, this is important to use the right KPI to evaluate, not to link greenhouse emission s to one single impression of ads, because you can have ads which are videos, but which are actually at a high price, so for the same budget we will deliver less video than small ads, which are perhaps less impactful for a single impression. But at the end you will, for the same budget, you will buy 10 times or 100 times more than videos. And so, you should also be aware of any kind of rebound effects that can happen when you do an optimization. And you mentioned, Gaël, at the very beginning, saying, yeah, you can target smaller screens. When you target a smaller screen, you can also have users with 5G connection. Which is actually more electricity intensive than WiFi that you would have used on a bigger screen. And so, this is important, to evaluate the combinations of devices, networks, servers, and also combining this with your campaign KPIs to see which kind of ads, which player, which company, which offer, would be the most efficient for you, in a given context. And then with this evaluation, you can select and push more on this given format in this company because that's more efficient for your KPIs i

[00:37:03] Gaël: Yeah, I really like your approach that you should interconnect business KPIs and environmental KPIs to make sure that you don't go at ninety degrees. Yeah it makes total sense.

[00:37:17] Gaël: You were mentioning at the very beginning of the episode IAB effort, SRI effort, that slowly, and very slowly, but hopefully, surely, we might reach some kind of agreement among the industry. So, you were mentioning Europe and the French from SRI, I know that the Germans, they're pretty active on this topic too, but Iwant to ask the very impolite question: what about the Americans? Because if they don't move and if there is not a standard endorsed by the Americans in digital marketing, nothing will happen. So, could you tell us a bit more about it?

[00:37:59] Audrey: So, the IAB Tech lab, which is part of the IAB US, was also launched at the beginning of this year. I think he's on the sustainability group. So, I think, I think that Europe is still more in advance than the U. S. for the moment on the ad tech part, but the WFA, so the global organization representing the advertisers, has also launched a group last year, I think, the WFA GARM, which is currently evaluating the different frameworks that already exist on the market and to see which one, they would take in account in their global online plus offline advertising evaluation framework.

[00:38:55] Audrey: So that begins to move from the advertiser perspective. And if the advertisers. are moving, then the whole supply chain will move much faster.

[00:39:08] Gaël: And Audrey, that's interesting that you mentioned the entire supply chain because I've got two more philosophical questions before closing the podcast. And the first one being what I call the, - I think I will write something about it in 2024- the digital sustainability curse. And we are cursed because our footprint is super huge but super dispersed and so it's diluted across every sector, every company, every household. And eventually we always assert a force in the ranking of top greenhouse gases being emitted you know. Look even at Netflix okay - and that's the same story for many big tech companies - but look at Netflix. It is believed that at peak time in the US they consume more than 30 percent of the entire US internet bandwidth. That's just an amazing number. And yet, quoting here, Emma Stewart on my climate journey, the Netflix chief sustainability officer, she basically told everyone that more than 80 percent of Netflix footprint is emitted by content creation. And the same goes in advertising. You know, you do a shooting and you need to move a team by plane, and voilà, a high percent of your campaign footprint is in the making, rather than in the distribution, and until now we talked mostly about the distribution and yet, you know, still very important and we know that gathering all this little streams all this little rivers and it will make big flows at the end , of carbon being emitted in the atmosphere so do you face this opinion or this kind of rational decision from well-intentioned people saying, 'Hey, you know, okay, I got it. I got it about digital marketing and your campaign, our campaign even being a bit dirty, but let's focus first on content creation, etc.' And what do you answer, when you face this kind of, what I would call, false arbitrage; are you cursed?

[00:41:19] Diarmuid: I would say, so far, we haven't faced it that much. I think we're at the start of the curve in terms of where awareness is just beginning to rise, and people are starting to ask the questions. So, for example, the statistic that you just raised, I was totally unaware of that. You know, I was thinking about the increase in online video and consumption, but I never thought about the carbon footprint put into the creation of that content.

[00:41:48] Diarmuid: It's similar in advertising technology. I think people are only starting to ask the questions. And then when they get the first part - so we talked about the cost of serving an ad - but that's actually much, much more behind it, you know, involving the creation, the production, all of the calculations that go behind.

[00:42:08] Diarmuid: And so as we start digging deeper into this, the subject, then we're going to ask more and more deeper questions, more comprehensive overview of the end-to-end. And at that point, hopefully we can get as an industry to some more concrete and standard measurements, so we can compare like with like.

[00:42:27] Diarmuid: I would say we're not there yet. I think we're only starting on that conversation and it'll probably take some time to come up with some kind of standard metric that we can all compare.

[00:42:40] Audrey: I think that for the hi-tech site, so the seller site, most of the CSR team have understood that they need to clean up their own room, meaning that they are not involved in the production side of the advertising, they only receive the creatives that has been done, and so they need to work on their own technology, not to focus too much on what the advertiser s have done on the production side.

[00:43:11] Audrey: On the brand side, let's say, this has already been a discussion, on the production companies, meaning that the clients are also pushing the production company to reduce their waste, work on their emissions, limit the number of flights to build the ads and so on. And this has been pushed through many discussions that already have happened in the past.

[00:43:44] Audrey: So that's already addressed. And these are different people in brands that are involved in producing the creatives and buying the ads. So they are both involved by the CSR team to reduce as much as they can on their own scope, meaning that the media teams, media buying teams are involved, the creative teams, are more involved and every time they are issuing a RFP, a request for proposal, they include their sustainability requirements, or at least sustainability information.

[00:44:29] Audrey: This is now in the process and everyone is focusing on his own business. So that's not really a pushback because our clients are more on the media buying side of the things than on the creative part.

[00:44:45] Gaël: Yeah, it makes total sense. And that's kind of a good news. If everyone is attempting to reduce emissions where they can, you know, literally at the front door rather than trying to put the garbage in someone else' s backyard. So that's pretty good news

[00:45:05] Audrey: I will just complete it, it's not everyone, it's not in every company. It still has to be really deployed at scale. But in there are some company level decisions that are important. There are also a lot of individual choices in each single company, there are people who are making the organizational changes, and that's very important to help these individuals that have actually the power to make the whole multinational company move rapidly.

[00:45:44] Gaël: I got it. I got it. Makes total sense. And thanks. My last question before we close the podcast, maybe a bit more philosophical, but I have to ask it because to be honest, I know that I will have some comments from listeners about inviting people from the advertising industry, which is not as bad as the airplane industry, but let's say that you don't, you know, rank super high in the heart of many, I would say, climate activists, and on the other hand, I cannot not acknowledge all the efforts that you're doing and explaining and you're trying to bring regulation, et cetera. So, you know, the philosophy of the podcast is that everyone is welcome to share what they do to make the world a better place when it comes to environmental issues. This is why everyone is welcome. Yeah my question about the advertising and it's something actually I'd like to discuss with you if it's something that you feel a bit when you interact with people, is, if i was a bit provocative i would call it the Solitaire Thompson wake up call. I don't know if you've seen this TED talk, where basically she's a former executive from very big communication and PR company and she deliver this TED talk basically saying that PR and communication agencies are destroying the planet and they need to change the way they see the business in a very aggressive manner, because just adjusting is not enough and it's really basically stop working with any business that is not sustainable etc.

[00:47:28] Gaël: Does it make sense according to you? And is there already some kind of reflection in the industry, or at least with the people that you're discussing? Like, I know I don't want to work with this ultra-fast fashion company because I really do not see the point of promoting their business. Or is it something different with this kind of silos approach that you've described Audrey? What is the mood of the advertising industry, at least digital advertising industry, and at least what you experience on your daily basis ?

[00:48:02] Audrey: Of course, the elephant in the room is the advertising mission, meaning that the emissions due to the products and the service that are sold because of the advertising.

[00:48:22] Audrey: Everyone has to clean up his own room. That's our position at Impact +. Every marketer needs to begin to think about what they are doing, what they are selling, and so on. The overconsumption won't stop this year. And we, as individuals, as co founders at Impact+, decided to stay in this industry, to try to realign our own values with our day to day work life and see what we could change into our own industry, meaning that we are not producing these products. We are not producing these services, but we need individual marketing teams to think about first what they do, to empower them to in the future think wider and think how they can change the product and the services that they sell.

[00:49:25] Audrey: And then we need to begin with something to speak with the marketer. And digital advertising is one of the parts which can be changed rapidly, efficiently. And to show that it has no impact on the company results, let's say. And if we can show that, then perhaps we can widen the discussion in the future.

[00:49:54] Diarmuid: Everyone has a responsibility in the industry, our partners, the brands, all different types of retailers, and individuals, in how we consume the Internet and how we consume our products, what we use, what we don't use. I think digital advertising is something that's incredibly important for the Internet as we know it today.

[00:50:14] Diarmuid: Right? Your podcast, Gael, is free and it's paid for through subscriptions and through your own hard work. But much of the Internet is actually funded through digital advertising, and so it's really the only large-scale economic model that works, because if everything goes subscription based because, you know, creating the content, as you know, it's time intensive and it costs money. If everything goes subscription based, and that actually takes A lot of what we appreciate is the internet today out of the reach of so many people. Advertising helps keep so much content open and free and available. That's super important. We also helped keep, you know, choice for end users in terms of where they buy online.

[00:50:58] Diarmuid: And so, for many small businesses, you know, advertising is the only way that they can survive against, you know, the large multinational corporations. And trying to find the right way that we can protect the ecosystem, that we can provide value to all participants, I think is super important. To do it in a responsible way that, you know, we are conscious of the impact we have in the environment and that we do what we can to measure it first and then to be able to reduce it.

[00:51:26] Diarmuid: Because, you know, whatever number you come up with today is less important than the fact that you're trying to reduce it, and you're trying to optimize it, and so on. Looking at all of the participants and working all together to understand how we can all collaborate to make the world kind of a better place, and reduce our impact on it, I think that's the secret to progress in the conversation.

[00:51:51] Gaël: Fair point. It's interesting to see that yeah, it's a question of where you start your journey and in which condition you can evolve and push things forward. So thanks a lot to both of you for being honest and transparent about where you stand and where you actually want the industry to go and to move forward.

[00:52:13] Gaël: To close the podcast I would love to finish on an uplifting news. I'd like both of you to share a very positive piece of news that you've heard recently, and that made you optimistic about our past and about a sustainable future.

[00:52:33] Diarmuid: For me, I don't think there's any one single piece of information that I think is the positive thing. I think it's a collection of things. I'm an optimist by heart. And so, you know, the fact that more and more people are engaged in the conversation and Gaël, as I listened to your podcasts while I'm running, then it's overwhelming the number of people who care about this, you know, who are getting involved and who are looking for different ways to make an impact. I take great courage from that. The problem is huge, but there are a lot of people who are concerned about it. Also, I see that there's a lot of innovation in terms of renewable energy, you know, energy storage methods that don't use rare earth metals. Lots of different kinds of innovations in how we handle water desalination, and so on, trying to do them in an environmentally sustainable way.

[00:53:26] Diarmuid: I think technology has a huge part to play in helping turn things around. I'm just, very, very hopeful that it can, all of these innovations can arrive before the impact and the harm is too great.

[00:53:41] Audrey: I would say that the, the positive news, it's not a news, but a trend that we can see, is that there are more and more students, going out from huge and important universities around the world who really want to work on sustainable products and sustainable services. They really push for a change in mentality and not only in mentality but in reality. And I think that the good news is that the younger generation now know and now want to act rapidly. And that would make everyone change in the same way I think

[00:54:34] Gaël: And I hope this podcast very modestly contribute s to that, but thanks a lot both of you, that was great to have you on the show. I must admit that it's not my comfort zone, I would say, digital advertising. I was more like a CTO having to interact and to get all these barbaric names plugged into my information system, rather than someone really doing the hard job of selling stuff. So thanks a lot, because I've learned a lot with you today, and I'm sure the listeners as well. We might discuss again in the future if methodology, standards eventually arrive, that will be a big move forward.

[00:55:12] Gaël: So once again, thanks a lot and have a nice, not too hot day.

[00:55:20] Diarmuid: Thank you, Gaël. Take care.

[00:55:22] Audrey: Thank you, Gaël and well done for having learned a lot about our complex industry in such a short time.
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We don't always need a science-fiction device "à la Star Trek" to get transported somewhere else.Discussing with Maxime Blondeau results in such a journey where I discover how anthropology, geography, and cosmology can help us understand better digital technologies and more specifically:🤯 Why Digital Tech is not the first mind revolution humanity has gone through🌪️ Why its magnitude will be as impactful as the previous ones🗺️ How our representation of an over expanding digital world alters our perception of our material world🧠 Why our attention is such a precious - and increasingly scarce - resource🎁 Plus a breaking news shared by Maxime at the end of the episode!📣 Before rushing to listen to this 29th episode, do not forget to book your ticket for the Green IO conference in Paris, December 8th. Join us to get the latest insights on Digital Sustainability with Aurore Stéphant, Perrine Tanguy, Tristan Nitot, Julia Meyer, Theo Alves Da Costa, Pindy Bullar, Vincent Poncet, and more! Get also feedback from all the teams involved in the 2023 Sustainable Digital Challenge: Allianz, Axa, BlaBlaCar, BNP Paribas Cardif, Ekwateur, Evaneos, Groupama, INSEE, Leboncoin, Norauto, SNCF!And it's free for our listeners! Register here with the voucher GREENIOVIP. We're looking forward to seeing hundreds of you there 😍.

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!📧 Once a month, we deliver carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents in your mailbox, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 🫴 Green IO is a free and independent podcast! And so we need your help to keep it that way by supporting us on Tipeee here.Learn more about our guest and connect: * Maxime's LinkedIn with its qualitative daily post followed by +100K people * Gaël's LinkedIn and website * Green IO website

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Maxime's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* Jack Goody’s book “The domestication of the savage mind” * Maxime’s courses and conferences and all his resources and supports

Transcript [00:00:00] Gaël quoting Maxime: "There is no contradiction, according to me, in using digital technology to perceive and represent infinity. But, we have to use it, and to see it, and to represent it, within constraints, the 1 and the 2. If we are seeing it and using it in the 1, 2, 3 infinity, then we're going to have problems, because the material world is limited..."

[00:00:32] Gaël: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. Before we start, a quick note for my European based listeners, you are invited to the Green IO conference in Paris on December the 8th. for free. I partnered with API days to bring you an amazing lineup, starting with Aurore Stéphant, Tristan Nitot, Théo Alves Da Costa, and all the teams involved in the 2023 sustainable digital challenge. The link to register is in the episode notes.

Our representation of the territory depends on our senses, our culture, the data we capture, but also the technical systems we choose. This is where cosmography, the graphic representation of the world, becomes essential to our existence. However, ecological disruption reflects a failure of our collective representation of the territory. This imbalance probably dates from the Neolithic revolution 12, 000 years ago. When we became sedentary, we built systems of exploitation and domination of a territory perceived as infinite.

In 2023, we are still mainly guided by this archaic mindset. This Maxime Blandeau quote powerfully resonated with me when I first read it, because this point set also drives our understanding of digital technology, which is seen as infinite and limitless by default, hence the use of the words cloud, universe, metaverse, Endless possibilities or the quest for infinite double digit gross This verbatim speaks volume about our digital tech cosmology and we should question ourselves, asking what could be a representation of digital technologies which enable a sustainable future for them?.

And for humankind I am a long-time fan of Maxime's work from his LinkedIn daily post of beautiful maps, to his course at the Paris Political Institute (Paris Science Po for my French listeners) which he decided to fully open source as he did for the. 40 plus conferences he gave on geography, technology and attention economy. He is also not a stranger to entrepreneurship, having co -founded a start-up, and I hope he will join the growing community of the French podcasters soon, and today it's an honor to have him on our show to take a huge step back and reflect on our collective understanding of digital technology.

Welcome Maxime, thank you for joining Green IO today.

[00:03:33] Maxime: Thank you Gaël, I'm very happy to be here.

[00:03:36] Gaël: Me as well. So, to put things in perspective, I mean, you post every day, including Sunday, on LinkedIn, a nice little text, I don't know how many, I think you're pretty close to hit the 1 million followers on LinkedIn, that's just insane, and this regularity, it's just amazing, I mean, I got it, like the blossoming and the richness of our world is a big source of inspiration, but how do you find the resources to produce qualitative content every day? I'm just amazed.

[00:03:42] Maxime: Well, I connect all my activities, the teaching, the entrepreneurship, the conference, the talks, I give and, the LinkedIn post. And the result is that some content come s to me, so almost every week I have readers contacting me, let's say 'I thought about you, here is a subject that you could add to'. So, in the end, it's like things are coming to me. I'm doing curation, of course, I rewrite, et cetera. But it seems that it's easier and easier to find your subject because, I mean, people want to share. And they also want to help me to find the right subject. So, in the end, I'm not alone to choose my subject every day, my daily topic.

[00:05:00] Gaël: The power of a community of committed people. That's one explanation. Now I'd like to ask you maybe to set the stage. I would love to ask you a simple and very complicated question. What can anthropology bring to our understanding of digital technology?

[00:05:18] Maxime: I'm a tech anthropologist, that is to say that I use anthropology, human science, to explore the relationship, very ancient, actually, relationship between, the way we build technical systems.

And the way we think, that's what anthropology can add to the understanding of a technical system in general, and a digital system in particular. So, I have a course at Sciences Po, but also at an engineering school called Mines Paris, PSR. It's one of the main engineering schools in Paris. And in Sciences Po, my course is programming the world, and I study how we program, that is to say, how we pre -write technical systems, technical structures. And how those technical structures program us in return, and how there is actually a link between how we define design, technical structures, infrastructure and superstructure and how it changes the way we develop perception. We develop attention to the world, because that's the place where technical systems, and culture meet and it creates a whole lot of belief systems. And that's what anthropology can bring to a better understanding of what's technical, and in particular these days, what digital systems do to the world.

[00:06:55] Gaël: And how massive is it? the destruction that digital technologies bring to the world, I mean is it just an evolution of some set of existing technologies, or is it something comparable to the reinvention of printing, because the Chinese had already known how to print centuries before the Europeans, or even the alphabet, what kind of level of disruption are we talking about when we are talking about digital technologies?

[00:07:25] Maxime: Well, there is a British anthropologist called Jack Goody, who was studying the effect of, graphic systems on, cultural mindsets, let's say, but particularly by studying, African population s in the seventies that had, at the time, never seen any scriptures, written characters. They were living in orality, and he developed a theory, by observing what it made to the culture to the belief systems to the way people were living and interacting with the world. So, he developed a theory on what he called mind technologies. Mind technologies are pretty much information technologies, but with certain characteristics, and he included language, for instance. Writing, alphabet printing, telecommunication. And we can also consider that digital systems, digital technologies are part of this 'mind' technologies category.

And what Jack Goody brought to the conversation is the fact that there is a correlation, a very narrow relationship between. the effect of the arrival of such a mind technology and the way culture evolved and the way cultures represent the world. And there are many, many stories, archetypal legends, throughout the world that tell the story of this moment when lot of new information suddenly arrived into a society because a new technology emerged and it changed the way people see, nature, for instance, and when you just take one of the most famous myth, of western culture, the, the Adam and Eve story, the fall of Eden, well, that's the story of what Jack Goody could call cognitive revolution, techno, technical and cognitive revolution, that is to say that actually you can see that story as something that happened that changed the way you, deal with knowledge and information, and that created this balance, a fall in the way you see the world. Nature and the balance of living things and actually, an ecological sustainable way of living the world. So, anthropology can tell you that there is a very deep link between digital and green climate, sustainable transition, I mean, from a very long time.

[00:10:23] Gaël: And did You already notice some trends in the way we represent the world with the arrival of digital technologies?

[00:10:34] Maxime: Yeah. Yes, absolutely. I don't know if it's the right expression in English, but I'm going to try. In French, there is that idea of volume géographique mental (geographical mental volume).

[00:10:44] Gaël: What is it? The ability of information that you can gather in your head, the maximum amount of information, or is it something different?

[00:10:52] Maxime: Yeah, but it's not a quantity, it's more related to space. For instance, our grandparents and the grandparents of our grandparents were living in a village. Maybe they had in mind their city and the valley and the mountains. And that was... their world, like really the representation of space, the idea they had of the space that constitutes their world was that and beyond, there were just stories.

They had no idea of, you know, distances and even the names of the countries and the continents, et cetera. And nowadays, I mean, it's totally changed. We can see pictures on social media of almost every place in the world, we can measure distance and times, on Google maps. We have, thanks to the new digital technology, our generation, and also new mobility, transportation, and new sources of information, so a very different comprehension of distances, and geographical perception of the world. And it also changes the way we, as humans, see the world as a planet, because as you may know, the first picture of planet earth is quite recent. It was taken in 1972, and it's called the blue marble. And, everything that the digital technologies can bring in terms of imagery, in terms of picturing the world, is really changing our representation and this can go to the right or the wrong side of things.

[00:12:36] Gaël: And actually, I’ve heard that people experiencing this out of space experience, of watching the planet earth, this beautiful blue planet earth but also super fragile, that once you start to realize the magnitude of things, and how small we are, it's got a name, I think…

[00:12:58] Maxime: It's I called the overview effect

[00:13:00] Gaël: thank you. Is it the kind of example that highlights what you just said, that it completely changes the perception, and usually people get very into sustainability after that.

[00:13:12] Maxime: Yes, it is. I mean, the overview effect would be one of the most distant and global ways of representing that idea, that our perception of the world can change, and it can create emotion and psychological changes. But imagine that this effect - a psychiatric and psychological physiological effect, happens, but on a daily basis, and on the way we represent time and space and distances and what the world is. And also, that's also why I'm a tech anthropologist by, I don't know, academically speaking, but what I'm doing on LinkedIn, posting and also, talking, is more cosmology. That is to say, our thought system, the way we represent the world as it is, and cosmology is a word academically that is used to describe our understanding of space, like the far and distant universe. But actually, what I'm interested in is the way that our cosmology, immediate cosmology, is changing nowadays. That is to say the way we represent the word, but the close word, like the word around our feet, the world, the plant, the vegetable, the animal world, around our village, our house, our home, it's an infinite universe as well, and it's changing very quickly these days. I mean, in the last 30, 40 years, the representation, the way we picture the world is really changing, and it can be an opportunity if we decide to direct that new look at things, into the right direction, and it can be a threat if we are preventing ourselves to understand better and to perceive better the world, and what is essential to our survival, for instance.

[00:15:12] Gaël: What are the main trains in this representation of our world, which has changed that much in the last 30, 40 years, as you said, and I know it will be oversimplifying, but can you try maybe to tell us the top three or top five massive changes, which are already happening.

[00:15:32] Maxime: Okay. The first transformation would be the way we collect data. So right now, we are collecting huge amounts of data on the world. I mean, it's never been that range before. So, thanks to the digital system that all my technologies [use], but principally information systems, we are now able to collect a huge amount of data. That data can be used for science, the comprehension of natural earth science, et cetera. But that huge amount of data can also be used by business companies. It can be used by government, public policies. And actually, we now have a very deep, profound, transformation on the way we perceive the world as organizations, as scientists, as business leaders, as government leaders doing public policy. So, I would say the first change right now is the amount of data and what we are or will be able to do with the data. Secondly, it would be more something related to imagery. So not only figures, numbers, data's quantitative information, but more the quality of the things we can see and it's related to media. So social media, but also TV and movies and, photo, I don't know, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera, or in China, WeChat and all those social media, are shaping a new image of the world by. letting us exchange billions of pictures and images every day. So, we are creating belief systems by exchanging a lot of pictures of the world.

[00:17:37] Gaël: And what could be an example of a new belief that has been created by Instagram or WeChat?

[00:17:47] Maxime: It's not created by, it's more amplified and its effect has been amplified. I don't know. There are many, there are good representations. There are errors as well. For instance, flat earth representation, I mean, right now you have this international flat earth society based in the U S, but in France, for instance that is a small country, there is between eight to 10 percent of the population that believe in the flat earth representation. Why? Because, social media and digital systems are promoting a certain picture, a certain representation of the world.

Right now, we are in a cosmographical revolution, that is to say, everything is changing, and we are in the eye of a hurricane, you know, and it could go in the wrong direction. And, for instance, the flat earth belief, it's not something that is just funny. It's something that is really deep, and that's one example of how digital media right now can produce a belief system in picturing the world differently.

But we could, we could talk about climate belief, climate skepticism, eco -denial belief systems that are related to the way we are picturing the world. And the third one that I wanted to mention would be more related to what we could call indicators or measurements of our impact. For instance, companies right now want to better understand the changes in the world, climate change, biodiversity, water consumption, resources, and how it will impact their businesses.

And, now, thanks to new technological systems, infrastructure, digital infrastructure, for instance, we can implement these measurements into our business models and take these decisions accordingly, and that's new.

[00:19:52] Gaël: Okay, fair enough. So, three big trends. I got it. The amount of data, the way we collect data, the ability to measure or impact.

I remember that in one of your conferences, you kind of illustrated our collective reaction, with two caricatures who are Homo Deus and Homo Humilis. And if I understood it well, it was a reaction to this mind revolution that we are in between and how people position themselves. Could you tell us a bit more about representations?

[00:20:30] Maxime: Yes, that is more the belief systems that could be emerging right now when we are collectively facing a double crisis.

One, a crisis of information and two a crisis of space and time, ecological crisis, but also identity crisis, the way we relate to the place where we live And facing that huge challenge, some people believe that technology will solve the problem , and that if we are, I don't know, building the right technical systems, we can solve any problems, including death, And so we are entering a field, a space that is really a belief system, close to religious belief, and even sometimes it becomes a cult, it becomes indoctrination, and, it can go very far, and that is the idea of Homo Deus. So, the idea that, thanks to Homo Deus, technical power, we can do anything, including killing death, you know.

[00:21:44] Gaël: which has been structuring our society since we exist on Earth, and things are finite.

[00:21:52] Maxime: Not since we exist. I mean, in the last 12, 000 years, I mean, I can go back to that subject, but there are different periods in our human evolution, as I see it. So, three or four periods and in the last 12, 000 years, yes, we have been developing the Homo Deus point of view. That is to say, thanks to technical systems, agriculture, cities, transportation, and now digital media and digital infrastructure, the ability to do anything, anything in an unlimited world.

[00:22:27] Gaël: And what was his belief system before?

[00:22:31] Maxime: Oh, okay, so before the Neolithic, so that happened 12, 000 years ago, we were hunter- gatherers, you know, living in a world that would provide meat and fruits. And, it's in, I don't know, between 40 and 60, 000 years, two or three ice ages, we were living that way. And before, we were living in a world with no complex language. So, we were really integrated as a human population into the animal sphere. Then we developed language, complex language, and that's the moment when Homo sapiens conquered the old planet. So, it's funny to understand that we developed complex language at the same moment, we conquered the world - Homo sapiens went out of Africa and conquered all continents, probably because we developed a certain way of communicating and it changed radically the way we saw the world. We became the main predator on Earth in the last 50, 000 years.

[00:23:44] Gaël: But is it related to this view on the fact that sapiens managed to kill actually also humans on planet earth as well, because they created complex belief system s that basically made them able to stick at one, two, or three or four hundred people in the same room, whether apps or even the industrial we will never be able to do so and that collectively we were stronger , because we were believing in things, that the ability to believe in things were our superpower.

[00:24:18] Maxime: Definitely, …called it the cognitive revolution, this moment when we invented the complex language, and that's why he said what makes us special as a sapiens is the our ability to tell stories -that's his point of view - and he studied the way as an historian, he studied the way, stories built social, but also technical, and in the end, biological structure that let us conquer the world in the last, 50, 000 years.

According to me, there are three main periods. First, the deep Paleolithic, when we were really integrated into nature. Then we developed complex language and we became the first predator on earth, conquering the whole planet. And then you have the Neolithic revolution where humans are taking everything the world has to give, we became a producer. We became able to use technical systems like agriculture, cities, et cetera, to produce what we need out of the world. So suddenly the world became like a huge mine, we can mine to gather, accumulate wealth and everything we desire. And actually, what I'm saying is that we are still in the Neolithic period, and we have to reach a new age ...

[00:25:41] Gaël: With new tools. You mean we are still in the nihilistic period, but with tools that are more and more powerful.

[00:25:49] Maxime: Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm saying. First, we developed agricultural basic rudimentary tools 12, 000 years ago. Then we developed cities, bridges, and military tools. And then at the Renaissance, thanks to the science revolution, we enter the period we call humanism, but humanism is exactly the same process that started at the Neolithic. That Is to say that the idea is one of human emancipation from the natural constraint in a way, except we have more and more technical power, more and more means. And we are still in that idea that we are exploiting, representing a word, land, space, and time that we can exploit, that we can Dig in a way things from it. And we perceive the world as unlimited and that is the Neolithic mindset, according to me. And we are still in it, and we need to move forward to a next stage post Neolithic. That is not to say we should unplug all technology and, no, it's more that we should think about the use of technical systems that is very different because we have a new representation of space and time of land and territory, and that would let us enter a new belief system that is more directed to care maintenance and balance in our relationship with the world,

[00:27:25] Gaël: But that's very interesting, because the latest super powerful tool that we've developed is obviously digital technologies and the representation we have for our digital world is infinite and endless. So how would we be able to move towards what is a post Neolithic vision, whilst at the same time we are double betting on the very latest technology, which is digital technology, that maps the world as something potentially infinite? We have disconnected the materiality of our surroundings with something that is now purely virtual. I know that it's not truly virtual because it's grounded in materiality, via the resources it needs to get powered and built. But the way we represent our digital world is infinite. So, don't you see a discrepancy here?

[00:28:22] Maxime: Well, that's where it becomes mystical. It's our relationship to infinity. In mathematics there is a character that is called Aleph that is the first letter in Hebrew, but also in Arabic - Alif. And it's very close to the Alpha Greek Alpha. And actually, that's the first letter of the first alphabet that was invented by Phoenicians 3000 years ago, on the shores of Lebanon. And that letter, in mathematics, represents infinity within infinity. So that is to say, we are representing the world right now with 1, 2, 3, 4, infinity.

But if you just take 1 to 2, there is infinity within between 1 and 2. And there is no contradiction according to me, in using digital technology to perceive and represent infinity. But, We have to use it, and to see it, and to represent it within constraints - the one and the two. If we are seeing it and using it in the one, two, three, infinity, then we're going to have problems because the material world is limited.

But if we use digital technology as a way to touch infinity, but within one and two, then it works. And that is called Aleph in mathematics, the end, the amount of numbers that are infinite within two, nombre entier, (whole numbers) so in English that would be, I don't know, numbers, like one and two, three, four, but the in-between, that's interesting because that's poetry. What is poetry more than just making beautiful things with strict constraints, with limits, and limits can help you make beautiful things, and infinite creativity. So, there is a paradox, but a paradox that is perfectly clear to me, and that we can use to build a world that we want to live in that's mystical I told you.

[00:30:41] Gaël: That's very interesting - this is the way you would re-incorporate the matter reality and the resource shortage that we are already facing, and that we will face more and more in the future, versus the over -expanding immateriality of our digital world.

[00:31:00] Maxime: Yeah, that's a little bit the same idea. You know, last night I was invited to talk about growth, post growth economics. Can we move forward from that idea of growth? And is it possible? And what is growth? Well, the way I answer it is to use a very simple analogy: human body growth. I mean, from a certain point, we don't want to grow more. You know, it's not good to grow more, but we are still growing in different ways.

I mean, when you reach 20. Years old, you do not grow physically with your body anymore, but you grow in your mind, you grow in your relationship in, in the way you are, I don't know, you are trying to reach wisdom or caring for people around you. So that's a type of growth. That's another way of growing.

And that's that idea of, you know, reaching creativity and infinity within new constraints that are not a bad thing at all. I mean, it's actually a good thing that we do not keep growing infinitely, you know, as a body, and that's a little bit of the same. And that's, according to me, a nice way to say that we have to be aware of the moments when physically we should not grow anymore. And that we should turn our growth into something else that has more value.

[00:32:33] Gaël: Do you believe that we'll be able to spot the moment we need to stop growing?

[00:32:39] Maxime: I believe that we are right now reaching the tipping point in terms of awareness of the limits of our wealth. And that's a very, very good thing. That's why I think we are living an extraordinary and fascinating and exciting period that is a cosmological revolution comparable to the main one that occurred in human history, that is to say the Neolithic revolution or the language revolution. And what is it exactly? This cosmological revolution? Well, precisely what we're saying before, that it's the awareness of being in a limited physical body: planet Earth. And that's beautiful because it would let us build develop creativity in a different way

[00:33:30] Gaël: That's very very, very interesting but I’ve got this same feeling. We talked a lot about digital technology and the way it shapes all representations. I remember that in one of your conferences you made an example of how the Innuits would represent the world - how it was different between summertime and winter-time. I think it was a good illustration that the way we represent the world dramatically shape - like in summertime it's almost a free lunch and you can travel for how long and, pretty much whatever you want - and in winter time you're under very strict social rules and your surrounding is reduced to a few kilometers. Am I quoting you or explaining your thoughts well here or ...?

[00:34:15] Maxime: Yeah, well, that's how anthropology studied the Inuit population in the great North, in Northern Canada. Indeed, that's a population that is nomadic in summer. So really, you know, traveling all the time and sedentary in winter. So, that's probably why I mentioned those observations, but everybody, actually, we have our own belief systems, our own representation of the world. I mean, French people have their own conception, philosophy of space and time, and especially when it's related to the land. American people have their own representation and conception and philosophy of the land. And in America you have the East Coast, the West Coast, the middle, the Midwest, and they don't have [the same representation]. Our representation of the world is very cultural, but it's also very technical, because what I'm interested in is how technical systems create culture because in anthropology, we know that every technical system changed our perception of space and time from the fire, to chat GPT, and, it creates a new social and cultural order. The question is, do we take that into account first? I mean, in our liberal democratic society, we don't really (take it into account). In authoritarian countries, like China or Russia, they do, they really want to use technical systems in order to produce control and social order, because they know it works that way.

So the question is, how do we direct, govern the effect of this huge, massive technical infrastructure that has an effect on culture, that has an effect on our belief system, and our minds in a way that is compatible with our values, with our education, culture, political, convictions. And that's a very, very concrete problem that is related to the cosmological revolution we are talking about.

And, what I want to add, in this conversation is: how do we perceive the world? Well, according to me, there are three main ways of perceiving the world. First is information. We get information from the world and technical systems, digital systems, science, help us to collect knowledge about the world. And that's the first way, we comprehend what's around us.

The second one would be more the stories we tell. So, belief systems based on stories, On, more the power of creativity in terms of what we share in terms of stories and it's related to communication. And when you are a company or when you are in government, you tell stories a lot internally and externally. And that creates a certain way of comprehending the word that surrounds us.

And thirdly, you have the direct experience of the world senses, ‘sensoriality’. The hot, the cold, the light, the dark, and we are living in a world - because of the technical structure that surrounds us, a digital technology - that is preventing us more and more from feeling the world. So, the way we feel the world with our bodies. Has an effect on the way we are building the word with our mind. So, there is a connection between our direct experience of the world physically and the stories we tell and the information we collect. And all that is the way we represent, [the way]we picture the world.

And, right now we have to be very careful on the direction we are collectively choosing in terms of cosmography, that is to say, in terms of representation of what the world is, and what we want to do in it, and to it. And, what is our mission and purpose and role and place as human beings on the planet.

[00:38:53] Gaël: I used to see attention as a moral question, like you don't have the right to steal attention from people, and you're the first one who kind of, shifted my perspective like no, this is a resource it's like water ,you know clean water ,air etc., they are actually the main resources that helped sapiens () we discussed earlier), to become the dominant species on earth, it's our capacity to focus, to create stories, and that is powered by attention, and that attention is a resource that should be carefully curated rather than just something on the moral stance ...

[00:39:31] Maxime: And my message, if I want to make my message in one sentence, it would be: our attention resources are limited, and we have to direct them as much as possible towards the world itself. So, we have to comprehend, we have to focus on the world, which is quite complicated to focus on everything. But compared to just looking at ourselves and, you know, being disconnected from the world by creating digital connections that are not sustainable, because they are not connected to material reality, we have to focus, on the contrary, on what is material reality, and what is material reality is life itself. Animals, vegetables, the water, resources, the air, the ocean, the world itself. And, I'm not saying that we should only think about ecology, natural ecosystems, but it's our interest as humans to heal our relationship with the world.

[00:40:47] Gaël:
That's kind of a positive message, and I'm going to jump to make an easy transition for an easy conclusion, which is if you had to pick one piece of good news, which made you optimistic recently, about this ability as you described, to connect a bit more with the world, pay attention to the world and make it a more sustainable place to live, what would be the news that you would choose?

[00:41:19] Maxime: I think I would choose the trend that we are observing in terms of accountancy, which is a very specific and technical subject, but it's very related to everything we've said. Accountancy is a very, - I don't know, some find it boring, but actually it's crucial in the way we interact with the world, because it's the way we, I don't know, pay attention to anything by integrating numbers, quantities into actions and decisions.

And right now, we're observing on the planetary level and especially on a European level because it started in Europe, but it's a global conversation right now. A reflection on how we could count things and how we could be accountable for things, and accountancy is a way to measure the activity of a business, but it's also a way, or it could be a way, and it will be a way of measuring impact, and also measuring risks.

And right now, if we want to assess risks and measure impact properly, we have to focus on the world itself and what we are doing to the world. So according to me, the first steps we are observing right now, we are taking right now in terms of accountancy, could be in the next year's, a door to a change in perception.

And I'm really optimistic in relation to that particular field. And for me, that's really a good [piece of] news and a good trend. And, we'll see what's happening in the next days and weeks, because there is an accountancy war right now. And I really consider it's a critical decision we are going to make in the next few days and months.

[00:43:25] Gaël: Yeah. Double materiality or not.

[00:43:27] Maxime: Exactly.

[00:43:30] Gaël: When you start saying, 'by the way, I'm going to talk about the content and that's a very positive friend', I suddenly feel way less lonely. So thanks a lot for that Maxime,

[00:43:40] Maxime: You are welcome.

[00:43:42] Gaël: And thanks a lot for joining the podcast. That was great. I know that you've got a crazy agenda. I hope that you will not get kicked out of your hotel room, and that your conference tonight will be awesome. I strongly suggest every French speaker, even if he's not, or she's not, a native one, to follow you on LinkedIn, because your posts are beautiful, and they're always kind of, you know, mind blowing or opening the chakra, as I like to say.

And I think that for our non-French native speakers, you've got an announcement to make

[00:44:18] Maxime: Yeah, well, it's a very simple announcement. It's just that I've decided to translate all my posts, LinkedIn posts in English, because I received many requests from, yes, from people not speaking French. And so I decided that next January, I would translate everything and post everything every day in English. So if you are an English speaker, please feel welcome to read them and see what I'm sharing every day.

[00:44:46] Gaël: So, from 100,000 followers on LinkedIn to 1 million in 2024, yeah, you could do it! Thanks a lot, Maxime, for joining the podcast.

[00:44:59] Maxime: Thank you very much.

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🤯 AI is all the rage at the moment but what about its impact? 🌱 Especially its environmental cost? 🛑 Does it mean we should stop leveraging this tool? 🏃 Can we extract ourselves from this rat race? AI comes with many questions and this episode comes with a clear angle to debate it: how do data experts specialized in impact business such as Lou Welgryn and Theo Alves Da Costa - the 2 founders of the NGO Data for Good - and Anastasis Stamatis - the founder of Dataphoria - answer these questions?It’s not that much about the training, go for a factor 10, … A lot of counterintuitive answers and great food for thoughts!
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Transcript
[00:00] Gaël : Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener Digital world one byte at a time. Our guests from across the globe, share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. [00:33] Gaël: You might have heard about artificial intelligence last month. Yeah, sorry about the joke. But you might also have heard about the rising concern about the environmental footprint about artificial intelligence and data groups. Actually, I recorded a full episode with Jerry McGovern and Katie Singer in January about what they call data tsunami. And since then, we've seen new studies about the water consumption of chat GPT, about the electricity consumption, training and requesting these artificial intelligence models, that have started to raise concerns about the sustainability of these new technologies. But on the other end, I'm bombarded with articles, posts and discussions with peers and clients about the expected benefits of AI for humankind. So I reckon this question is on a lot of tech practitioners’ minds today: how to leverage AI and data to regenerate the planet in our societies rather than destroying them. And to answer it, I decided to ask people I could trust, to tell more about data for good. For real, and by real, I mean, without overlooking all the impacts of using AI including the negative ones. And believe me, Lou, Théo and Anastasis are to be trusted. Lou and Théo founded Data for Good in France five years ago. Today, this community gathers more than 3000 data scientists and data engineers doing pro bono work for NGOs and nonprofits. And Data for Good has been making headlines in early November with their job on 425 climate bombs worldwide, and which companies and banks are supporting them. But that's something Data for Good has been familiar with. Just last year, Lou was listed among the 100 thought leaders who give meaning to technology in France, (kudo) and was getting attention with the ClimateQA, using Chat GPT, but trained only with IPCC reports. And it was important to me to have another point of view than a French one. And so for this episode, Anastasis Stamatis was a perfect match. Thanks to the Climate Fresk network, I discovered the founder of Dataphoria in Greece and his amazing track record in the impact business sector, most of them powered by AI. So welcome, Lou, Theo and Anastasis. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today. That's our third attempt to get a recording, but this one will be the good one. [03:10] Théo: Hello everyone. [03:11] Lou: Well, hi. [03:12] Anastasis: Hi, Gaël. Thanks for having us. [03:13] Gaël: You're welcome. Before we jump into both the bright and dark side of AI, I would like to ask a very simple question but a very tricky one. Where are we with artificial intelligence in the world? What's really the spread of AI in both tech companies, but in regular companies, government, etcetera. And is the technology moving that fast? How much is hype, and how much is really big acceleration? [03:46] Théo: It's an interesting question, because it's been a year since Chat GPT has come out, and it's changed a bit how people see AI. And with it, at Data for Good, we created a white paper on generative AI, and we actually discovered that a lot of people in the general public didn't really know the history of AI and there are still a lot of misconceptions about the topic and a lot of people, for example, don't know that AI actually has been around for more than eighty years, and has had a lot of waves and evolutions over the years, and has already enabled us to do lots of stuff. For example, I always say when we explain about the topic, that Google search has been using the Transformers technology (which is in chat GPT), for more than seven years in production. So people are using AI every day in their Google search. And this has been a constant evolution for the past eighty years, even if there has been some increasing pace at some points in history. But still there is something new about today, which is for me, the general public’s adoption of these technologies, which has actually struck a lot of people by surprise, by the fact that it was not something that different. Of course, we can do a lot of things a lot better since we have access to generative AI technologies. But still, it was only the fact that 200 million people now use Chat GPT every day that signaled a big change, and people now were able to actually test it and that made them even want to learn more about the topic. So for me this is actually not a technological outbreak or like a complete shift in what was feasible. But more something that now is accessible and people know that it's not something obscure, and that they can use it. And with it, there is a question of the exponential. That's when you talk about environmental issues. Every time there is an exponential like this, there is a question. So there is a part of Ai that is in constant evolution for me. [06:06] Lou: And I think maybe to complete what you're saying, what's interesting, is what you were saying about the fact that people now are more aware that it's here. I feel like in the tools that we're using, there's often functionalities that tell you ‘ask AI to do this or to do that’. And this is a shift from before where there was AI, but we were not talking about it, and most people were not seeing it, and maybe it's a bit more visible than before, because since there's been this breakthrough in a generative AI, we have the feeling, as users, that we're talking and that we're using it maybe almost like a relation. So I think, to complete what Théo was saying, it's more visible than before, and it's breaking through much more, much faster than before. [07:02] Gaël: Anastasis, is it a trend that you analyze as well? That the breakthrough is more on public adoption than purely the technological side? [07:12] Anastasis: Absolutely. So it's more the democratization of AI, it has raised massive amounts of users compared to previous applications of all sorts. And I think that's where the risk might be, because our reaction time is limited with regards to the massive adoption that is happening all around us. And yes, we have been using AI over the past years without even realizing it in our phone, in the way we consume the news, even some news we might have read, it was generated by AI. But now it is all around us, and there is all this public sentiment around it. And with it comes a lot more data that needs to be used. And with AI being so massively in production, also the infrastructure requirements and the electricity and technology requirements are becoming bigger as well. [08:10] Gaël: And you mentioned that it's more [a question of] public adoption than technology. But if you read many articles, if you listen to many thought leaders, it's more like everything has changed, you know, since GPT III or since even chat GPT IV or whatever. And actually, that's not truly the case. It has been a trend but it creates a massive hype that, you know, everyone needs to put AI in everything. I mean, it's exactly as you said Lou, that stuff that was done by machine before without acknowledging that it was artificial intelligence suddenly needs to be labeled as AI because it's better to sell. So I still see this massive hype wave and that leads me to another question. But a similar one, how you spot a hypist, I would say I've just made this word up but I love it. So how do you spot hypist and how do you spot true thought leaders, and who do you actually follow? And who do you believe is speaking good sense about what is going on in the AI field at the moment? [09:28] Théo: I think honestly, I have one simple rule that worked quite well. It is a newly labeled expert that has been around for less than a year? which means that he only knew GPT as what he thinks is AI (his own vision) and, actually it's most of the time it's a he and not a she, or is it someone who has been around for many years and especially scientists and engineers in the field of AI, that have been applying AI in production, which is a bit different than doing a prototype using GPT or just embedding such technology in your product. And at the end, after you have confronted the buzz, there is a question of user adoption and I think already a year after, there has been a course of adoption by users, but there has also been a lot of deception on the topic. People are using it less for mundane tasks. Developers are using it a lot, but there are already a lot of people that have tried it, and now feel that they don't have a use for it. So, and that's normal and that's a lot coming from people that are not just like experts on the topic but just saw this trend and put it in their products. So in the end, mostly I love people like Hugging Face, for example, they are probably the one that I've been advancing the most to the field in the open source community. And I'm spending one hour on their platform just to see the latest innovations and papers, and following the people that are within, because they are probably gathering a lot of people that actually have the same values that we have at Data for Good. But on a wider scale, I would say that those are the people I'm following on my side.[11:13] Lou: I would say I'm not following experts, but rather the important thing for me is really the purpose of the algorithm that's used, what's really important for me is, besides the technology, is what is it aimed at? And is it going in the right direction or in the wrong direction? And spoiler? I feel like 95% of the usages that are made today of chat GPT are just going in a way that makes us buy more stuff or do more things that we don't need to do. So that's why I'm really focused on the usages that are going to benefit for all. And I think they're are some [usages] and I'm not going to make some internal publicity, but I think the tool that has been developed called ClimateQ&A and which helps you navigate through IPCC reports and make climate data accessible to citizens and to people that want to understand the problem, yet don't have the time to read 14,000 pages of climate reports - it’s these kinds of usages to democratize knowledge which are amazing, and this is the kind of thing I follow. [12:34] Anastasis: Wow. Hats off to Théo for this tool, which I'm gonna definitely be checking out after our session. Just to add to that, I guess the most important thing, from my perspective, is if someone is being generally objective about AI and does not treat it like a silver bullet. Usually what we get out of the hype is people claiming it will change everything, it will save the world, it will destroy the world. And I don't really like dealing in absolutes in that sense. Definitely many hard-working people in the industry for loads of years, most of whom know how difficult it is to collect the data, to label the data, to train the right models and how difficult it is to actually get a good trustworthy result out of AI, and so yeah, AI is hard, it's very burdensome to get the right results, and most people who would tell you that, yeah, they would find no silver bullets and no extreme hype…[13:41] Gaël: And Anastasis, if you had to pick one name, who would it be?[13:45] Anastasis: I think I would probably go back to basics, back to a person, one of the people who started all of this, who started the hype behind AI, behind data science as well. And that would be Andrew Ng , who is very well known in the community. And he's one of the voices that has been there from the beginning actually, [4:08] Gaël:Thanks a lot, Anastasis, and the two others know that I'm going to ask the same question. But actually, I’m pretty sure I can do a bit of a mentalist exercise with Théo. So if you had to pick one name, Theo, who would it be? And my guess it will start with an S…[14:26] Théo: Yeah, that's a good person to follow that for sure, Sasha Luccioni, she was a researcher at Mila, a university in Canada (Quebec) and she was one of the people and actually the only one in the world to create a research paper on the carbon footprint of AI. And that is the only resource we have today to estimate what is actually emitting. And she has been doing a lot on AI ethics and AI carbon footprint. She also created a tool that we use, and now we maintain at Data for Good to measure the carbon footprint of AI. And now she works at Hugging Face. So yeah, that's one of our models.[15:05] Gaël: And Lou?[15:06] Lou: Well, I was going to say the same person. So it's not fun. [15:10] Théo: Oh my God, that's super bad.[15:13] Gaël: We stole your hero. I'm sorry about that. OK. So the fun fact is that I really wanted this episode to start on a positive note, and focus on data for good. But what is really interesting,is despite the fact that you are working on very positive applications of AI, the three of you started right from the start about, hey, cool down, there are some downsides as well, etc. So, OK, you know what? You won, I will not have such a positive episode, or at least not yet. And let's talk about A I as a destructive [force]. [15:51] Lou: No, I wanted to complete what you were saying, because I think it's really important, and the reason why we're doing it is that we're facing speeches in the media or people that are all AI experts, in 90% of the cases they're talking about AI and technology in general, like something that is going to save us, and behaving as if we can continue exactly the same pace that we're having, and that we just need to change our technology, and behind it we're going to be saved. And I think especially when you work in this field and you are aware of all the limits of those technologies, well, I feel like I have a role to, each time I have the possibility to talk in public to remember and to remind [everyone] of all those limits, because they're huge and we need to say it. There are positive cases, and they're amazing in science and all the projects that we can do at Data for Good, but they are not the majority. And this is really important to be said when the occasion is happening. [17:08] Gaël: So technocracy won't save the world. I'm under shock. But could you elaborate a bit with maybe one example? Like if I understood you well, that, it’s really the question of with such a powerful tool, towards where are we accelerating? And are we accelerating in the right direction? Or I would say the other side of the same coin is well, just drop a pinch of AI everywhere and it will solve the entire world’s problems. So do you have some specific examples that you would like to share when you really believe that it is a terrible idea to use AI? [15:51] Lou: Well, basically, when we're talking about technology, I think what is really important to bear in mind is the materiality of this world that we believe is immaterial. For instance, I think it's really funny that we're talking about the cloud as if it was something in the sky, that was really not material. When we know that for instance, 99% of the data that we exchange worldwide, they're circulating through submarine cables and then they're stuck into like monsters of metals. So everything is material. And so when we talk about technology, we need to remember that there are two sorts of impacts. The first one is ‘direct’, the materiality of it, that I was talking about. And then there are also all the indirect effects. And one of the main ones is called the rebound effect. And it's the fact that every time that we have discovered or improved a technology, or use technology to improve the usage of something, well in the meantime, we've increased its usage. And then as a result, the absolute emissions are always bigger. So, for instance, in our daily lives, we have the example of the planes. Because for instance, we've reduced the intensity per passenger, but we've increased hugely the number of flights. And so the absolute emissions are way bigger. And so for generative AI and AI in general, it's really the same thing happening. For instance, to take an example, we can take as an example the fact that AI helps you write emails way faster. But at the same time, it's going to make you maybe be able to make many more emails. So if the objective of your emails is to send stuff, maybe you're going to be able to sell much more stuff. Another example that I like a lot is the example of publicity. So you can make much more [publicity], you can personalize much more the advertising that you're going to make. And so in the end, you can make it faster. But so you're going to sell much more stuff. And these examples, actually, I didn't find a counterexample today, maybe somebody has it but I don't…[20:23] Gaël: Anastasis, do you have a counter example? Actually? No, let's stick with the negative force. Would you like to comment on what Lou shared about the rebound effect, about accelerating in the wrong direction, just selling more stuff? [20:39] Anastasis: Oh absolutely. And I feel this is like another facet of consumerism that's been evident in our days. And especially since if we do flood the internet with AI generated copies of emails and advertising texts, then guess what the next models will be trained on, and what degradation that might produce in the future. So, again, some elements that people should consider. When I say people, just to get back to that technocratic aspect of what we discussed, what I'm sort of feeling, which leads to the destructive force behind AI, is limited knowledge and limited engagement with the risks and the dangers around Artificial Intelligence Data centers, cloud computing, the energy they produce, that's the essence of your show, Gaël. So, we've been exploring this throughout other episodes. What happens when we try to apply AI without the relevant data? I mean, all of us are working at least to a certain part in climate change. We have to create aspects to global North and to global South. Some climate change solutions embedded with AI should apply to the global South as well. But most of the data come from the global North. So you end up trying to do good, but you might end up applying solutions where they have actually no applications because you've trained them with wrong data sets. All these are dangers and risks that we, as a community, should be informed of, and should be informing people of, and democratizing this knowledge. When people apply AI or use AI, there should be a way for them to know what to use and what not to use. Just the way when you use the electricity or you use the water, you're aware of the dangers, you're aware of what to do, what not to do. It should reach a point where it is the same thing with artificial intelligence. That's how we can de-risk it and stop it being a sort of destructive force through its application. [23:06] Gaël: And actually listening to both Lou and you Anastasis, I realize that people are seeing the data that is needed to train any data algorithm a bit like the cloud. It's some kind of magical [solution] and they don't really challenge the media reality of the cloud, and they don't really challenge the materiality of the data we need to use. And that creates this huge bias that you've mentioned. And actually, I think it's a very important bias. It's not an environmental bias. But yeah, if you train data mostly based on US behaviors and you try to apply it to Madagascar (just to pick my neighbors as an example), well that can create a lot of issues. And it’s funny that this hype and all this magical thinking around AI tends to overlook this aspect. I mean, am I right to rephrase it this way? [24:03] Anastasis: Absolutely. You're absolutely right. And technology in itself nowadays is political. It has been used as a political tool. So the users of technology have to be political as well, the way we use it makes a statement that leaves its footprint on the world based on our ethics, our responsibility. So we do have to claim this responsibility.[24:30] Gaël : You mentioned earlier that Sasha Lucionni was the only one who wrote a research paper on the environmental footprint. That's something that both Anastasi and Lou mentioned several times that we also need to pay attention to the electricity consumption. And I guess much more. Could you elaborate a bit? What do we know today about the environmental impact of artificial intelligence? [24:56] Théo:This is important because that's also where you see what you can do in terms of negative impacts. I think there are three misconceptions about the environmental impact of AI. The first one is that actually we don't know what the environmental impacts are of AI. We don't have the data for it. We have ideas for it. We know that it consumes energy and water and we have a lot of data over there, but no one may actually measure it aside from a few people in the world. So we just don't know. But what we know, the second misconception is I'd say, is that people tend to focus on the carbon footprint and the energy consumption of data centers, which for me, and I will give some figures, is actually not that important, and especially for people in AI, because it has been the case for a lot of years, people think that it has to come from the training phase, that this is the most important phase. And the third misconception is that they always forget the indirect impact. So let me give you a few figures. We think we know that GPT 3.5 has been trained and consumed during the training phase and emitted around 500 tons of CO2, 500 tons of CO2. It's quite big, but it's not huge. It's like it would be a small company of maybe 10 to 30 people, or it's around 250 people flying back and forth to New York, which is actually, if you divide that by 200 million users, it's actually nothing. One thing is the second indirect impact is actually the use of AI before, because we had a lot of technologies that were actually trained and used and the usage phase were actually not that [bad] in consuming energy. But with the transformer technology that we have already, that we have now in the generative AI techniques, actually, the inference phase, the usage phase emits as much the training phase. So if you scale it to 200 million users per day, that's becoming quite a thing. And we did the exercise in our latest white paper at Data for Good. If you do the exercise, you find that for GPT 3.5 it is around 100,000 tons of CO2. But even so, for me, if we only take that into consideration, we forget a lot of things. There was one study by McKenzie that we actually did some work on, that said that a generative AI will just add to the economy 4000 billion in GDP worldwide every year. And that means that in each sector, you will have an increase in revenues. And if you take for each sector the decarbonization trajectory, you can do a small calculation, that it will mean that it would be emitting around 2 billion tons of CO2 every year and 2 billion tons of CO2. Now, it's not negligible at all. It's around 5% of the global emissions worldwide. And this is exactly a figure that represents the fact that with generative AI, people think that we will accelerate an economy that is not decarbonizing so much, and that it will be actually emitting 5% more of CO2 every year. And this is why we actually tend to focus on the finality of the algorithm. What are you using it for? And especially stopping using it for marketing and publicity, or even fossil fuel extraction actually, and start using it only for good.[28:35] Gaël: Which makes a beautiful transition because we don't know that much on what exactly is the impact, and still we try to use it for good. So can we try to switch now? Because the alerts are crystal clear about bias with data accelerating in the wrong direction, all the political entanglement that you can see. But the three of you, you've managed actually, you tried, to use it as a force for good. So let's get our hands a bit dirty. Can you pick a project where you say, OK, I'm going to use AI, I'm going to challenge myself about the direction I'm going in, and also challenge myself about the intensity of the energy, the water usage, etcetera, trying to reduce it all. [29:22] Lou: Maybe I can illustrate with an example, which is one of my favorite ones, that we're doing right now at Data for Good. We've been helping an NGO that's called Bloom for several months now. And this NGO is focused on protecting the ocean and marine life. And what we've been doing with them is helping them track the biggest boats on the sea and being able to identify when they were fishing in zones that they were not allowed to. So in this case, we've really used algorithms and artificial intelligence to develop algorithms that will help us detect depending on the boat’s trajectory, whether they were fishing or not, and then match it with the geographical zones in which they were identified to be in, to see if they were in a protected area or not. And when we match the two information on whether they're fishing or not and if they are in a protected area or not, we can know if they are violating some rules. And since we've been doing this work, we know that Bloom has been finding more than 20 complaints at international level in order to denounce the illegal fishing. And here, we felt that we haven't totally measured the impact of CO2 of those algorithms compared to the benefits that they procure. But what we're sure of, is that protecting marine life is way more important than the consumption of electricity that those algorithms are generating. [31:22] Théo: Maybe I can continue on the Data for Good example. We have a framework to see if the project is actually for good or not, not talking about the moral aspect of it. But we try to be quite logical, but the one thing that we actually always see that it is working well and if we don't do it, it won't actually have a real force for good, as we were saying, deploying it in the field and not staying at the level where it's only a geek thing, where we just produced something that could be used. And we put it in open source and we say we created a great thing, just use it and now you will be for good. Now what we thought that now you discover we're actually delivering our impact when we are putting our tools and what we developed in the field. A few of our examples that have been done, not only on the fishing side, for example, was one project that we did with an NGO called Pyronear, which is detecting forest fires before it's too late for the firefighters to intervene. And at first, we created just an algorithm to detect it with computer vision from small cameras that were quite sober and frugal. But the moment that the project completely switched and actually became a force for good is when we actually made the contact with the firefighters with the people managing forests so that we can actually implement it. And at the end, it raises alerts with the firefighters. And the project now, the full life cycle, it's actually now starting to really prevent fires. And if we hadn't been doing that, we had nothing. And other examples, we worked a lot with another NGO called Quota Climate, which is basically monitoring how people speak in the media about the ecological transition. So it's counting the quantity and the quality of interventions in the media and ranking TV, and radio chains together to see who has been talking about what topic, and having some barometers to see the evolutions. And at first, the same thing, we created algorithms and we created some linkedin posts and it was good and we had a lot of buzz with it. But the project actually started to become quite important when with our work, with the KPIs that we produced, this NGO created a task force to change the regulation around media and the ecological transition. And we always see that aspect where, if we stick to keeping just having a geek thing, when we think it is a good thing, we're not actually delivering something on the field. So that's why, even if we have a lot of other aspects to consider, if the project is so good, then that's the most important thing for us. [34:11] Gaël: And Théo in that case, do you completely skip the intensity part, which I would say is reducing the environmental footprint in other aspects as well? Or do you have some basic guidelines that you follow all the time? [34:29] Théo: Yeah, because we have one good thing at Data for Good, we were talking about that before, where we now maintain a library in Python called Code Carbon that is helping us monitor the carbon footprint of what we do. And we're actually trying to do the most that we can; it's not always feasible when you're working with volunteers because it's not a company. So sometimes people don't use it because they don't know how to use it, and we cannot really train them, but we do that as much as possible. And what we actually found is that most of the time, because for all of those projects, it was not using generative AI. So like other AI algorithms that are basically statistics, statistics which are not that heavy for a computation. So even if, when we monitor it, it's cool because we can actually have this impact measurement of our actual impact with the plus and the negative part of it. But in the end, it's actually changing now that we have generative AI. And if we had been creating a product where the generative AI was live and used by millions of users, that would be when the question would become so important, that we actually would have some big decisions on whether we kill it or not, or actually do we invent it or not if we [already] know that it will be deployed at such a high scale. So we try to measure it, and one big part of it is not just not using some complicated algorithms in production or at all, that's all like a good way of being sober is just not doing it. [36:05] Gaël: Anastasis, Théo mentioned that to be efficient, to actually achieve its goal, a proper data for good project should not be left only to geeks. Is it something that you've practiced also? And do you have any good stories to tell us about this? [36:26] Anastasis: Absolutely. So what we usually do, we are more business focused in the sense that our clients are Corporates and businesses of any size that want to showcase and monitor their sustainability KPIs, we connect to their data systems. So we prepare their data infrastructure and then we are able to extract all the sustainability data and more general ESG data of sorts. Through that, what we hope to achieve is to automate the process of ‘how’, and leave the ‘why’ to them, for example, why do they need to reduce their carbon footprint? Why do they need to improve their ESG performance? and then to help them through this process. In this sense, we are trying to use data to reduce their own footprints and to improve their own environmental, social and governance performance. So their success is our success, and the tools they are using to implement these goals is something that's very close at heart for us. Through this process, we found that, more often than not, the need for AI comes in organically at some stage in the project. So we're always careful to avoid using it as a buzzword. I do remember a specific example which shed some light on the way we can use AI at Dataphoria and it was all about benchmarking. So we've got a particular case where the client wanted to see how they were performing against other peers in the industry with data that could not be found in specific databases or specialized ESG websites, but which was embedded in a number of sustainability reports. Most of these are in a PDF format, a couple of 100 pages long each. So when we started looking through there, to find the right data, at one point, we decided that it was going to take a very long time actually. So we tried to automate the process. We started with a few basic text analytics and one thing led to another, and we found ourselves working through a text classifier and a way to extract this textual data in a very structured format. And now when we're talking about technical data, like carbon emissions, like intensity base years, materiality topics and all these, of course, this has to come with very specialized knowledge. So that was the point where we had to stop and discuss between ourselves. Even at the small scale, we were applying heat, whether the footprint, the impact of what we were hoping to achieve could surpass the impact of building this model and deploying this model itself. And we found this as a rule of thumb ever since. [39:54] Gaël: Yeah, a good rule of thumb makes total sense. It’s not easy, it’s not easy all the time, to try and assess how much your clients will actually save. But I guess having this order of magnitude to 1 to 10 protects you from minor estimation errors. I would say.[40:16] Anastasis: Absolutely. That's the engineer in me speaking. So yeah, that's the sort of case ‘we're never gonna get it right’. We just have to be certain. [40:27] Gaël: You know, when I prepared this episode, I had a very interesting discussion, a very meaningful discussion with Yoann Fol and Buster Franken, thanks to Anastasis’ advice. And I remember Yohan telling me, you know, maybe AI will just become like electricity or a fridge, a technology that it is so obvious that it will become invisible, and we will not talk that much about it because we don't talk every day about electricity or the fact that we are able to produce cooling mechanisms, which is pretty amazing when you think about it. So do you foresee this trend that AI will become just AI, and not a cool hype technology boost. It's just AI, you know, it's just electricity. What do you think about it? Starting with Lou? [41:21] Lou: Well, I think it's as we were saying earlier in the podcast, I think it's already happening, as we're already using it every day in our lives. When you're going on social media, there are algorithms behind it, and when you're using the internet, it's algorithms again. So it's already everywhere in our lives. And what frightens me is the pace at which it's going right now. And the fact that nobody is questioning it, especially politicians. I think it's a subject where they're completely out of their reach and they don't understand. So they're not taking it seriously. Well, I believe we should in the political instances take the subject and ask the question about the usages, and the needs that we have about those technologies, because they're spreading faster and faster, and we need to ask ourselves about our needs. [42:23] Théo: Maybe my idea around that is, especially with this new word generative AI, and it's not only a question of Chat GPT, that is the top 10 that we always talk about. It's a question about generated human readable content that is multimodal. So that means image plus text plus sound, plus video, plus whatever. That means that it's not a question about being a real intelligence, but it's actually emulating how we are in this world, what we do in this world and how we interact with things. And so as soon as you have that ,and you're actually connecting actions, like reading and writing and so on, it becomes something that is natural to have embedded everywhere in our life, if we just follow how [others think ] it should go, if we just listen to technocratic people. So it's logical that actually, yes, AI can become obvious and invisible. For example, if you use Notion, there is now the AI part and it's labeled as AI because it's like the buzz, but at some point it will be not [be a buzz], it will be something like when you use a keyboard and it writes for you and it helps you write faster. So it will be there, and it’s already there, but is it like a good thing? That's another question. We always love to talk about Jacques [inaudible] and the people that are and have been studying technology and there are some researchers and social researchers that are saying that a good technology has to be convivial. That means that you cannot create a dependency to it. Because at some point, there will be a problem, and this is something that we already see. If you ask a developer right now, they are using github pilot and other AIs to write code, and I'm using it six hours a day to write code faster. And now when I don't have it, because there is a problem with my server, or I'm on a train and I don't have any networks, I know less how to code than before, but with it, I'm super faster. And this is a big question, because as soon as you create dependency, you make something that can create a lot of problems. So I don't know if it has to be obvious and invisible to be more of a force for good than a destructive force, but for sure, it is happening already, and I agree that now it's a buzz. So it's labeled AI, but it will disappear at some point. [45:02] Anastasis: I would totally agree with Théo on that. And just to go back to the ages before writing was actually democratized, there were all these mnemonic devices and mind balances and ways of sustaining the most information you could within your own mind. And then writing became easier because of papyrus and the parchments and so with the writing tools, it was certainly easier than writing things on stone tablets. And then there was a sort of disruption and a sort of resistance from the society back then, because people would tend to forget how to remember stuff if everything was written down. But that was the way we passed knowledge from one generation to the other. That was the way we could learn all the more, and use our mind for creativity instead of remembering lots of things. That's the analogy I would see for AI as well. It is a tool that, as Théo said, can free up our time for creative stuff that can help us accelerate what we are actually doing and take off the burden. I would see it more as a tool, therefore, more as an integration within our daily lives. The same way we have books, the same way we have phones, the same way we have other tools, calculators, you name it. But in order for it to be a force of good, not a destructive force, we need to set this trend in the right trajectory. That's what the European Union is aiming to do with the regulations about AI. That's what our generation should do as well. So in order to make AI for for good, in order to embed it the way it should be in our daily lives, we need more people, like you Théo, like Lou, like Gaël, like you listeners, to become part of this dialogue, part of the discussion and act for positive change. [47:15] Gaël: Thanks a lot Anastasis, it resonates a lot, with a lot of the listeners as well, and definitely with me. And now my last question to close the podcast on a positive note. Could you share one piece of good news which made you optimistic recently about a pass towards a more sustainable world? [47:37] Lou: Ok. Well, maybe you're gonna say it's not a good news, but I think it is. You were mentioning it at the beginning of the podcast, but today with Data for Good, we've been working on a project for several months about carbon bombs in the world. So this is not a fun topic, but I think what's positive about it, is that we've had media coverage all around the world. And I think a few years ago, this would have never happened, because people didn't care about these problems and the fact that the media is talking about these subjects in their front pages and selected them as their recommendation of the day and stuff, this is a positive thing. By showing that the media is becoming more and more aware about the subjects and trying to use the impact that they have to notify people and to inform, to help us go in the right direction. [48:39] Théo: I'd say a very geek good news is, in the past week, there has been the release with Hugging Face, which I was saying that I loved a lot at the beginning of the podcast, there was a release of a model called Zephyr 7b-beta, which is basically like a geek code name for a new large language model. So the kind of algorithm for generative AI that is free, open-source, small, sober, with very fast inference - that means less energy consuming inference - And that is for the first time, more performant than the things that I'm doing with GPT in production. So that means that for the people that in the field are called the GPU poor, ie. the people that don't have a GPU to do AI (that means like 99.999% of the world), if you're not working at a tech giant company, you can now have access for free, and switch your actual model that you are using for AI from a proprietary closed model, to something that is open-source and free, and consuming less energy, and created by people with different kinds of values, and something that you can actually fine tune, remove bias, audit and so on. So that's actually for the first time that I've been using generative AI every day for a year in the past year. And now for the first time, I have something that I can put in a product that I actually trust a lot more because I know I can control it in a way. [50:23] Gaël: And what about you, Anastasis, what is the good news that you want to share? [50:29] Anastasis: Right. So a few weeks ago, we had significant news in the corporate sustainability reporting sector. So all over the EU we are waiting for new sustainability reporting standards that would require a lot more companies, five times more companies than today, to report on and reduce their carbon footprint, and also their general sustainability performance. And part of this was put to a vote in the European Parliament, and there were some moves to hinder the vote and to reject the motion, or set it back a couple of years, at least by certain parties. And it was looking quite grim. It was quite unsure if this was going to pass. Obviously, if this doesn't pass, then the whole environment and sustainability progress is left two years behind. The very good news is that this passed with a majority. So we are continuing on as planned with the vision to become the first net zero continent. So that for me is great news. We shouldn't take it for granted. But people all over the place are working towards this same goal. [51:48] Gaël: Well, it was a lovely chat and, and it was great. Actually, it was a bit less technical than I would expect with geeks like you. But maybe it was because the right question to be asked is really the use of AI and this kind of ratio, I love how you, Anastasis, how you put it, you know, ‘multiplying by 10, otherwise it doesn't seem worth it’. And, you know, starting with a real live case, and all the tips that you shared, about how Lou and Theo, with Data for Good, manage to create massive impact using AI, and using AI doesn't necessarily mean the latest shiniest model. So thanks a lot. I really do mean it, the three of you, it was great talking to you. And as I mentioned, I hope that we will have some room in the Green IO conference hosted by API days to talk about data for good. I will try to convince some of my guests tonight to be with us in Paris. I'll let you know more in the next episode. [52:59] Gaël:Thanks a lot once again for joining the Green IO podcast tonight about AI and data for good. In episode 29 we will talk about anthropology and geography and Anthropocene and yes, it will still be a tech focused episode, but taking a huge step back in time, thanks to Maxime Blondeau. Yes, the one and only thought leader on geography and ecology and technology, who shares one map a day on Linkedin to his 100,000 followers. [53:34] Gaël: And before you leave, a small message from our sponsor. No, I'm kidding, Green IO remains a free and independent podcast, and so we need your help to keep it that way. 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Meeting Asim Hussain, the Green Software Foundation’s Director, is always an uplifting experience and this episode makes no exception. A patchwork episode where we talked about: When we finally have the chance to meet with Asim Hussain the Director of the GSF, the episode becomes a crazy mailbag one where we talked about: * 🙌 How trust and consensus can work in an organization gathering small and agile NGO with Tech multinationals, * 🔧 Which tools shall we pick to report about carbon and which ones to build more carbon-efficient software, * 📈 How a simple yaml file could boost comparisons and operability of green software, * 🌿 And yes … a bit about psychedelic medicine also 🙂

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📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Asim's sources and other references mentioned in this episode* Green Software Foundation * Decarb Software 2023 * Environmental variables podcast * Impact Engine Framework * Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification * Green Software Maturity Matrix * Asim’s article “My 6-year journey with psychedelic medicine” * Boavizta * Watttime * Institut du Numérique Responsable * SustainableIT.org * Blue Angel label Resources and Energy-Efficient Software Products (DE-UZ 215), * Linux Foundation

Transcript
Green IO E27 TRANSCRIPTAsim [00:00:07] "We have a very specific way of working. If you're in a working group and you do not like what is happening, you have to say the words I object. It can't just be like a strong argument. You have to sarcastic a magic incantation. You have to say the words, I object."Gaël [00:00:30] Hello, everyone. Welcome to Green IO, the podcast for Responsible Technologists Building a Greener Digital World. One byte at a time. Our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. Quick note from our European-based listeners. You are invited to the first Green IO Conference in Paris on December the 8th (2023) for free. I partnered with API Days to bring you an amazing line-up, starting with Aurore Stéphant, Tristan Nitot, Théo Alves Da Costa and all the teams involved in the 2023 Sustainable Digital Challenge. The link to register is in the episode notes. Hope to see many of you.Gaël [00:01:20] In the small but growing community of people coding with our environment at heart. The GSF, the Green Software Foundation, is getting a lot of traction. Big companies and universities are joining almost on a weekly basis. Dozens of open-source projects around the globe participated in the 2022 hackathon. The numbers of LinkedIn followers have doubled in less than the semester, if not a quarter. And a quick glance on the Green Software Foundation website will give you a good idea of all the tools and methods they provide to decarbonize software. But what's in it for a software engineer or a designer who could get lost in this vibrant library? Where to start and what to use for which needs? What are the limitations of these tools today? I seized the opportunity of meeting Asim Hussain, (the Green Software Foundation director) at API days, London, in September - where we were both talking about tech sustainability - to ask him to join the show. Between fellow podcasters because Asim and Chris Adams are the regular hosts of the great Environment Variables Podcast. He gladly accepted and voilà, hi Asim. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today. Asim [00:02:38] Thanks, Gaël. Thanks for having me.2 Gaël [00:02:40] So, Asim, before we deep dive into the GSF tools, I have the question I wanted to ask you since I've started following your work. What's the connection between Microsoft, Intel, JPMorgan, the European Space Agency and psychedelic medicine? Asim [00:03:00] Hmm. Well, there's hopefully no connection between them and psychedelic medicine, other than the fact that I was employed (in these sectors). I've had quite a long career working in various areas, including, space and finance. And for a long stretch I was actually self-employed, teaching and training courses in teaching. Then I joined Microsoft six or seven years ago, I think, in the recently reformed developer relations division. And I was doing JavaScript developer relations focusing on the audience, but then I eventually I was the EMEA regional lead for developer relations over there. And honestly, that was just an opportunity when the whole organization shifted. It was a big reorg. Everybody was struggling to figure out "what are we going to give Asim"? And I just said, "Hey, look, I've been really part of this movement around green software. I'm talking to all these people. It's a passion area of mine. Let me incubate a team that lets me focus in on this golden question, and the stars aligned and they allowed me to just focus in on that area. And that's when I became the Green CAT advocacy lead at Microsoft. And then eventually I just moved over to Intel. And that's how we launched the Green Software Foundation. So that medicine is kind of completely tangential to all of that. So, about seven years ago, honestly, I used to suffer from very significant depression. And I really went through quite a few different modalities. I was looking at meditation - it used to be a very large part of my daily routine as well as just a number of other things that I would I was trying. Meditation is extremely powerful. I extremely recommend meditation. But then I discovered actually for many, many decades psychedelics were actively being used, and as treatment mechanisms. There are over 20,000 academic peer reviewed papers on the use of psychedelics in a wide variety these areas. But then it just got banned by Richard Nixon because he didn't like the people who were in the psychedelic movement and he wanted to find reasons to put them in jail. And that unfortunately, just spread. It's just a really unfortunate thing. And then it became illegal and the way he made it illegal was he made it illegal. So there was a schedule one, which means there are no medical uses for it. Cocaine FYI is schedule two. So, you know, that's an interesting little thing that that speaks right now. Gaël [00:05:52] That's crazy. Asim [00:05:54] Now what's happening is, based on the large polymer study that Tim Ferriss funded, which is in the Johns Hopkins University, there's this big resurgence of research in this space. Australia just legalized that. There are multiple countries in the world which are changing their legislation over it. And there's been a large kind of movement over the last couple of years to really explore this space - sometimes it's called the psychedelic medicine movement, sometimes it's called plant-based medicines. And yeah, I've been doing a lot of those, mostly ayahuasca, but a lot of those ceremonies over the last seven years. I do them a couple of times a year and I'd say my journey in the psychedelic medicine space and my growth in there as a human being and as a spiritual entity has really - I wouldn't even remotely have been able to do what I've done here without that space. And I'm happy if anybody ever has any questions about it. I'm very open on it. It's on my profiles, on socials. I wrote an article about it recently, so I'm always happy to answer any questions on that for anybody. That's one of my missions, recently, I realize, was to advocate for this space, to be a beacon and thank you for the opportunity to tell everybody about it because it is an area I'm trying to destigmatize. Gaël [00:07:21] Yeah, you're welcome. You know, I feel that a lot of we're doing is actually, in tech, showing how complex the system is. But actually, if you take an even bigger point of view, I think it's good that to break the silos in which we position our professional life our personal life or spiritual life, and understanding that everything is somehow pretty strongly connected, it helps us to be a bit more humble. I guess one effect at some point in one space could have ripple effects in others. And also reconnecting with our ecosystem or biosphere nature, choose word you want. Thanks a lot for sharing. That was intimate. So thanks for your openness. Gaël [00:08:11] Yes, you said you had a pretty astonishing trend in success professionally last year and even before that, for sure you've been a beacon, I would say, in the green software movement. And actually, that's true now for the Green Software Foundation. And my question would be, why so much traction for the Green Software Foundation? And I know that in the 2023 additional decarb software, I guess this online conference is in two week’s time - am I right? Asim [00:08:43] Yup. 16th of November 2023. Gaël [00:08:46] Okay. Thanks a lot. And of course, we'll put the link in the show notes along with every other reference that we mention in this episode. But you will give the introduction talk with Adam in that matter, if I'm not mistaken. And one of the aspects is 2023 in review. So could we have some teasers? Some previews? Was 2023 a good year for the Green Software Foundation? And why? Why do you see these trends? Asim [00:09:13] Well, it was just to talk very openly and honestly, I think. Through 2023 and we're still in it, but if you remember, the start of the year was a very interesting, challenging time for the whole industry and everybody was letting everybody go. There were really big question marks over what's happening in the ecosystem. You know, as a person who leads a foundation where we are funded through membership fees, I started off this year with a little bit of trepidation and a little bit of concern, because I knew the pressures that were on organizations to cut budgets. And, as much as we are run through volunteers, there are staff and there are costs and we have to maintain it. And now as ED, I never wanted to give anybody any bad news. So that was for me a bit of a worry. So at the start of the year, my goal for the year was mostly to ensure that we could continue functioning. My initial thought at the start of the year was "Oh my word, the world's going to a terrible place". I know other foundations that really lost a lot of funding and they're in significant issues. And so I was like, okay, as an ED, let's be careful. We've got this mission we're trying to deliver and drive it. Let's make sure we can keep it going. And the reality is, and this is the thing that so surprised me about us, is that we've grown over the year. We kept on growing. We kept on growing, we kept on growing. And I took an opportunity and we had a healthy budget. And there are a lot of people suddenly on the market with such wonderful talent. And we've now grown such a wonderful team in the foundation, very, very strong in their field. And we were just in a great situation. So we've a) grown a great staff, really strong staff who've been driving some amazing work throughout this year. Gaël [00:11:18] I've got a quick question. How many people are actually working for the Green Software Foundation? Asim [00:11:26] I don't know, because we have quite a lot of staff that are part time. We have one, two, three, four, five full time - no eight full time staff members, currently right now. Some of them might be on more of a temporary full-time contract. But we have definitely five people who are just completely full time all the way through, and also other people who are allocated from the Linux Foundation on a permanent part time basis. Yes, we have like a good staff, but also because we do a lot of things like, you know, we don't have a full-time designer, but we have a designer. We do have a full-time web developer, we got a developer, we have writers, we have multiple writers on staff, we have a designer, we have multiple people who we go out to on an ad hoc basis.Gaël [00:12:22] Asim, you're not full time working for the Green Software Foundation are you? Because you've got your job at Intel also, or are you now fully allocated by Intel to the Green Software Foundation? Asim [00:12:33] I'm not fully allocated by Intel to the Green Software Foundation. So, we have strange bylaws, we have this role of chairperson, which has to be an unpaid position. It is the leader of the organization and has to be one of the steering member organizations. Yeah, that's me. And I am very generously, my role at intel pays for my role here. I do say I have two full time jobs. It's kind of my life right now. I have a I have a calendar that is crazy. I have multiple admins supports to help me just figure out and navigate the whole space. But yeah, that's kind of my world, right now. Gaël [00:13:14] I understand why you need so much meditation.Asim [00:13:17] Yeah. Yeah.Gaël [00:13:20] But. Okay, so coming back to the initial question, because you mentioned the means, the budgets and the fact that you've been able to secure funding and actually to grow. But how do you explain the success you made in the tech industry today? Asim [00:13:35] So I've been kind of contemplating this. It's hard to pin down, I'll be honest with you. I think we have a very good reputation amongst the industry. We have a very good reputation amongst the industry, non-profits and in academia. We have a rare foundation in that we have representation from across the board. I would say there's a couple of ways of working that we have, that I think are quite fundamental. Like when the foundation first started, there was hardly anybody out there. Everybody was asking themselves, everybody's telling me - i remember one organization came to me and said, "You know, Microsoft tells me this, Amazon tells you that, and Google tells you this. I don't really know what to do. Then there's other organizations telling me this, and this other thing, and then there's this paper over here, and that over there." And so, the really the one word we would try and run, the mantra we had at the start was trust. We need to grow a trusted ecosystem. We need to create a place where people can trust. And so that's actually why when we formed, we formed as what's called a 'standards body'. So, we were actually a standards body at heart. You also do open-source, you also do these other things. And that means that when you're a standards body, we have so many rules around collaboration, like the open-source foundations (not to criticize open-source foundations) but open source foundations do not have those rules, which, I think, makes for a much more collaborative environment inside the Green Software Foundation than in other organizations. For instance, we run a lot of our projects and all of our working groups and everything through a consensus model. That means that every organization has got to agree before we move forward. And we also have a rule where that you if you're a nonprofit, it doesn't matter if you're Microsoft with 100,000 employees or you're a nonprofit with ten, you actually hold the same amount of power inside the Green Software Foundation as each other. When I was first forming it, a lot of nonprofits were, I was speaking to them and we want we want to create a big church, have everybody who's talking about the space here. And they were like, "We don't want to join. We've joined other foundations. We just get bullied by the enterprises. Our voices just get silenced. You just use us as effectively greenwashing for your things. And I was like, look, trust, you know me, I'm not doing this to greenwash. I had a reputation previously. We have these rules, you can join and we have a very specific way of working, which is if you're in a working group and you do not like what is happening, you do not like a change that is being made to a spec, you do not like a wording that is being proposed for a white paper, you have to say the words 'I object'. It can't just be like a strong argument. It's like a magic incantation. You have to say the words 'I object' either written or spoken. And then we actually have very specific rules for how we get over that objection. And eventually, if we can't get over it through discussion, we have a voting mechanism, so we have this extremely collaborative mechanism where anything that we create, you know, everybody has the opportunity to say no. So, when we actually publish something, so we publish something like the SCI specification, the advantage of it is that anybody out there can create a spec. It's so easy to create a spec, it's nothing. You just write something out. And a lot of other organizations, it's just one or two organizations, just write a spec and go, 'Are you all right with this? Hmm, I wasn't part of the meeting’. Where is when we publish the SCI, every single organization had specific input into that. And so because of this mechanism that we have, when we release the SCI, everybody's already adopting it because they've already been discussing it intensely inside their organization, it's already been used in academic research, already being used in all these areas. It's really ridiculously hard, the consensus model is agonizing, honestly. Sometimes you just want to go like, okay, I'll make the call. But it's the thing I think that creates the trust, because that allows your member organizations, the nonprofits, the academics, to engage because they know that their voice is going to matter. And then when we release something, it allows people to trust what we release because they're like, "Well, look all those names behind it and they really are behind it." So, I always use the word trust. I think trust is what this space needed and trust is what we're trying to provide.Gaël [00:18:34] Before moving to everything you do concretely because what you've explained is super, super important, I'd like to go a bit more in-depth. I've got like this question about the potential downside, which is until when, or until how many could it work? Because a consensus with ten is hard to obtain, with hundred is ridiculously hard, and with 1000, I don't even know if it's possible. So how do you foresee the future and is it connected, which is my question number two, to a very strict onboarding process? That you don't welcome anyone or you welcome anyone, but following very strict rules that will avoid to have some kind of a...Asim [00:19:23] Malicious intent…Gaël [00:19:24] Insiders with a general philosophy...Asim [00:19:26] Yeah. So I think we're trying to educate people on, is that consensus is ridiculously hard. But however hard the consensus is, like, if you saying if there's a thousand people we need to get around to make a consensus, that's actually good. Because that means that once you get people, eventually put all that effort in, and all that negotiation, you've got a thousand people who are about to adopt something. So you've kick started that whole process. We have mechanisms where we do have a voting mechanism, which we have rarely used. I will say that there have been and I have been some extreme [moments]. You know, we're in the sustainability space. Everybody in the sustainability space, we all care about the same thing, but we have different views on certain topics. There are very powerful views on those topics. There have been some extremely tense 'I object' things, where everybody is a wonderful human being who deeply cares, passionately cares about it, and there's not really a clear path forward. But we've always found we've always found a compromise all the way through. Gaël [00:20:39] Yeah. Okay. So, you do have this kind of nuclear option, that is the big stick that if we don't manage to get consensus, there is another way and nobody wants to use it but hey it's here. So, it drives people toward a collaborative mode. Asim [00:20:57] Okay, But the truth is the thing, I think that I used to be very nervous about this model because it was a strong recommendation to me at the start. And I was like, okay, ughhhh, I'm used to more command-and-control structures. I now fully trust the process of getting a bunch of passionate people, passionate, knowledgeable people, together on a subject. As long as that group is large enough and diverse enough, you will always get to the right solution. I'm a very trusting of that whole process. We also do have projects which you don't run through consensus, more of, like open-source projects. If there is literally a piece of software, we're not going to have a consensus on every single pull request merge. Gaël [00:21:43] No, obviously. Asim [00:21:44] But we have a slightly different mechanism called 'graduation'. Once you graduate, you're free to do what you want, and there's still a lot of oversight. Gaël [00:21:55] So, let's deep dive. And that was very, very enlightening on the work of the Green Software Foundation. And let's deep dive a bit on what actually you provide, because I had obviously a quick look on the Green Software Foundation websites. Well, it would make anyone realize that the GSF provide a lot of tools. Just to name a few principles on green software engineering. SCI, as you already mentioned, Carbon Aware SDK, the green software maturity metrics that Anne Currie very recently advocated, and I was not aware of it, so of course I had to look at it. The software carbon efficiency rating, how you've gone through community tools, the green software champions or a state of green software study, so there are quite a lot of them. Could you try to make sense of them? What connects them and why are they interesting or important? Asim [00:22:54] So there's a lot going on and a lot of people of engaging on a lot of fronts in the Foundation. We have four main working groups: standards, policy, community and open source. So standards is the software carbon intensive specification - most of our projects are in that area because we are just like an expert at making standards, and getting people to sit and agree and all other stuff. So software carbon intensive specification is a thing that I'm so incredibly proud of because that specification was built by people who had been actively trying to measure the emissions of software inside their organizations using the GHG or other mechanisms and for a while had seen the real limitations of that protocol when applied to software and had, when they first started off the process of building the ECI, they had this idea - what we want this to be, what do want this to drive. And there were some very early decisions. I was staring at this zoom room full of people, with such pride - wow, you all really are making wonderful decisions here. But they were [saying]: We want to make sure that the spec drives certain behaviors. We don't want the behaviors that we know are good to be an accidental byproduct of a spec, which is often what happens. These are the behaviors, so what is the spec that we need to drive these behaviors? We need people to invest in more energy efficient software. We need people to into making stuff more energy efficient. We need people to invest in using fewer servers and using less embodied carbon, using less hardware. And we need people to invest in making software carbon-aware. These are the things that people have been trying for years inside their organizations to get effort into. And they were [saying 'The gesture isn't helping us, it's not driving any of this stuff. And in fact it's harming a lot of our efforts". The market-based emissions loophole and GHG kills off any effort to make any work in the energy efficiency space. It just does not happen. Gaël [00:25:23] It has been changing recently. Asim [00:25:24] The GHG?Gaël [00:25:25] Fortunately. Speaker 1 Asim [00:25:25] Yeah there are movements but... Gaël [00:25:28] That it's too much location based rather than a market-based approach. But yeah, I was I was very, very relieved when I read the latest SCI specification, when it became really public, to see the public version, to see that embedded carbon was taken into consideration, that the main first focus was you reduce everything. And offset is just what has absolutely to remain, and that offset is almost off the table. That's not the topic. The topic is really, yeah, it's about reduction. Asim [00:26:00] By the we say it's about elimination. Like the only way to reduce your score is to eliminate your emissions. But when you talk about a lot of our projects, a lot of the work we do is really about measurement. Gaël [00:26:13] Can I ask one final question about the SCI, because I know that a lot of people listening the podcast are developers, designers, that can truly leverage this kind of tool. But my question is, do you believe that today the SCI has closed the gap with the GHG protocol? And let me elaborate a bit on it, because that's really something I'm struggling with some clients - that the SCI hubs definitely help to steer the decarbonization of your software in the right direction, especially taking into account the embedded carbon, in not only energy, which is electricity consumption actually, but when you say, okay, I wrote this piece of software and I now believe that when I run it, it emits, I don't know, several kilos of greenhouse gas or CO2 equivalent, [and so] it's not really easy to connect with one bucket, one slot in the GHG protocol, because it will split it between electricity consumption, what are the goods you buy or whatever services you bought to build this software? So do you believe that actually this gap could be closed at some point? Do you believe it has already been closed? Or actually it doesn't really matter, because it's a tool to steer people in the right direction. And at some point you will also see obviously the benefits in greenhouse gas protocol reporting, even if it's not directly connected, you know, one line really related to another. Asim [00:27:48] So I would say that they are completely different tools. When you measure something, you're trying to find the answer to a question. GHG is just a different set of questions than SCI. GHG is trying to answer the very specific question: what is one organization's emissions separate to another organization's emissions? Because the unit of pressure, responsibility, accountability is an organization. And the belief is that if you tell an organization what their emissions are, they will somehow drive reductions. The SCI is just trying to answer a different question, is trying to answer what is the intensity of a piece of software? Because I don't even want the SCI ever to be used in a reporting context like that, because we are trying to drive behavior change through the SCI, rather than just ticking a box of what are your carbon emissions. We always say this, it actually doesn't even matter what the carbon emission value on the right-hand side of the SCI is. All that matters is that the actions that you take, that we know our actions that drive down emissions, i.e., reduce electricity consumption, [and which] will reduce that score. If you have that connection, that's how you drive behavior change. You, as somebody who works in organizations, the GHG serves a very important function, which is we need to know all of the total carbon budget. What is one organization or one country responsible for versus another one? It does not drive behavior change. If you make your software consume less energy, it is extremely unlikely that that will be reflected in the GHG reporting numbers for your organization. If you make your application carbon aware, it is impossible for that to be reflected in your organization's carbon reporting number, because of that complete break in behaviors and numerical reporting. It does not drive behavior change. That's the really important thing. That's the thing that I realized over the years. What happens often times inside organizations and I've seen it multiple times, is that people spend ages calculating their carbon footprint. And then you submit a PDF and everybody's happy, and then you go away and do the same thing next year. How was that action? Can you connect the dots between programs inside your organization that are trying to search for funding? And we know 100% will reduce emissions. And this reporting mechanism, which doesn't care about keeping those connections from, you know, actions that you take to this carbon figure, that is actually what's so important. That's the kind of a message I'm really trying to get along the world. It doesn't matter. Calculating your carbon footprint does not matter if you, in that, process have broken the understanding of the actions that you can take to drive down that number. And that's oftentimes what happens because concrete number is so unbelievably hard. Use a thousand spreadsheets. You copy values from one spreadsheet to another, and you lose. You lose that relationship. And then at the end of the day, there's some team going, you know, I need $1,000,000. I'm pretty sure I can reduce actual emissions by 10%. And then people go, "Well, you might be able to reduce actual emissions by 10%. But the way we calculate our carbon with the assumptions that we make and the averages we've have to use, and our auditors have insisted that we can't use that figure, we have to use that figure." So unfortunately, even though you could actually reduce 10% of of physical carbon emissions, the way we measure doesn't recognize that. Therefore that work will not happen. That is that is what I'm seeing happening multiple times, repeatedly. And that is what I think is broken about our space right now. Gaël [00:32:15] Yeah, I agree with you. That's why that's why you need the Chief sustainability officer to have a very open and transparent discussion with CTU and CIO because they both need to acknowledge they will have the same goals, not using exactly the same tools. And that the GHG audit end of the year is a lagging indicator in that some of the indicators that could become the sustainable dashboard of any CTO or any CIO around the globe is more in need of leading indicators. And you know that at the end of the day you will achieve the same results. But you need to understand also that the bridges are not there and it's not just copy pasting and it will work. I'm very happy that you made the point because that yeah, I think I will refer to you as like the director of the Green Software Foundation site. So, so please believe me that you can track multiple things, or the same thing in different ways. And that actually that's a very consistent way to work so that you will achieve meaningful progress rather than just one north star, then, you know, sometimes still you are in the wrong direction. Asim [00:33:27] Yeah. And, and I find that quite frustrating and annoying. I always say when I go to a doctor for a health check, it's not just weigh me and then that's it. They weigh me, they check my height. You see your blood pressure, you see this etc. There are all of these things that you need to measure, all completely different units. They're very different ways of measuring so you understand what is going on and what do you need to do. And there is a complete obsession with this one, not just carbon value, but one methodology of measuring carbon and assuming that this one is the magical way of measuring which will inform you of all of the things that you need. It's like it's like an organization saying the only metric every single department needs to know is profit. And you should be able to figure everything else out. You should be able to figure everything else out from profit. I don't need that. I need to know employee satisfaction. I need to know customer happiness. I need to know how many people are visiting my website and if people are dropping up, I need to know all these things. And that's the same we need in the sustainability space. Gaël [00:34:35] We agree. That reminds me, you know, the crazy focus we had in the eighties, in the nineties about fat. You know, fat fat fat fat fat. You realize that when you crack the surface, half of the studies were sponsored by the sugar industry, that actually fat is not the issue -I mean don't get me wrong, eating too fatty can lead to a significant disease - but sugar is way more an issue than fat. It's quite kind of funny. Obviously. We talked a lot about the SCI, software carbon Intensity - which is so important of carbon intensity, but there are a lot of other initiatives going on. Do you fancy giving us a tour or maybe highlighting what could be the most beneficial for doers in the tech industry?Asim [00:35:22] So therefore, I recommend the training that we have learned on our greensoftware.foundation site, which is often used to be called the 'principles'. That has been an effort just to get everybody on the same page. Unlike others before, we weren't even all using the same terms. Our conversations are confusing, so it's just a way of getting everybody on the same page, everybody in the same language. Even if you having a conversation, if you're on the same page and you are having a conversation with a customer or somebody else, you can send them to our training to get on the same page. In terms of what wer are working on in the future, hopefully next year we'll be working on more certification. Gaël [00:36:08] Still working with the Linux Foundation?Asim [00:36:11] So we're still we're having some conversations [about] where to learn that right now. But yeah, we'll probably want to do it for free, which is a challenge for the cost structure of the Linux foundation that does that. But yeah, so, that's where our education arm is going. And again, all of this stuff is stuff that we do through consensus, through our members. So, some of the stuff, it really depends on whether the members feel this is an area that they want to invest that time into. There's a lot of work going on in the standards space. One project I want to highlight is a project that I've been particularly putting a lot of my personal attention in is there's a lot of interest from our members in this particular project and we're going to be announcing it at DeCarb and it’s called Impact Framework. And what it is, it's a tool to allow you to measure the environmental impacts of software. Now it won't scan anything. It won't do anything. You have to manually create a manifest file, a YAML file to describe everything, but hey, here's what happens all the time. Somebody measures a piece of software or makes a claim about a measurement or a user story or something like that. And it's always written up in English in like some PDF remarked on file. No, it's just like, it's like someone writing a blog post, I guess. There's no structure to it. What this is like is a YAML file where you gather some user data about your application workloads. This is the backend workloads. This is the utilization. This is this, this is that, this is the other, you gather data, you put it into a YAML file and then you actually very explicitly say, "Hey look, you can define a pipeline of computation and again it's all in the YAML, you can install plugins, all different types of modules that you want to use and we've standardized the interface to models". So, let's say you want to use, - I'm using the Boa Vista model - and then let's say, you know what I actually want to use- What times- what time are big supporters of the marginal emission factors for and I trust most of exposed I want to use what time versus resources, electricity maps. And so, you can really define, not only you're putting your data with this manifest file, but then you're explicitly stating your method, your methodology of calculation. This is how I'm taking that utilization figure. I'm turning into carbon, and that is all in a manifest file. So, when you report a carbon figure, you're not telling me a carbon figure, you're sending me a YAML file, that I will then execute and I will then see what your carbon figure is. And then you know what? I don't like some of your assumptions that you've made. I don't like the fact that you've used this coefficient for the database. I think you're being a bit too generous there, that I'm going to use my coefficient. I don't like the fact that you use values from that paper for your networking. I prefer the values from that other paper. So, it's making the whole thing just fully transparent. You're not just people, not just telling you what your carbon emissions are. Here's your money. Here is my working out, here is my manifest. The future that I see is that every open-source project in the world has this YAML file and its root directory, and you know what the emissions profile of this application is. My dream is, in the future, every single software product that's released, every single version of it, will come with one of these manifest files. There are so many use cases that people are coming up with for this thing. Yeah, those are projects I'm extremely excited about. I put a lot of my personal effort into it, and energy, and I think it's going to be quite transformative in the industry. Gaël [00:40:02] And actually I didn't realize how deep it was, how structural, I would say it could be. For me, it was more like an extension of the sky. But no, it's more rooted in. Yeah. Has a huge potential of making significant change. And fun fact is, while you were talking about it, it was like, hmmm, that could be a box to be ticked in the Green Software maturity metrics. You know, that's okay if you are truly at this level of maturity, all your code will have this YAML, file, etc. This is kind of the idea as well?Asim [00:40:42] Yeah. I think I will now talk to with others, it was still pre alpha so I'm trying to get to the point where, a lot of what I've just explained to you would be just obvious by looking at the project. Unfortunately, there's a lot of just old code hidden away in places. But yeah, that would be that would be an ideal place. I've even had somebody say they want to create, - they're selling more of a physical product, and they want to create a QR code which would point people to the YAML file, because you can do with a physical product as well. There's nothing stopping you from using this YAML file as a LCA for physical stuff as well. So yeah. Gaël [00:41:24] I would love to talk about all the other projects as well, the tools, etc., but being mindful of all time, I'd like to talk a bit about the interaction of the Green Software Foundation with the rest of the ecosystem. I understood from your earlier description that your strategy is mostly to produce norms and methods and standards. This is what you are excellent at, quoting yourself. But yeah, that's my advice as well. But that leads me to a very important question, which is how do you connect with other initiatives in Europe? You've mentioned Boavista, but also sustainability.org. This initiative in Germany around the Blue Angel label, Blue Angel Label Green software. I don't remember the German word for it. Obviously in French you've got several big initiatives like the INR, Sustainable I.T.. How did you translate it? IT Sustainability Institute or something like that, institute in your area, because...Asim [00:42:33] I know that... Gaël [00:42:33] ...In Switzerland and in Belgium and. And actually, it could go all the way up to - we already mentioned the GHG protocol - but do you plan at some point to become ISO norms? So how do you see yourself in this ecosystem? Asim [00:42:51] Because you mentioned ISO, the SCI is actually now an ISO approved specification. So, we've gone through all those processes and it was ratified by 195 countries, which I didn't know that was the actual process for the ISO. But yeah, we, adjust to the pace of the feedback. So, there is that. So I'll just tell you one of the things, that we have a theory of change which was developed to our members, which is basically like three pillars. We need changes in knowledge, we need changes in tooling. And we need changes in culture. The culture is a big one. We need that. We need a cultural change in order for people to prioritize a lot of these things. We went through this whole exposure to this theory change. Then we went through this exercise of what are all the things we need to change in the world to make all of those things happen? And then we went through the exercise of 'Well, are we even the right organization to make that change?' Because we don't have to be the right organization. And one of the things that we're doing a lot more now is we are, especially amongst the LF foundations, because in a lot of the foundations, there is like a working group or an arm or like a new there's a sustainability focused little team inside. They're focusing how to do that part of that fund. Now, whatever the foundations focus areas is more sustainably. So and also there's multiple organizations like the ones you mentioned out there. Our working group, the one that's responsible for connecting all those dots is a policy working group. But there's so many dots and everybody's a volunteer and we've even with the staff, there's just too many too many things going on. So one of the things we want to start doing for next year. So actually some of those you mentioned, we actually do have very specific arrangements with some of the sustainability i.t. Org. We have an MOU understanding, and that they're collaborating together on a piece of work in the Policy working group, and some of the others are members of the foundation. But one thing we really want to start doing from next year after we're going to call them roundtables, which are closed door meeting. In fact, I think I stole the idea from Boavista, because they were doing this a while ago, but closed-door meetings, with Chatham House Rules. So you have a bit of freedom to talk. Well, we invite everybody together, like one day a quarter. We'll arrange everything, and we just talk to each other. And I think that's just the most important thing. Just talk to each other. And there's so much going on, it's hard for you to keep a track. It's not the case of people stepping on each other's toes. We're just all busy and no one knows. You've barely got enough time to figure out what you're doing. So, trying to keep an eye on what everybody else is doing, you just don't have the time. So we want to create an environment where we bring everybody together and we just we talk. Maybe we do a show and tell, and we just keep the lines of communication open. And then we do things like, Hey, look, we were going to do X, but you seem like you're much more suited, so why don't you go about it? You focus on X, you focus on Y, you focus on Z, and then we all support each other. We really want to create that kind of collaborative now, hat's what we do with it. We're a collaborative organization. The way I want it to be is much more to help everybody get together, to help the whole ecosystem get together, and just all be moving in the same direction. And again, we're just all busy. That's the thing. If there is stuff that's not moving in the same direction, it's just because we're busy most of the time. Or maybe there is a difference of opinions that could be there as well. But we're not like competitors where we're kind of intentionally trying to come up with different things at the same time. So that's the idea, it is just to get everybody together. We'll figure it out.Gaël [00:46:48] Well, I love the philosophy Asim, because actually, I know that you know, but you know only since a few minutes so it's still a bit of a surprise for you I guess, but we will have a Green IO conference in Paris December the 8th. And of course, all the listeners can get free tickets. So it's just a matter of pinging me on LinkedIn or by email. But most of the listeners, they already know it. And this conference, I really want to have a roundtable with most of the organizations, and I didn't know that you wanted to create this roundtable approach is for 2024. I think this is absolutely awesome. But as you know, it's also why I launched this podcast. This is a very DNA of the Green IO podcast. So congratulation and obviously I hope that either you or a representative of the Green Software Foundation will be able to join the onsite roundtable in Paris with many other organizations, to discuss about collaboration, steering things in the right direction, and also acknowledging our differences. Because this is how the world works, and how it moves beautifully toward a more sustainable future. Hopefully. So, that's kind of funny. I didn't expect this announcement. So pretty cool. And now closing the podcast, I've got my two last questions. What piece of news would you like to share that recently uplifted you when it comes to our move toward sustainability and maybe a bit more digital sustainability? Asim [00:48:27] So the news that gives the most optimism is just I'm a big believer in the fact that we need to have a deep cultural shift in society to actually make a solution. Now, I don't think this is going to be, I think everything else just really stems from there. I think there's been a massive shift up to this point. But, um, but that's really what makes me excited about is just a number of people and I'm very lucky to speak to a lot of people, a number of people like yourself, and others in this space, who are, you know, just talking about these questions. And I think that's all you really need to have, is just have people talking about these questions. That is 99% of the challenge. I remember once I was speaking at a conference in sustainability, and it still comes to me quite often, which was, afterwards the audience came up to me and they said, you know what? You're the first person who's ever spoken to me about sustainability and were giving me solutions; and they were energized and the other speaker, and he's quite famous, not to name him, but his fundamental nature, his talk was like very doom and gloom. In fact, this is why I do not remotely talk about any of the aspects of climate change, I don’t think it matters. I just focus on the solution. And I think that's what I'm seeing a lot more of, I'm seeing a cultural shift with people where you go, "right let's dig in, we're focusing on solutions, okay, you do X, you do Y. This is the solution the GSF said what? Said do that? Ok let's focus on that. So as I said it's like I'm seeing that kind of action happening and that kind of conversation happening. I always said, for us in our part of the space, all we really need to do is just to have people, when things are being proposed, when features are being proposed, to actually say, hey, look, what is a sustainability aspect to this? Sustainability is not the most important thing for everybody. It will never be. Security is important. All these other things are important. But as long as we could just have somebody go, what about sustainability? Just having to ask that question is enough for me, because I think that we're there now. We're there at the table with everything else, and now we just are doing a negotiation, and that's the culture shift. Like honestly, four years ago, if any, if there was even one article published which mentioned anything around green stuff or anything by tech sustainability, we all lost our heads over it. And now the foundation's got a weekly newsletter where we're just jamming it full of information. All the news is going on, you've got your podcast, we've got all this, there's loads of material out there. I talk to multiple organizations that have said to me very explicitly, we are willing to spend more on sustainability this year. It's been more challenging to get that kind of answer from an organization, but the fact that we're still getting it is a really positive sign. So from where I sit, I'm just seeing like a hockey stick curve up. So I always get a lot of inspiration. But one of the things I'm very adamant about and it's one of the values, one of the values of the foundation, is that we focus very much on solutions. We talk about solutions. We don't solve our problems. I'm not in that space. I don't care. I've got enough people with climate anxiety who are just sitting there and they just get shouted out all the time by people about how everything's going to pop. Doesn't matter. Like knuckle down. Work on solutions. Ask us what gives me a lot of inspiration. Gaël [00:52:34] Thanks a lot for joining us. Thanks for all these great insights that you shared with us and hope to see you soon in Paris or somewhere else. Asim [00:52:45] Thank you so much for having me here and hopefully see you at an event soon. And just another final statement, we said, please come, please visit the decarbonized software event - it is happening on the 16th of November. It's online. It's free. It's about two and a half hours. We've got community speakers from all over, talking about various topics. We'll be talking about some of the releases, some of the Champions program, which I've not even mentioned, but we're launching an MVP style Champions program, the Impact Framework, a bunch of other things we'll be talking about. And if you go to Decarb.GreenSoftware.Foundation, that's where you can sign up. Gaël [00:53:23] Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. In episode 28, we will talk about A.I., but artificial intelligence with a purpose. I focus on data for good as we see it labeled quite often. I will have the pleasure to host Lou Welgryn and Théo Alphas Da Costa, the founders of Data for Good, who made the headlines this month with their data visualization of the 422 carbon bombs which might detonate worldwide, and Anastasis Stamis, the founder of Data for Hire, the first data for good impact driven startup in Greece (self-claimed) providing ESG and sustainable data integration, management and analytics. Stay tuned. Gaël [00:54:08] Before you leave, a small message for my sponsor. No, I'm kidding. Green IO is a free and independent podcast, and so we need your help to keep it that way. You can help us by supporting us on Tipeee, and the link is in the episode notes. I also give online and on-site conferences and facilitate workshops about climate change and digital sustainability. So do get in touch if that interests you. It's a good way to allow me to keep investing in the podcast. Full disclosure: each episode takes me roughly 15 hours of work finding the guest, convincing them, researching the topics, and it costs between three and €400 to produce. Now you know everything. If you cannot donate, that's fine. You can support us by spreading the word. Rate the podcast five stars on Apple and Spotify. Share an episode on social media or directly visit the website. Seriously. Thanks for your support. It means a lot to us, us being me, but also Tani Levitt our amazing podcast Producer Engineer and Jill Tellier our amazing podcast curator. Stay tuned by subscribing to Green IO on your favorite podcast platform or via the Green IO mailing list. The link is in the episode notes, but you already know the drill. Every two weeks you will get more insights and premium content to help you, the responsible technologists scattered all over the world, build a greener digital world.
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This episode is not in Spanish or Portuguese but it might have been 🙂
With Catalina Zapata - founder of La Web Verde community in Colombia - and Ismael Velasco - founder of the Adora foundation and based in Mexico - Gaël Duez explores the momentum of Digital Sustainability in Latin America as well as the pitfalls it faces. From COP21 memories to the structure of the IT industry in LATAM, both guests share unconventional wisdom as well as tips for any IT workers based in LATAM to green the Web. Learn more about our guest and connect: * Catalina's LinkedIn and WordPress.tv results * Ismael’s LinkedIn * Gaël's LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Catalina's and Ismael’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode: ClimateAction.Tech * WordPress Sustainability Community* * Adora foundation * Elena Morettini’s talk * Gerry Mc Govern’s work * Tom greenwood’s Curiously Green newsletter * Unitar’s article on Latin America’s e-waste management * Article in Portuguese: Green Information Technology practices in University educational institutions: A systematic review * CSIS article on The Development of the ICT Landscape in Mexico: Cybersecurity and Opportunities for Investment * Environmental Variables - The Week in Green Software: episode with Chris Adams and Ismael Velasco * Green Web Foundation

Transcript (in English - for Spanish check below)
(00:09) Gaël: Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. On Green IO, we explore how to reduce the environmental impact of our digital world. Our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector, and, beyond to boost digital sustainability.More than 300 million digital users, home of dozens of unicorns, with vibrant tech scenes scattered across the region. 2.2 million working in the technology, internet and communication sector, according to LinkedIn. No, I'm not talking about Europe, but Latin America. Latin America, which is a significant player in our digital world and as such a significant contributor to its environmental impacts. Just following a non-rigorous approach based on the number of its users, but hey, remember that the majority of the environmental impacts come from both manufacturing and user devices, and the electricity consumption of these devices. So, resuming my on-the-go analysis, with 5.5% of world users, Latin America’s carbon footprint for its digital activities would be around 77 million tons of CO2 (2019), which is more than any country in Central America, apart from Mexico, obviously, and for instance it is more than Uruguay has emitted. So, I guess now that you understood that today's episode is about Latin America, and more specifically, how someone working in the digital sector and based in Latin America can contribute to decarbonizing the Internet.To help us finding the answers, I'm pleased to welcome two guests today. Catalina Zapata, who's based in Medellín, Colombia. Catalina is a seasoned web designer who started a project called La Web Verde, (my pronunciation is terrible because it's in Spanish) in order to democratize sustainability on the web, teach designers and developers how to create more sustainable digital projects and more specifically spread green awareness about our digital footprint within the WordPress community. (02:34.39) Gaël: I spotted Catalina in this vibrant WordPress sustainability group last year, and when I reached out to her, she told me that she was already a regular listener of the podcast. And when I asked her why she was so much into sustainability, she had a very straightforward answer: because we breathe the same air and we are all on the same planet. And that was pretty straightforward. Well, later, she actually told me that three years ago she read an article about internet being the fourth most polluting country in the world, and that was kind of a ‘ha-ha’ moment. But actually, I think I even love better her first answer.Ismael Velasco is based in Mexico and I met him via the amazing CAT community. Ismael is a veteran in the software industry at large, and green software in particular. His API ‘graceful degradation’ concept immediately appealed to me, but I discovered someone whose knowledge and commitment goes far beyond green IT, with his involvement in the Adora Foundation, which forces social innovation across the globe and his recent decision to focus more on the sustainability side of technology. So, welcome Catalina, welcome Ismael. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.(04:02) Ismael: It's great to be here. Great to be with you.(04:05) Catalina: Thank you, Gael, for connecting, for inviting, and creating this space, that is not only innovative, but also is very, very, very necessary for those who design the web and consume the internet.(04:18) Gaël: Wow, thanks a lot, both of you. I would love to start, actually, with a very straightforward question. Is the title of this episode all wrong? I mean, is Latin America a pertinent scope to apprehend Tech and sustainability? Ismael, do you have an opinion on it?(04:40) Ismael: I think, personally that, yes, it is a meaningful category. I think the distribution of technology and the role and contribution of technology does diverge regionally. So; each country, each area will have different profiles. But I think the main realities facing Latin America in relation to technology do have a lot of parallels. I think culturally, there is probably even more commonality across Latin America than there is across Europe, in many areas. The tensions that we experience are often also mirrored across countries. So, I think it's definitely a meaningful category, which is not to say a homogenous one. I think you will find enormous diversity country to country. But I don't think that negates the fact that addressing the reality of technology at a Latin American level makes sense on very many levels. So yes.(05:45) Gaël: Catalina, do you have an opinion on it?(05:48) Catalina: I think that in Europe, digital sustainability has become a priority for both government and business. But there are strict regulations on the energy efficiency or data centers, the recycling of electronic devices, and the reduction of carbon emission in the technology sector. The United States has not reached European standards, but there is a growing awareness of carbon footprint reduction. But in Latin America, we have a great challenge in accessing resources and knowledge, and access to information in Spanish is limited. It is necessary to translate and adapt resources into Spanish and other native languages of the continent, to make the information more accessible and usable. However, I believe we have great potential, but more awareness and education is needed from all of us who create the web and consume the internet.(06:57) Gaël: Well, that's very interesting feedback, Catalina, and there are a lot of different things to unpack here. So we'll go back to them point by point, but I'd like to bounce back on what you've just said about the level of awareness across the globe. What is the level of awareness according to you about digital sustainability in Latin America?(07:19) Catalina: For me, it's very, very, very low. Digital sustainability is a strange concept in Colombia and Latin America. Everyone talks about climate change, net zero, circular economy, sustainable development goals, sustainable fashion, human rights, green mobility, recycling, inclusion, female empowerment, artificial intelligence, eco-tourism. But no one talks about green software, green web, or the impact of the internet on each of our digital actions on carbon emissions. And I ask myself why. To give you an example of how ignorant we are. I am an ambassador for the Climate Reality Project. It's a non-profit organization, one of the largest communities of world climate leaders of the world created to promote solutions to climate change. This organization has a virtual platform where everyone can connect with other leaders. There are materials, videos, forums, events, resources, surveys, discussions, seminars, virtual meetings, job opportunities. And for the last three years, I have not found a single conversation about digital sustainability or sustainable web design or digital sovereignty. The server where the website and digital community is hosted is not a green server. That makes a lot of inconsistency between what is said and what is done in companies or organizations or change makers in Latin America.(09:09) Gaël: That's not the first time I hear someone saying that digital sustainability per se, not sustainability at large, because a lot of stuff is obviously going on in Latin America, but digital sustainability is not a hot topic. Ismael, is it something that you agree with, especially with regards to the situation in Mexico?(09:29) Ismael: Yes, I think I recognize that situation, and I think it's probably the case for almost all of Latin America, with the exception of the academic sector in Brazil. But in Brazil, you do have quite a lot of academia that has been publishing for years. They've been, I think, some of the earliest thinkers around brain computing and digital sustainability. But they are the exception. And I don't think even in Brazil it has expanded outside of academia into industry in any meaningful way. In Mexico, a bit like we heard for Colombia, I've organized a number of events here on ‘greening your software’. I've given a few talks, etc. I'm in touch with a lot of developer communities here, in the thousands. And I think every single time, without exception, when I brought up the theme, it has been the first time anyone remembers ever having come across a talk or an event dedicated to the subject. But, like Catalina mentioned, there aren’t really any accessible resources in Spanish. There aren't bodies that are pushing for it. There isn't a regulatory or a policy agenda for it. And the people who have thought about it have tended to think about it in isolation. We've been trying to start building communities through a set of events around ‘Green Your Software’. We launched one in Mexico. We're hoping, with Catalina, to do something like that in Colombia too, and also outside of Latin America too. But generally speaking, I would say that, like Catalina, my experience is that the topic is highly resonant. The moment that people hear about it, developers in particular, they go, ‘ah, that makes sense’. I want to do something about it. But it's almost always the very first time they've thought about it. The level of awareness is extremely, extremely low, with the possible exception of Bitcoin, which has got such a globally bad reputation environmentally, that it has permeated the popular consciousness. And people might go, ‘oh, yeah, Bitcoin might be bad for the environment’. But outside of that, I don't think it's a discussion that is happening in general.(12:04) Gaël: So how come we are facing so many issues? Catalina, you mentioned that a lack of documentation in Spanish was one of the issues, but is there any other hurdle that a designer (because you're more on the designer side) faces, to start greening the web?(12:28) Catalina: I agree with what Ismael said, that the principal problem is the awareness. Yes, many companies and professionals in Latin America are still aware of the environmental impacts of their online activities. The lack of education and awareness about digital sustainability is a key challenge for those of us who create and consume internet content. Another very important point is the resistance to change. Some companies and professionals may resist to change, especially if they believe that adopting sustainable practices could increase their costs or require additional efforts. Another point is green hosting challenges. At times, selecting eco-friendly hosting provided by renewable energy sources can be a challenge, as there may be a lack of available options in certain areas and costs can probably be high.(13:36) Gaël: Ismael, is this something that you've noticed as well or do you have another angle as a developer?(13:44) Ismael: Both. I definitely agree with absolutely everything that Catalina has said, but I also think that there is a structural issue that is driving a lot of this, and it's the nature of the ICT market in Latin America. I think there are four layers to it. You have the base layer of a very small website and simple apps for a domestic market, that are not necessarily high skill and they're also not high in price. So that means that developers generally do not have much say in terms of what or how they build. They are freelancing. There's a huge gig economy around ICT. So that first layer of the gig economy means that even if you cared about green software, and even if you were a bit informed about green software, the opportunities to present it, to incorporate it, to discuss it, are smaller. Then you have the next layer, which is where you have developers who are building more sophisticated software applications, and are who are primarily competing on price - they tend to be software agencies, and this is another scenario where they are given not a lot of resources, not a lot of time to come up with an app and who do not necessarily have a high level of training or focus on quality. The importance is to churn out products and the jobs are precarious. So, the long-term thinking around green quality, around impact, around all kinds of things that companies might do if they're building a single product over three or four or five years is much harder to do if you've got a three-month contract or a five-month contract.(16:12.) Gaël: There is, in different parts of Latin America, a much more highly skilled digital labor force and people are offshoring to Latin America and often for longer-term projects. So often, in major companies, people will have products that they're building and they will have entire teams based in Mexico or in Colombia or in other parts of Latin America. And there you will have the level of expertise required to build perhaps green apps, but the commissioning process, the people making the actual decisions on architecture, on design, on hiring, are all in the United States, in Canada, in Europe, and they don't particularly care about the environment.So, they are achieving high quality for lower price. And then the final layer is the unicorns. You have some Latin American tech companies that have begun to emerge in Mexico. I can't remember the number, there might be five or ten unicorns. So, these are people getting billions from venture capitalists etc., and they are no more green than any of the big companies in the global North. So, whereas I think there is a big gap between awareness in Latin America and awareness in North America and Europe, I don't think the gap in practice is equally as large, because in Europe and in North America, people really are much more aware of the environmental implications of software, but I don't think they are particularly more committed or active in building greener software. So, the same people who are building the most polluting software on a global scale across Europe and North America are the people who are hiring the Developers in Latin America to build that software. So, there's a whole bunch of structural factors that, even if you have the desire to build green, would create significant barriers. These are significant barriers, because you have less power.as an external freelancing or contracting Dev than if you are a staff engineer in Google, for example, to say, actually, ‘I want to do it green’. So even if you have the awareness and the resources, I think there are economics and responsibilities that lie outside of Latin America for some of the barriers that we have in implementing green applications.(19:30) Gaël: Ismael that's super insightful to go all the way up to the entire structure of the tech economy in Latin America. So overall, this is not really good news that you have shared because low level of general awareness, lack of documentation in Spanish, lack of green, (or not a single one, actually) structural issues, several about who gives order a short-term profit incentivization. I guess it was you, Ismael, who also mentioned that there is a terrible lack of political pressure concerning these topics. So, it’s pretty hard to try to code green or to design green in Latin America.Yet still, here you are, like thousands of others. So, I'd like to switch the narrative a bit here, and to see the glass as half full or even one third or one quarter full, and say, okay, so I'm just a tech worker in Latin America, what can I leverage to help me build a greener internet? And how vibrant is the green IT ecosystem in Latin America? Because maybe it's not as vibrant as other parts of the world, but I know for sure that there are people working on these topics. What are the available resources? We say that there are not many, but I guess we still have some resources. What network should I connect with? So, Catalina, would you like to give some advice to someone starting in the design or the sustainable design business? What would you say to this person? (21:07) Catalina: There are some resources available such as blogs, discussion groups and online communities. The offer in Spanish, like those in Portuguese, is not the same as that compared to languages such as English or German. But I think that digital sustainability today in Latin America is an issue only for large worldwide private companies, such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft or other large companies in the country / region, for example, Globant, Nubank, Rappi, Natura, Mercado Libre. But it is noticed as subject now by small entrepreneurs or micro entrepreneurs or designers or developers. We have to start talking about digital sobriety and the impact of digital actions by ordinary citizens can contribute. Not only how the companies we consume can neutralize carbon emission, but also how we, the user, can support and contribute. (22.15) Gaël: Ismael, from a developer's perspective, what would be the resources and the approaches that you would advocate? (23.23) Ismael: I'd like to mention three things and not just as a developer, but also for entrepreneurs. And I think we need to make and understand that green software is not a barrier or a hurdle to get over, but it's also a commercial opportunity. So, for example, across Latin America, there is, in Mexico, I think there's something like 71 million regular internet users, but there's a huge percentage of people who have very low intermittent access to the internet. In other parts of Latin America, the number of people with poor connectivity is even greater. If you're able to design an app that is green, you are likely to design an app that works well under low connectivity; that uses less data, so it is cheaper to run. And you are likely to design an app that is flexible, depending on availability, which means that you've got a gigantic addressable market that does not exist in the global north. So, the first thing I would say is that entrepreneurs, companies, inventors in Latin America should think about that large addressable market that could be reached if you build software with green patterns. And the nice thing about green software is that you end up building an app that works both for the person in that village that has full connectivity, and for the businessman in the city, and for the woman president in that country. And they can all use the same app because you developed it ‘green’.The second thing that I would mention is that regulation is coming. It's already started. Europe as ever is ahead. France is ahead of Europe. The US is beginning to catch up. And this means that a lot of the nearshoring jobs that will come to us in Latin America, a lot of the companies in the US and in the EU who will hire Latin American debts, will in the next three to five years, have to demonstrate that they are reducing emissions in the apps they build. So that means that if you're a developer or a student right now, and you master the art of green software, you're going to be at the cutting edge of labor demand when there is a huge skills gap. And when people are coming to Mexico or to Colombia and saying, ‘we want to hire devs but in order to comply with regulation, it needs to be built green’, it you've started learning now, you're going to be in a uniquely competitive space. And the last thing that I want to mention is community. Community really matters. Go check the software community that Catalina mentioned. Climateaction.tech has a bit of a Latin American bit growing.But I also wanted to say to any listener that the Adora Foundation is going to launch a project to bring green computing knowledge onto Wikipedia in Spanish. And there are grants for this. So, if anybody wants to partner with us in creating what they call Wikathons, I think, but basically, partnering with us in creating new and translating existing green compute content into Wikipedia, please reach out to me on LinkedIn, and we will add you into the partnership. And together we can create a massive explosion of access to knowledge in the most democratic platform available in Spanish and eventually in Portuguese and other languages too, but we'll be starting in Spanish. (26.33) Gaël: And just to bounce back on what you've said, Ismael, actually there is another tool which is now available in Spanish - the Digital Collage:-(26.47) Ismael: El mural digital.(26.33) Gaël: Yes. Ismail, you mentioned communities, and I know that Catalina, in previous discussions, you mentioned the importance of the open-source community as one of the solutions, because we're still trying to answer this question: ‘Where can I start when I am a developer or a designer or an entrepreneur in the tech sector in Latin America?’. Do you want to elaborate on the importance of the open-source community?(27.25) Catalina: Yeah, the open community in Latin America is very big and robust and very active. The focus is the collaboration and open access and quality software. Maybe the privacy and data security is a central topic. But it's important that I mention that in Medellín, my city, because Medellín won the recognition of the most innovative city in the world in 2018, and the most intelligent city in the country in 2022. And is known as, or is calling to be known as, the software valley. Here, there is enough scholarship to bring people closer to technology. And we are rich human talent in all digital issues, and we are in the place that has the most technology communities within the country, or maybe the region. But the question is we never hear about sustainable web design, green software or digital sobriety, that there is only focus on programming language, databases, artificial intelligence, security, marketing frameworks, libraries, apps, etc. And my question is why? Digital technologies are responsible for the 4% of all greenhouse gas emissions of the planet, and that the cloud has a larger carbon footprint than the aviation industry. That 10 hours of high-quality video contain more data than all the Wikipedia articles in text format. That the web and the data centers that power our digital lives consume more energy and water that we can imagine. And it's controversial, because it's a city that has many technology communities, but it never speaks about this topic, this ‘sustainable digital’ and it's a question for me every time, every day. (29:56) Ismael: I think that's a really great point, Catalina, a really important one. I have also found that I know many Mexican developers who are in the very top rank of open-source contributors to their projects, people who have contributed to the Linux kernel or people who are at the heart of WordPress, or at the heart of all kinds of big open-source projects with really serious international contributions and recognition. And I think that would be a fantastic population to target. And if they are listening to this podcast (and I hope they are), I will certainly be promoting it.I think if you've got a voice in your area of open source, if you are a serious contributor as a Latin American to an open-source project, consider that you may be the person who can green that technology. You may be in a really good place to actually impact on a technology that impacts millions of people because you know what you're doing and you've got reputation and credentials. So, to all the Latin American open-source contributors out there, and especially those of you who are really serious about it, consider asking yourself the technical question: If I wanted to green this open-source project, what would I do? And then rally people around it. You will find all of us around the world supporting your efforts.(31.44) Gaël: Thank you Ismail. That's very inspiring and actually quite true as well, because the momentum we've got today in digital sustainability in Europe, just to speak about what I've experiencing, has been built a lot on the open-source community, and with people just, as you said, starting to pay attention, usually coming from privacy movements, the question of truly open source, and the intellectual property issues around digital rights, etc. And suddenly they are switching to, ‘oh, but actually there is a missing part in my puzzle, which is sustainability’.And connecting to the question of having different angles, there is one last question I wanted to ask to both of you. Going a bit beyond this green angle that we had, how much can we, or shouldn't we, disconnect the environment from other issues like ethics or social justice in Latin America? Because we were discussing before the interview that some, especially some countries in Latin America, are rife with inequalities and that might be hard, actually, to dissociate both, or should we dissociate both because otherwise no topics get any traction if we try to connect too many things. What are your opinions on it?(33.17) Catalina: Okay, I believe that we cannot disconnect and separate these issues, because everything in the planet is systemic. The environment, ethics and social justice are interconnected in systems that depend on each other and together they form a complete vision of a better and brighter world for all. Social justice means that everyone must have equal access to resources and opportunities, and that basic human rights must be protected. And the ethics is about doing the right thing and treating our natural environment and other forms of life with respect. We must act responsibly to preserve the herd, not just for ourselves, but for others as well. Our ethics is how we treat the herd and others life forms, it has a direct impact on social justice for generations. But I think that it's impossible to disconnect and separate these issues.(34:33) Ismael: Thank you, Catalina, for your point about ethics. Actually, you're not going to green software if you do not have values that drive you towards it, right? It is a values-based choice. So, you cannot associate values from that decision. I would question, however, the framing, Gael, that you introduced, because you pointed out the inequalities within Latin America. And I think the inequalities within Latin America are a huge, huge dimension of this. If you do not have access to water, let alone to internet, let alone to full literacy, then clearly your ability to contribute to – though I guess you are contributing to a greener digital footprint by not using it - but you will be limited in those abilities and those skills if your access to information is limited. Then even if you are educated and keen, it's going to be hard for you to acquire it.However, the real constraint on greening the digital world in Latin America, from mining through to the supply chain, through software building, is not the inequalities within Latin America, it's the inequalities between Latin America and the rest of the world. It is the dynamics of the way Europe, and in particular the United States and Canada and China and the richer countries, interact and consume Latin American resources and products, that are the biggest determinant of the kind of applications that get built. So, the challenge of justice here is that it is definitely crucial to have justice within Latin America. But one of the reasons why you don't have regulation that works, is because of pressure from companies that are not based in Latin America. So, I would say the social justice issues are the sine qua non, the basis of achieving digital sustainability in Latin America. But that involves the inequalities between the people who commission most of the digital products in Latin America, which is the global north, and the people who produce them in the global south. That inequality, I think, is the key barrier. If you can make all of the companies that commission software or mining or supplies or sell e-waste to Latin America from abroad, demand green standards, you will see that digital sustainability accelerates dramatically. And without that, all the goodwill, all the conviction, all the dedication of people like ourselves in Latin America will not achieve a systemic impact. So, yes to the inequalities, but I would say it's the global ones that count more than the regional ones at this stage.(38.10) Catalina: Yeah, I totally agree Ismael’s whole answer. (38:17) Gaël: Yes, thanks Ismael, fair point. It's also definitely an issue about inequalities across the world, and not just within a country or a continent. Now being mindful of time, do you want to add just one more recommendation to learn more on digital sustainability if you're based in Latin America? (38.44) Catalina: I would recommend the talks by Elena Morettini, who is the Global Head of Sustainable Business at Globant, and shares a lot of values, content about transition and energy efficiency and green IT for business/(39.00) Gaël: And what would be your pick, Ismael?(39.04) Ismael: Well, I am conflicted, because I'm going to recommend something that I want to discourage at the same time. So, I'm going to say why I don't want you to use it. I don't want you to use ChatGTP and Bard and LLMs because they are environmentally 10 times worse than most other alternatives. However, what I will say is, if the main barrier right now is information, if you are in Latin America, and if you're listening to this, you probably have enough fluency so that's not your barrier. But you will have so many colleagues for whom this might be a barrier. And what I would advise is, search and google all the resources, all the names that Catalina mentioned, and they are connected. So, the moment you find one, if you find Jerry McGovern, if you find Wholegrain Digital, if you find the people in this very podcast, if you find who Gaël has interviewed, look them up, basically go find all the resources you can in English and translate them. If you can use Google Translate first, it'll be cheaper environmentally. But if not, to be honest, that is a trade-off that I am happy to do. If using ChatGPT or Bard will equip you to green the next 300 apps that you build the rest of your life, go and use it.(40:52) Gaël: Excellent. I didn't expect such an answer. But that's a very nice one. That's a beautifully played card. I'm not going to choose, actually, I'm going to list all these great resources, but the tool is translation. And I fully agree with you, Ismail. Sometimes you use a terrible tool in the right way and that’s the worth the type of investment. But that was great. And so, because we are on a positive mood, Ismail, if you had to share one piece of good news which made you optimistic recently about our path toward a more sustainable world, what would it be?(41.37) Ismael: I need to say that good news is there if you look for it. Around COP27, there were these series of reports that came out, that were dire. They were terrible, they really were. The situation is absolutely horrific. We're moving too slow. But buried in all of those reports, were extraordinary achievements that no one really reported. So, I was in Paris for COP 21. And I remember that at the start of COP 21, the level of ambition was on the floor. None of us believed this was going to lead anywhere, not the governments, not the activists, not the NGOs, not the academics, nobody. And then civil society moved. The largest demonstrations in the history of the planet and the use of technology, groups like Avaaz creating mobilizations. And in real time, I saw governments change their positions. And then when people weren't going to embrace certain targets, city mayors embraced those targets. Terrible multinationals embraced targets, and the mood changed. Now, at that point, the status quo, the business-as-usual scenario, was leading us into the worst apocalypse. The latest reports that came out are saying that we are on track for catastrophe, but we have moved away from apocalypse. No one has tracked the fact that at the most dysfunctional time in global decision-making, humanity has managed to shift track. For the first time in the whole of our records, by 2030, the IEA expects emissions to no longer grow, but to flatline. None of this is enough to spare us from catastrophe. But it shows, that as a global community, we have the power to truly change scenarios. So, we need to understand that power, not become complacent, and go, ‘it's all okay’, but also not to forget that hope exists empirically.(44:15) Gaël: Thanks a lot Ismael. I may just comment on COP21 that, yes, civil society played a big role, but hey, this is the episode on Latin America, so I guess we also have to give a big kudos to one of my longtime heroes now, which is Cristiana Figueres, obviously, because if she hadn't have been there, leading the UN climate delegation, with her amazing ambassador skills, and everything else that she built around her, and the team she brought, etc., I don't believe anything would have been achieved (without downplaying the massive role civil society played too). I'm not trying to give her a percentage here, but just acknowledging that, yes, I think without her, we would be in real dire straits at the moment.(45.08) Gaël: What about you, Catalina? Is there one piece of good news that you'd like to share? (45.14) Catalina: Concerning this point, I need to talk about WordPress. This is my community, right, and some excellent recent news is that the global WordPress community has formed a sustainability group. With 264 members showing a growing interest in the topic though only from Latin America, like Ismael and me, but this is an important step for other people, other humans, whether Spain or other countries in Europe. But it's also encouraging to see that several developers are reducing the size of their plugins to make them more efficient and environmentally friendly. Awareness about the importance of greening servers is increasing, where every small contribution, like removing a single kilobyte, or millions of websites, can significantly reduce carbon emission. Also, it's inspiring to see more people engage in creating a more sustainable web. That is a good piece of news, and good for the global community for WordPress, because it's a good step. (46:44) Gaël: Thanks a lot, both of you, for sharing such positive news at the end, and for the amazing work that you're doing in Latin America, and way beyond just a green internet, to make people aware of the environmental footprint of our digital world. Thanks too for being there, and connecting with me on being based on a very different time zone, and for accommodating all those differences. So, thanks a lot. It was great having both of you. I hope this episode will be very useful for people based in this beautiful region of the world. And as usual, I will put all the references in the show notes. Thanks a lot for being there, both of you.(47.35) Ismael: Thank you. Great opportunity and great to chat with both of you, Catalina and Gaël. Really great opportunity. Thank you.(47.44) Catalina: Thank you, Gaël. Thank you, Ismael. Really, really, I'm very, very happy to share.(47.51) Gaël: Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. In episode 27, we will talk about all the tools provided by the Green Software Foundation to decarbonize software. There are quite a few, and Nassim Hussain, the Executive Director of Green Software himself, will give us a guided tour. And he might also share some exclusive announcements before the big Decarb Software 2023 conference. So stay tuned.Before you leave, a small message from our sponsor. No, I'm still kidding. Green IO is a free and independent podcast. And so we need your help to keep it that way. You can help us by supporting us on Tipeee. The link is in the episode notes. But if you cannot donate, that's fine. You can support us by spreading the word. And I know, I've asked you several times already, and I'm bothering you with this, but please do rate the podcast five stars on Apple or Spotify. And if you've already done it, ask a friend to do it too. This is the only way that we will get new listeners via the search in these platforms. So thanks a lot for rating the podcast. That's super cool of you. And hopefully we will get more listeners and more responsible technologists joining the show. You know, each vote is truly worth a thousand likes on YouTube, believe me, when you compare very successful YouTubers and very successful podcasters.Now, if you don't have Spotify or Apple Podcasts, that's perfectly fine, share an episode on social media or directly with a relative, and it will be way more effective than many ads. So thanks a lot for that. Seriously, thanks for your support. It means a lot to us. Us being me, but also Tani Levitt, our amazing podcast producer, and Jill Tellier, our amazing podcast curator. We are delighted to help you, the responsible technologists, scattered all over the world, build a greener digital world….one byte at a time.

Transcript (in Spanish - AI generated)
(00:09) Gaël: Hola a todos, bienvenidos a Green IO, el podcast para tecnólogos responsables que construyen un mundo digital más verde, byte a byte. En Green IO, exploramos cómo reducir el impacto ambiental de nuestro mundo digital. Nuestros invitados de todo el mundo comparten ideas, herramientas y enfoques alternativos que permiten a las personas dentro del sector tecnológico, y más allá, impulsar la sostenibilidad digital. Más de 300 millones de usuarios digitales, hogar de docenas de unicornios, con escenas tecnológicas vibrantes repartidas por la región. 2.2 millones trabajando en el sector tecnológico, de internet y comunicación, según LinkedIn. No, no estoy hablando de Europa, sino de América Latina. América Latina, un jugador significativo en nuestro mundo digital y, como tal, un contribuyente significativo a sus impactos ambientales. Solo siguiendo un enfoque no riguroso basado en el número de sus usuarios, pero recuerden que la mayoría de los impactos ambientales provienen de la fabricación y el uso de dispositivos y el consumo de electricidad de estos dispositivos. Resumiendo mi análisis rápido, con el 5.5% de los usuarios mundiales, la huella de carbono de América Latina por sus actividades digitales sería alrededor de 77 millones de toneladas de CO2 (2019), lo que es más que cualquier país en América Central, excepto México, obviamente, y, por ejemplo, es más de lo que ha emitido Uruguay. Así que supongo que ahora han entendido que el episodio de hoy trata sobre América Latina, y más específicamente, cómo alguien que trabaja en el sector digital y está basado en América Latina puede contribuir a descarbonizar Internet. Para ayudarnos a encontrar las respuestas, me complace dar la bienvenida a dos invitados hoy. Catalina Zapata, que está basada en Medellín, Colombia. Catalina es una experimentada diseñadora web que inició un proyecto llamado La Web Verde, (mi pronunciación es terrible porque es en español) con el objetivo de democratizar la sostenibilidad en la web, enseñar a diseñadores y desarrolladores cómo crear proyectos digitales más sostenibles y, más específicamente, difundir la conciencia verde sobre nuestra huella digital dentro de la comunidad de WordPress.

(02:34.39) Gaël: Descubrí a Catalina en este vibrante grupo de sostenibilidad de WordPress el año pasado, y cuando me puse en contacto con ella, me dijo que ya era una oyente regular del podcast. Y cuando le pregunté por qué estaba tan interesada en la sostenibilidad, tuvo una respuesta muy directa: porque respiramos el mismo aire y todos estamos en el mismo planeta. Y eso fue bastante directo. Bueno, luego, de hecho, me dijo que hace tres años leyó un artículo sobre Internet siendo el cuarto país más contaminante del mundo, y eso fue como un momento 'ja-ja'. Pero en realidad, creo que incluso me gusta más su primera respuesta. Ismael Velasco está basado en México y lo conocí a través de la increíble comunidad CAT. Ismael es un veterano de la industria del software en general, y del software verde en particular. Su concepto de 'degradación grácil' de API me atrajo de inmediato, pero descubrí a alguien cuyo conocimiento y compromiso van mucho más allá de la tecnología verde, con su participación en la Fundación Adora, que impulsa la innovación social en todo el mundo, y su reciente decisión de centrarse más en el lado sostenible de la tecnología. Así que, bienvenida Catalina, bienvenido Ismael. Muchas gracias por unirse a Green IO hoy.

(04:02) Ismael: Es genial estar aquí. Genial estar contigo.

(04:05) Catalina: Gracias, Gael, por conectar, por invitar y crear este espacio, que no solo es innovador, sino que también es muy, muy, muy necesario para aquellos que diseñan la web y consumen Internet.

(04:18) Gaël: Wow, muchas gracias a ambos. Me encantaría comenzar, de hecho, con una pregunta muy directa. ¿El título de este episodio está completamente equivocado? Quiero decir, ¿América Latina es un ámbito pertinente para abordar la tecnología y la sostenibilidad? Ismael, ¿tienes una opinión al respecto?

(04:40) Ismael: Creo, personalmente, que sí, es una categoría significativa. Creo que la distribución de la tecnología y el papel y contribución de la tecnología divergen regionalmente. Cada país, cada área tendrá perfiles diferentes. Pero creo que las realidades principales que enfrenta América Latina en relación con la tecnología tienen muchos paralelos. Creo que culturalmente, hay probablemente aún más similitud en toda América Latina que en Europa, en muchas áreas. Las tensiones que experimentamos a menudo también se reflejan en otros países. Entonces, creo que definitivamente es una categoría significativa, lo que no significa que sea homogénea. Creo que encontrarás una enorme diversidad de país a país. Pero no creo que eso niegue el hecho de que abordar la realidad de la tecnología a nivel latinoamericano tenga sentido en muchos niveles. Así que sí.

(05:45) Gaël: Catalina, ¿tienes una opinión al respecto?

(05:48) Catalina: Creo que en Europa, la sostenibilidad digital se ha convertido en una prioridad tanto para el gobierno como para los negocios. Pero hay regulaciones estrictas sobre la eficiencia energética de los centros de datos, el reciclaje de dispositivos electrónicos y la reducción de las emisiones de carbono en el sector tecnológico. Estados Unidos no ha alcanzado los estándares europeos, pero hay una creciente conciencia de la reducción de la huella de carbono. Pero en América Latina, tenemos un gran desafío para acceder a recursos y conocimientos, y el acceso a la información en español es limitado. Es necesario traducir y adaptar recursos al español y a otros idiomas nativos del continente, para que la información sea más accesible y utilizable. Sin embargo, creo que tenemos un gran potencial, pero se necesita más conciencia y educación de todos nosotros que creamos la web y consumimos Internet.

(06:57) Gaël: Bueno, ese es un comentario muy interesante, Catalina, y hay muchas cosas diferentes que desempacar aquí. Así que volveremos a ellos punto por punto, pero me gustaría volver a lo que acabas de decir sobre el nivel de conciencia en todo el mundo. ¿Cuál es el nivel de conciencia según tú sobre la sostenibilidad digital en América Latina?

(07:19) Catalina: Para mí, es muy, muy, muy bajo. La sostenibilidad digital es un concepto extraño en Colombia y América Latina. Todos hablan sobre cambio climático, cero neto, economía circular, objetivos de desarrollo sostenible, moda sostenible, derechos humanos, movilidad verde, reciclaje, inclusión, empoderamiento femenino, inteligencia artificial, ecoturismo. Pero nadie habla sobre software verde, web verde o el impacto de Internet en cada una de nuestras acciones digitales en las emisiones de carbono. Y me pregunto por qué. Para darte un ejemplo de lo ignorantes que somos. Soy embajadora del Proyecto Realidad Climática. Es una organización sin fines de lucro, una de las comunidades más grandes de líderes climáticos del mundo creada para promover soluciones al cambio climático. Esta organización tiene una plataforma virtual donde todos pueden conectarse con otros líderes. Hay materiales, videos, foros, eventos, recursos, encuestas, discusiones, seminarios, reuniones virtuales, oportunidades laborales. Y durante los últimos tres años, no he encontrado una sola conversación sobre sostenibilidad digital, diseño web sostenible o soberanía digital. El servidor donde se aloja el sitio web y la comunidad digital no es un servidor verde. Eso crea mucha inconsistencia entre lo que se dice y lo que se hace en empresas u organizaciones o agentes de cambio en América Latina.

(09:09) Gaël: No es la primera vez que escucho a alguien decir que la sostenibilidad digital per se, no la sostenibilidad en general, porque obviamente hay muchas cosas sucediendo en América Latina, pero la sostenibilidad digital no es un tema candente. Ismael, ¿es algo con lo que estás de acuerdo, especialmente en lo que respecta a la situación en México?

(09:29) Ismael: Sí, creo que reconozco esa situación, y creo que es probablemente el caso para casi toda América Latina, con la excepción del sector académico en Brasil. Pero en Brasil, tienes mucha academia que ha estado publicando durante años. Han sido algunos de los primeros pensadores en torno a la informática y la sostenibilidad digital. Pero son la excepción. Y no creo que incluso en Brasil haya expandido fuera de la academia hacia la industria de manera significativa. En México, un poco como escuchamos para Colombia, he organizado varios eventos aquí sobre 'hacer que tu software sea verde'. He dado algunas charlas, etc. Estoy en contacto con muchas comunidades de desarrolladores aquí, en miles. Y creo que cada vez, sin excepción, cuando mencioné el tema, fue la primera vez que alguien recuerda haberse encontrado alguna vez con una charla o un evento dedicado al tema. Pero, como mencionó Catalina, realmente no hay muchos recursos accesibles en español. No hay entidades que estén presionando por ello. No hay una agenda normativa o política al respecto. Y las personas que han pensado en ello tienden a hacerlo de manera aislada. Hemos estado tratando de comenzar a construir comunidades a través de una serie de eventos sobre 'Haz que tu software sea verde'. Lanzamos uno en México. Esperamos, con Catalina, hacer algo así en Colombia también, y también fuera de América Latina. Pero en términos generales, diría que, al igual que Catalina, mi experiencia es que el tema resuena mucho. En el momento en que las personas escuchan al respecto, especialmente los desarrolladores, dicen: 'ah, tiene sentido'. Quiero hacer algo al respecto. Pero casi siempre es la primera vez que lo han pensado. El nivel de conciencia es extremadamente bajo, con la posible excepción de Bitcoin, que tiene una reputación ambiental global tan negativa que ha permeado la conciencia popular. Y la gente puede pensar: 'oh, sí, Bitcoin podría ser perjudicial para el medio ambiente'. Pero fuera de eso, no creo que sea una discusión que esté sucediendo en general.

(12:04) Gaël: Entonces, ¿cómo es que nos enfrentamos a tantos problemas? Catalina, mencionaste que la falta de documentación en español era uno de los problemas, pero ¿hay algún otro obstáculo que un diseñador (porque estás más en el lado del diseño) enfrenta para empezar a 'verdear' la web?

(12:28) Catalina: Estoy de acuerdo con lo que dijo Ismael, que el problema principal es la conciencia. Sí, muchas empresas y profesionales en América Latina aún no son conscientes de los impactos ambientales de sus actividades en línea. La falta de educación y conciencia sobre la sostenibilidad digital es un desafío clave para aquellos de nosotros que creamos y consumimos contenido en Internet. Otro punto muy importante es la resistencia al cambio. Algunas empresas y profesionales pueden resistirse al cambio, especialmente si creen que adoptar prácticas sostenibles podría aumentar sus costos o requerir esfuerzos adicionales. Otro punto son los desafíos del alojamiento verde. A veces, seleccionar alojamiento ecológico proporcionado por fuentes de

(12:28) Catalina: Estoy de acuerdo con lo que dijo Ismael, que el problema principal es la conciencia. Sí, muchas empresas y profesionales en América Latina aún no son conscientes de los impactos ambientales de sus actividades en línea. La falta de educación y conciencia sobre la sostenibilidad digital es un desafío clave para aquellos de nosotros que creamos y consumimos contenido en internet. Otro punto muy importante es la resistencia al cambio. Algunas empresas y profesionales pueden resistirse al cambio, especialmente si creen que adoptar prácticas sostenibles podría aumentar sus costos o requerir esfuerzos adicionales. Otro punto son los desafíos del alojamiento ecológico. A veces, seleccionar alojamiento ecológico proporcionado por fuentes de energía renovable puede ser un desafío, ya que puede haber falta de opciones disponibles en ciertas áreas y los costos pueden ser altos.

(13:36) Gaël: Ismael, ¿esto es algo que también has notado o tienes otro enfoque como desarrollador?

(13:44) Ismael: Ambos. Estoy totalmente de acuerdo con todo lo que Catalina ha dicho, pero también creo que hay un problema estructural que está impulsando mucho de esto, y es la naturaleza del mercado de las TIC en América Latina. Creo que hay cuatro capas. Tienes la capa base de un sitio web muy pequeño y aplicaciones simples para un mercado nacional, que no son necesariamente de alta habilidad y tampoco son de alto precio. Eso significa que los desarrolladores generalmente no tienen mucho que decir en términos de qué o cómo construyen. Son freelancers. Hay una gran economía gig en torno a las TIC. Así que esa primera capa de la economía gig significa que incluso si te importa el software verde, e incluso si estás un poco informado sobre el software verde, las oportunidades para presentarlo, incorporarlo, discutirlo, son menores. Luego tienes la siguiente capa, donde tienes desarrolladores que están construyendo aplicaciones de software más sofisticadas y que compiten principalmente en precio, tienden a ser agencias de software, y este es otro escenario donde no se les dan muchos recursos, no se les da mucho tiempo para crear una aplicación y que no necesariamente tienen un alto nivel de formación o enfoque en la calidad. La importancia es producir productos y los trabajos son precarios. Así que, pensar a largo plazo en torno a la calidad verde, al impacto, a todas las cosas que las empresas podrían hacer si estuvieran construyendo un solo producto durante tres, cuatro o cinco años, es mucho más difícil de hacer si tienes un contrato de tres meses o cinco meses.

(16:12) Gaël: En diferentes partes de América Latina, hay una fuerza laboral digital mucho más calificada y las personas están externalizando a América Latina y a menudo para proyectos a más largo plazo. Entonces, a menudo, en grandes empresas, las personas tendrán productos que están construyendo y tendrán equipos enteros con sede en México, Colombia u otras partes de América Latina. Y allí tendrás el nivel de experiencia necesario para construir quizás aplicaciones verdes, pero el proceso de encargo, las personas que toman las decisiones reales sobre arquitectura, diseño, contratación, están todas en Estados Unidos, Canadá, Europa, y no les importa particularmente el medio ambiente.
Así que están logrando alta calidad por un precio más bajo. Y luego la capa final son los unicornios. Tienes algunas empresas tecnológicas latinoamericanas que han comenzado a surgir en México. No puedo recordar el número, puede haber cinco o diez unicornios. Entonces, estas personas están recibiendo miles de millones de dólares de capitalistas de riesgo, etc., y no son más verdes que cualquiera de las grandes empresas en el norte global. Entonces, aunque creo que hay una gran brecha entre la conciencia en América Latina y la conciencia en América del Norte y Europa, no creo que la brecha en la práctica sea igual de grande, porque en Europa y en América del Norte, la gente realmente está mucho más consciente de las implicaciones ambientales del software, pero no creo que estén particularmente más comprometidos o activos en la construcción de software más verde. Entonces, las mismas personas que están construyendo el software más contaminante a nivel mundial en Europa y América del Norte son las personas que están contratando a los desarrolladores en América Latina para construir ese software. Así que hay una serie de factores estructurales que, incluso si tienes el deseo de construir de manera verde, crearían barreras significativas. Estas son barreras significativas, porque tienes menos poder como un freelancer externo o contratista que si eres un ingeniero de planta en Google, por ejemplo, para decir, en realidad, 'quiero hacerlo verde'. Entonces, incluso si tienes la conciencia y los recursos, creo que hay economías y responsabilidades que están fuera de América Latina para algunas de las barreras que tenemos en la implementación de aplicaciones verdes.

(19:30) Gaël: Ismael, eso es muy perspicaz para llegar hasta la estructura completa de la economía tecnológica en América Latina. En general, esto no son buenas noticias que has compartido porque hay un bajo nivel de conciencia general, falta de documentación en español, falta de verde (o ni siquiera una, de hecho) problemas estructurales, varios sobre quién da la orden de incentivos de ganancias a corto plazo. Supongo que fuiste tú, Ismael, quien también mencionó que hay una terrible falta de presión política sobre estos temas. Entonces, es bastante difícil intentar programar de manera verde o diseñar de manera verde en América Latina.
Sin embargo, aquí estás, como miles de otros. Así que me gustaría cambiar un poco la narrativa aquí, y ver el vaso medio lleno o incluso un tercio o un cuarto lleno, y decir, bueno, soy solo un trabajador tecnológico en América Latina, ¿qué puedo aprovechar para ayudarme a construir un internet más verde? ¿Y qué tan vibrante es el ecosistema de TI verde en América Latina? Porque tal vez no sea tan vibrante como en otras partes del mundo, pero sé con certeza que hay personas trabajando en estos temas. ¿Cuáles son los recursos disponibles? Decimos que no hay muchos, pero creo que aún tenemos algunos recursos. ¿Con qué red debería conectarme? Entonces, Catalina, ¿te gustaría dar algunos consejos a alguien que comienza en el diseño o en el negocio del diseño sostenible? ¿Qué le dirías a esta persona?

(21:07) Catalina: Hay algunos recursos disponibles como blogs, grupos de discusión y comunidades en línea. La oferta en español, al igual que en portugués, no es la misma que en comparación con idiomas como inglés o alemán. Pero creo que la sostenibilidad digital hoy en América Latina es un problema solo para grandes empresas privadas a nivel mundial, como Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, u otras grandes empresas en el país o región, por ejemplo, Globant, Nubank, Rappi, Natura, Mercado Libre. Pero se está notando como un tema ahora también por pequeños empresarios, microempresarios, diseñadores o desarrolladores. Debemos empezar a hablar sobre la sobriedad digital y cómo las acciones digitales de los ciudadanos comunes pueden contribuir. No solo cómo las empresas que consumimos pueden neutralizar las emisiones de carbono, sino también cómo nosotros, los usuarios, podemos apoyar y contribuir.

(22.15) Gaël: Ismael, desde la perspectiva de un desarrollador, ¿cuáles serían los recursos y enfoques que defenderías?

(23.23) Ismael: Me gustaría mencionar tres cosas, y no solo como desarrollador, sino también para emprendedores. Y creo que necesitamos entender que el software verde no es una barrera o un obstáculo a superar, sino también una oportunidad comercial. Por ejemplo, en toda América Latina, en México hay algo así como 71 millones de usuarios regulares de Internet, pero hay un gran porcentaje de personas con acceso intermitente muy bajo a Internet. En otras partes de América Latina, el número de personas con una conectividad deficiente es aún mayor. Si puedes diseñar una aplicación que sea verde, es probable que diseñes una aplicación que funcione bien con una baja conectividad; que use menos datos, por lo que es más barata de operar. Y es probable que diseñes una aplicación que sea flexible, dependiendo de la disponibilidad, lo que significa que tienes un mercado direccionable gigantesco que no existe en el norte global. Entonces, lo primero que diría es que los emprendedores, empresas e inventores en América Latina deberían pensar en ese gran mercado direccionable que podrían alcanzar si construyen software con patrones verdes. Y lo bueno del software verde es que terminas construyendo una aplicación que funciona tanto para la persona en ese pueblo que tiene conectividad completa, como para el empresario en la ciudad, y para la mujer presidenta en ese país. Y todos pueden usar la misma aplicación porque la desarrollaste 'verde'.La segunda cosa que mencionaría es que la regulación se está acercando. Ya ha comenzado. Europa, como siempre, va por delante. Francia va por delante de Europa. Estados Unidos está empezando a ponerse al día. Y esto significa que muchos de los trabajos de nearshoring que vendrán a nosotros en América Latina, muchas de las empresas en EE. UU. y en la UE que contratarán deudas latinoamericanas, en los próximos tres a cinco años, deberán demostrar que están reduciendo las emisiones en las aplicaciones que construyen. Entonces, eso significa que si eres un desarrollador o un estudiante en este momento, y dominas el arte del software verde, estarás en la vanguardia de la demanda laboral cuando haya una brecha de habilidades enorme. Y cuando la gente venga a México o a Colombia y diga: 'queremos contratar desarrolladores pero para cumplir con la regulación, debe construirse verde', si has comenzado a aprender ahora, estarás en un espacio competitivo único. Y la última cosa que quiero mencionar es la comunidad. La comunidad realmente importa. Ve a revisar la comunidad de software que mencionó Catalina. Climateaction.tech tiene una parte un poco creciente en América Latina.
Pero también quiero decir a cualquier oyente que la Fundación Adora va a lanzar un proyecto para llevar el conocimiento de la computación verde a Wikipedia en español. Y hay subvenciones para esto. Así que, si alguien quiere asociarse con nosotros para crear lo que llaman Wikatones, creo, pero básicamente, asociarse con nosotros para crear nuevo contenido y traducir contenido existente de computación verde en Wikipedia, por favor, contáctame en LinkedIn y te agregaremos a la asociación. Y juntos podemos crear una explosión masiva de acceso al conocimiento en la plataforma más democrática disponible en español y eventualmente en portugués y otros idiomas también, pero comenzaremos en español.

(26.33) Gaël: Y solo para retomar lo que has dicho, Ismael, de hecho, hay otra herramienta que ahora está disponible en español: el Mural Digital:-

(26.47) Ismael: El mural digital.

(26.33) Gaël: Sí. Ismael, mencionaste las comunidades, y sé que Catalina, en discusiones anteriores, mencionaste la importancia de la comunidad de código abierto como una de las soluciones, porque aún estamos tratando de responder a esta pregunta: '¿Dónde puedo empezar cuando soy un desarrollador o un diseñador o un emprendedor en el sector tecnológico en América Latina?'. ¿Quieres profundizar en la importancia de la comunidad de código abierto?

(27.25) Catalina: Sí, la comunidad abierta en América Latina es muy grande, robusta y muy activa. El enfoque es la colaboración, el acceso abierto y el software de calidad. Tal vez la privacidad y la seguridad de datos son temas centrales. Pero es importante que mencione que en Medellín, mi ciudad, porque Medellín ganó el reconocimiento de la ciudad más innovadora del mundo en 2018, y la ciudad más inteligente del país en 2022. Y se conoce como, o se está llamando a ser conocida como, el valle del software. Aquí, hay suficientes becas para acercar a las personas a la tecnología. Y tenemos un talento humano rico en todos los temas digitales, y estamos en el lugar que tiene la mayoría de las comunidades tecnológicas dentro del país, o tal vez la región. Pero la pregunta es que nunca escuchamos sobre diseño web sostenible, software verde o sobriedad digital, solo hay enfoque en lenguajes de programación, bases de datos, inteligencia artificial, seguridad, marcos de marketing, bibliotecas, aplicaciones, etc. Y mi pregunta es ¿por qué? Las tecnologías digitales son responsables del 4% de todas las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero del planeta, y la nube tiene una huella de carbono más grande que la industria de la aviación. Que 10 horas de video de alta calidad contienen más datos que todos los artículos de Wikipedia en formato de texto. Que la

web y los centros de datos que alimentan nuestras vidas digitales consumen más energía y agua de la que podemos imaginar. Y es controvertido, porque es una ciudad que tiene muchas comunidades tecnológicas, pero nunca habla sobre este tema, este 'digital sostenible', y es una pregunta para mí todos los días.

(29:56) Ismael: Creo que es un punto realmente excelente, Catalina, uno muy importante. También he descubierto que conozco a muchos desarrolladores mexicanos que están en la cima de los contribuyentes de código abierto a nivel internacional, personas que han contribuido al kernel de Linux o personas que están en el corazón de WordPress, o en el corazón de todo tipo de grandes proyectos de código abierto con contribuciones y reconocimientos internacionales realmente serios. Y creo que sería una población fantástica a la que apuntar. Y si están escuchando este podcast (y espero que sí), ciertamente lo estaré promoviendo.

Creo que si tienes voz en tu área de código abierto, si eres un contribuyente serio como latinoamericano a un proyecto de código abierto, considera que puedes ser la persona que puede 'verdear' esa tecnología. Puedes estar en un lugar realmente bueno para impactar en una tecnología que afecta a millones de personas porque sabes lo que estás haciendo y tienes reputación y credenciales. Así que, a todos los contribuyentes latinoamericanos de código abierto, y especialmente a aquellos de ustedes que son realmente serios al respecto, considérense capaces de preguntarse la pregunta técnica: Si quisiera 'verdear' este proyecto de código abierto, ¿qué haría? Y luego reunan a las personas a su alrededor. Nos encontrarás a todos en todo el mundo apoyando sus esfuerzos.

(31.44) Gaël: Gracias, Ismael. Eso es muy inspirador y realmente cierto también, porque el impulso que tenemos hoy en la sostenibilidad digital en Europa, solo para hablar de lo que estoy experimentando, se ha construido en gran medida en la comunidad de código abierto, y con personas que, como dijiste, comienzan a prestar atención, generalmente provienen de movimientos de privacidad, la cuestión de verdaderamente código abierto, y los problemas de propiedad intelectual en torno a los derechos digitales, etc. Y de repente se están cambiando a, 'oh, pero en realidad hay una parte faltante en mi rompecabezas, que es la sostenibilidad'.

Y conectando con la pregunta de tener diferentes perspectivas, hay una última pregunta que quería hacerles a ambos. Yendo un poco más allá de este ángulo verde que teníamos, ¿hasta qué punto podemos, o no deberíamos, desconectar el medio ambiente de otros problemas como ética o justicia social en América Latina? Porque estábamos discutiendo antes de la entrevista que algunos, especialmente algunos países en América Latina, están plagados de desigualdades y podría ser difícil, de hecho, disociar ambos, o ¿deberíamos disociar ambos porque de lo contrario ningún tema obtiene tracción si intentamos conectar demasiadas cosas? ¿Cuáles son sus opiniones al respecto?

(33.17) Catalina: Vale, creo que no podemos desconectar y separar estos temas, porque todo en el planeta es sistémico. El medio ambiente, la ética y la justicia social están interconectados en sistemas que dependen entre sí y juntos forman una visión completa de un mundo mejor y más brillante para todos. La justicia social significa que todos deben tener acceso igualitario a recursos y oportunidades, y que se deben proteger los derechos humanos básicos. Y la ética trata de hacer lo correcto y tratar nuestro entorno natural y otras formas de vida con respeto. Debemos actuar responsablemente para preservar la manada, no solo para nosotros, sino también para los demás. Nuestra ética es cómo tratamos a la manada y a otras formas de vida, tiene un impacto directo en la justicia social para las generaciones futuras. Pero creo que es imposible desconectar y separar estos problemas.(34:33) Ismael: Gracias, Catalina, por tu punto sobre la ética. En realidad, no vas a adoptar un software verde si no tienes valores que te impulsen hacia eso, ¿verdad? Es una elección basada en valores. Entonces, no puedes asociar valores desde esa decisión. Sin embargo, cuestionaría el enfoque, Gael, que presentaste, porque señalaste las desigualdades dentro de América Latina. Y creo que las desigualdades dentro de América Latina son una dimensión enorme de esto. Si no tienes acceso al agua, y mucho menos a internet, y mucho menos a la plena alfabetización, claramente tu capacidad para contribuir a – aunque supongo que estás contribuyendo a una huella digital más verde al no usarlo - pero estarás limitado en esas habilidades y conocimientos si tu acceso a la información es limitado. Sin embargo, la verdadera limitación para hacer más verde el mundo digital en América Latina, desde la minería hasta la cadena de suministro, pasando por la construcción de software, no son las desigualdades dentro de América Latina, sino las desigualdades entre América Latina y el resto del mundo. Son las dinámicas de cómo Europa, y en particular los Estados Unidos y Canadá, y China y los países más ricos, interactúan y consumen los recursos y productos latinoamericanos, las que determinan en gran medida el tipo de aplicaciones que se construyen. Entonces, el desafío de la justicia aquí es que definitivamente es crucial tener justicia dentro de América Latina. Pero una de las razones por las cuales no tienes regulaciones que funcionen es por la presión de empresas que no están basadas en América Latina. Así que diría que los problemas de justicia social son el sine qua non, la base para lograr la sostenibilidad digital en América Latina. Pero eso implica las desigualdades entre las personas que encargan la mayoría de los productos digitales en América Latina, que es el norte global, y las personas que los producen en el sur global. Esa desigualdad, creo, es la barrera clave. Si puedes hacer que todas las empresas que encargan software o minería o suministros o venden residuos electrónicos a América Latina desde el extranjero exijan estándares verdes, verás que la sostenibilidad digital se acelera dramáticamente. Y sin eso, toda la buena voluntad, toda la convicción, toda la dedicación de personas como nosotros en América Latina no logrará un impacto sistémico. Así que sí a las desigualdades, pero diría que las globales cuentan más que las regionales en esta etapa.(38.10) Catalina: Sí, estoy totalmente de acuerdo con toda la respuesta de Ismael.(38:17) Gaël: Sí, gracias Ismael, punto justo. También es definitivamente un problema de desigualdades en todo el mundo, y no solo dentro de un país o un continente. Ahora, siendo conscientes del tiempo, ¿quieren agregar solo una recomendación más para aprender más sobre la sostenibilidad digital si están basados en América Latina?(38.44) Catalina: Recomendaría las charlas de Elena Morettini, quien es la Jefa Global de Negocios Sostenibles en Globant, y comparte muchos valores, contenido sobre transición y eficiencia energética y tecnología verde para los negocios.(39.00) Gaël: ¿Y cuál sería tu elección, Ismael?(39.04) Ismael: Bueno, estoy en conflicto, porque voy a recomendar algo que quiero desalentar al mismo tiempo. Así que voy a decir por qué no quiero que lo uses. No quiero que uses ChatGPT y Bard y LLMs porque son ambientalmente 10 veces peores que la mayoría de las otras alternativas. Sin embargo, lo que diré es que, si la barrera principal en este momento es la información, si estás en América Latina, y si estás escuchando esto, probablemente tienes suficiente fluidez, por lo que no es tu barrera. Pero tendrás muchos colegas para quienes esto podría ser una barrera. Y lo que aconsejaría es buscar y buscar en Google todos los recursos, todos los nombres que mencionó Catalina, y están conectados. Entonces, en el momento en que encuentres uno, si encuentras a Jerry McGovern, si encuentras a Wholegrain Digital, si encuentras a las personas en este mismo podcast, si encuentras a quienes Gaël ha entrevistado, búscalos, básicamente busca todos los recursos que puedas en inglés y tradúcelos. Si puedes usar Google Translate primero, será más económico ambientalmente. Pero si no, siendo honesto, es un compromiso que estoy dispuesto a hacer. Si usar ChatGPT o Bard te equipará para volver verde las próximas 300 aplicaciones que construyas el resto de tu vida, ve y úsalo.(40:52) Gaël: Excelente. No esperaba una respuesta así. Pero eso es muy bueno. Es una carta jugada de manera hermosa. No voy a elegir, en realidad, voy a listar todos estos excelentes recursos, pero la herramienta es la traducción. Y estoy totalmente de acuerdo contigo, Ismael. A veces, usas una herramienta terrible de la manera correcta y vale la pena la inversión. Pero eso fue genial. Y como estamos de buen humor, Ismael, si tuvieras que compartir una noticia positiva que te haya hecho sentir optimista recientemente sobre nuestro camino hacia un mundo más sostenible, ¿cuál sería?(41.37) Ismael: Necesito decir que hay buenas noticias si las buscas. Alrededor de la COP27, hubo una serie de informes que salieron, que eran desastrosos. Eran terribles, realmente lo eran. La situación es absolutamente horrenda. Nos estamos moviendo demasiado lento. Pero enterradas en todos esos informes, había logros extraordinarios que nadie realmente informó. Así que estuve en París para la COP 21. Y recuerdo que al comienzo de la COP 21, el nivel de ambición estaba en el suelo. Ninguno de nosotros creía que esto iba a llevar a algún lado, no los gobiernos, no los activistas, no las ONG, no los académicos, nadie. Y luego la sociedad civil se movió. Las mayores manifestaciones en la historia del planeta y el uso de la tecnología, grupos como Avaaz creando movilizaciones. Y vi en tiempo real cómo los gobiernos cambiaron sus posiciones. Y cuando la gente no iba a aceptar ciertos objetivos, los alcaldes de las ciudades abrazaron esos objetivos. Terribles multinacionales abrazaron objetivos, y el ánimo cambió. Ahora, en ese momento, el escenario del statu quo, el escenario del negocio como siempre, nos estaba llevando hacia el peor apocalipsis. Los últimos informes que salieron dicen que estamos en camino a la catástrofe, pero nos hemos apartado del apocalipsis. Nadie ha rastreado el hecho de que en el momento más disfuncional en la toma de decisiones globales, la humanidad ha logrado cambiar de rumbo. Por primera vez en todos nuestros registros, para 2030, la AIE espera que las emisiones ya no crezcan, sino que se estabilicen. Nada de esto es suficiente para salvarnos de la catástrofe. Pero muestra que como comunidad global, tenemos el poder de cambiar verdaderamente los escenarios. Entonces, necesitamos entender ese poder, no volvamos a ser complacientes y digamos ‘todo está bien’, pero también no olvidemos que la esperanza existe empíricamente.(44:15) Gaël: Muchas gracias, Ismael. Puedo comentar sobre la COP21 que, sí, la sociedad civil jugó un papel importante, pero oye, este es el episodio sobre América Latina, así que supongo que también debemos felicitar a uno de mis héroes de toda la vida ahora, que es Cristiana Figueres, obviamente, porque si no hubiera estado allí, liderando la delegación climática de la ONU, con sus increíbles habilidades diplomáticas, y todo lo demás que construyó a su alrededor, y el equipo que trajo, etc., no creo que se hubiera logrado nada (sin restar importancia al papel masivo que jugó la sociedad civil también). No estoy tratando de darle un porcentaje aquí, pero solo reconociendo que sí, creo que sin ella, estaríamos en una situación realmente difícil en este momento.(45.08) Gaël: ¿Y tú, Catalina? ¿Hay alguna buena noticia que te gustaría compartir?(45.14) Catalina: En cuanto a este punto, necesito hablar sobre WordPress. Esta es mi comunidad, ¿verdad?, y algunas noticias excelentes recientes son que la comunidad global de WordPress ha formado un grupo de sostenibilidad. Con 264 miembros mostrando un creciente interés en el tema, aunque solo de América Latina, como Ismael y yo, pero este es un paso importante para otras personas, otros humanos, ya sea España u otros países en Europa. Pero también es alentador ver que varios desarrolladores están reduciendo el tamaño de sus complementos para hacerlos más eficientes y respetuosos con el medio ambiente. La conciencia sobre la importancia de volver verdes los servidores está aumentando, donde cada pequeña contribución, como eliminar un solo kilobyte, o millones de sitios web, puede reducir significativamente las emisiones de carbono. Además, es inspirador ver a más personas comprometidas en crear un web más sostenible. Esa es una buena noticia, y buena para la comunidad global de WordPress, porque es un buen paso.(46:44) Gaël: Muchas gracias a ambos por compartir noticias tan positivas al final, y por el increíble trabajo que están haciendo en América Latina, y mucho más allá de simplemente una internet verde, para concientizar sobre la huella ambiental de nuestro mundo digital. Gracias también por estar aquí y conectarse conmigo a pesar de estar en una zona horaria muy diferente, y por adaptarse a todas esas diferencias. Así que gracias mucho. Fue genial tenerlos a ambos. Espero que este episodio sea muy útil para las personas basadas en esta hermosa región del mundo. Y como de costumbre, pondré todas las referencias en las notas del episodio. Gracias mucho por estar aquí, ambos.(47.35) Ismael: Gracias. Gran oportunidad y genial hablar con ambos, Catalina y Gaël. Realmente gran oportunidad. Gracias.(47.44) Catalina: Gracias, Gaël. Gracias, Ismael. Realmente, estoy muy, muy feliz de compartir.(47.51) Gaël: Gracias por escuchar este episodio de Green IO. En el episodio 27, hablaremos sobre todas las herramientas proporcionadas por la Green Software Foundation para descarbonizar el software. Hay bastantes, y Nassim Hussain, el Director Ejecutivo de Green Software en persona, nos dará un recorrido guiado. Y también podría compartir algunos anuncios exclusivos antes de la gran conferencia Decarb Software 2023. Así que manténganse sintonizados.Antes de que se vayan, un pequeño mensaje de nuestro patrocinador. No, todavía estoy bromeando. Green IO es un podcast gratuito e independiente. Y necesitamos tu ayuda para mantenerlo así. Puedes ayudarnos apoyándonos en Tipeee. El enlace está en las notas del episodio. Pero si no puedes donar, está bien. Puedes apoyarnos difundiendo la palabra. Y lo sé, ya te lo he pedido varias veces, y te estoy molestando con esto, pero por favor califica el podcast con cinco estrellas en Apple o Spotify. Y si ya lo has hecho, pídele a un amigo que lo haga también. Esta es la única forma en que obtendremos nuevos oyentes a través de la búsqueda en estas plataformas. Así que gracias mucho por calificar el podcast. Es súper genial de tu parte. Y con suerte obtendremos más oyentes y más tecnólogos responsables uniéndose al programa. Saben, cada voto realmente vale mil(47.51) Gaël: Gracias por escuchar este episodio de Green IO. En el episodio 27, hablaremos sobre todas las herramientas proporcionadas por la Green Software Foundation para descarbonizar el software. Hay bastantes, y Nassim Hussain, el Director Ejecutivo de Green Software en persona, nos dará un recorrido guiado. Y tal vez también comparta algunos anuncios exclusivos antes de la gran conferencia Decarb Software 2023. Así que manténganse atentos.Antes de que se vayan, un pequeño mensaje de nuestro patrocinador. No, todavía estoy bromeando. Green IO es un podcast gratuito e independiente. Y necesitamos su ayuda para que siga siendo así. Pueden ayudarnos apoyándonos en Tipeee. El enlace está en las notas del episodio. Pero si no pueden donar, está bien. Pueden apoyarnos difundiendo la palabra. Sé que ya se los he pedido varias veces y los estoy molestando con esto, pero por favor califiquen el podcast con cinco estrellas en Apple o Spotify. Y si ya lo han hecho, pidan a un amigo que también lo haga. Esta es la única manera en que obtendremos nuevos oyentes a través de la búsqueda en estas plataformas. Así que muchas gracias por calificar el podcast. Es realmente genial de su parte. Y con suerte, obtendremos más oyentes y más tecnólogos responsables uniéndose al programa. Saben, cada voto realmente vale mil likes en YouTube, créanme, cuando comparan con YouTubers muy exitosos y podcasters muy exitosos.Ahora, si no tienen Spotify o Apple Podcasts, está perfectamente bien, compartan un episodio en redes sociales o directamente con un familiar, y será mucho más efectivo que muchos anuncios. Así que muchas gracias por eso. En serio, gracias por su apoyo. Significa mucho para nosotros. Nosotros siendo yo, pero también Tani Levitt, nuestro increíble productor de podcast, y Jill Tellier, nuestra increíble curadora de podcast. Estamos encantados de ayudarlos a ustedes, los tecnólogos responsables, dispersos por todo el mundo, a construir un mundo digital más verde... byte a byte.
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What if you could get sued if your website is not low-carbon enough? What if you would be barred from many call for tenders if your digital services don’t hit minimum sustainability requirements?

Science-fiction?
This is what people said on 5 May 1999 when the first version ever of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines was released by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). 20 years later, these pitfalls are day-to-day concerns for many digital companies and digital service providers.
On August 31st this year, the W3C released its first ever Sustainability Guidelines (draft version). Ines Akrape and Lukas Mastalerz, two of its core contributors, share insider insights in this episode on how it will impact the way of working for millions of web developers, designers, ops and data folks. And why we will certainly not wait 20 years for this to happen…❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!📧 Once a month, we deliver carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents in your mailbox, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 🫴 Green IO is a free and independent podcast! And so we need your help to keep it that way by supporting us on Tipeee here.Learn more about our guest and connect: * Ines' LinkedIn * Lukasz' LinkedIn * Gaël's LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website * Green IO newsletter

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Ines's and Lukasz’ sources and other references mentioned in this episode: The W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) 1.0 * The Digital Collage workshop to better understand Digital Sustainability issues * The Sustainable Web Manifesto * Green IO Episode 19 with Sandy Dähnert * Green IO Episode 9 with Tim Frick * Green IO Episode 8 with Anne Faubry * Climate Arc * Fershad Irani and his project aremythirdpartiesgreen* * ReSpec * New York Climate Week * GRI standards *

Transcript
[00:00:09] Lukasz Mastalerz: We didn't want to go too narrow to only focus on CO2 emissions because that's not the only thing that matters. But then on the other hand, that we have to be careful about not going too broad because then it would be difficult to measure all the guidelines across all these different potential impacts.[00:00:43] Gael Duez: Hello, everyone, welcome to Green IO the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world one bite at a time. On Green IO, we explore how to reduce the environmental impact of our digital world. Our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.If this episode doesn't sound as usual, it's just that I'm recording it in a friend's house, being without house and without office since a few weeks ago. Don't worry, the refurbishment of my house should be finalized before December and before the beginning of cyclone season here in Reunion Island. And I should also soon join a new incubator place where I will help start ups with the impact both on the tech for green side but also on the green for tech side, which is the DNA of this podcast.Talking about DNA, What does HTML and CSS have in common? They are the ultimate worldwide standards on how we code on the web - a bit like DNA. And they are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium - the W3C - this is how we will name it throughout the podcast) maintain many more standards such as XML, SVG or web RTC just to name a few. But the W3C also provide guidelines. The most famous one being the accessibility guidelines called web content accessibility guidelines. Today WCAG are used in countless laws and regulations frameworks, best practices, sources, etcetera. In a nutshell, what W3C decides will be used in every website around the world. And on August 31st this year, the W3C sustainable web design community group, nicknamed ‘SustyWay’, released the first ever web sustainability guidelines in a draft version. This means that every person working in web development will be impacted at some point or another. We already talked about the W3C and its ongoing work in several episodes, including three episodes with active participants in the development of the document : Tim Frick, Anne Faubry and Sandy Däehnert.But this time, the entire episode will be dedicated to W3C guidelines, and I have the pleasure to be joined by two other very active participants : Ines Akrap who is one of the pillars of the web development committee and Łukasz Mastalerz, who is the chair of the Metrics Committee. On top of a W3C spare time commitment, Ines is also a seasoned software developer with a knack for web performance and sustainability. She's based in Munich, Germany where she is a fellow hiker in the beautiful Alps, like me in Reunion Island, (well, not the Alps, more the volcanoes for me, and she actually hikes far less than she would like to, just like me in the Reunion Island).On top of his W3C spare time commitment, Lucasz is also a climate data architect and before that, he was it architect director at UBS. He's also a fellow facilitator of the digital collage workshop where we met first before this W3C adventure all started. He has contributed to the development of the workshop in Krakow, Poland where he currently lives. Welcome, Ines and Łukasz. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today, especially on such short notice.[00:04:20] Ines Akrape : Thank you so much for the invite. [00:04:23] Lukasz Mastalerz: Hi, I'm so happy to be here. At Climate Arc we're defining our work as building arcs between NGO’s, finance and corporate, and I think your mission is to build bridges between people looking into sustainable digitization. So I think our missions are very much aligned.[00:04:43] Gael Duez: very much alined. I like to mention to explain my job, as with the Green, a podcast as a bridge builder. So it 100% resonates with me. So you know, my first question will be actually not about the story of these guidelines, how we achieved such a great document et cetera. It's all about getting our hands dirty right from the start. And for this, I'd like to ask you a tricky question. Could you share your top three favorite guidelines with a bit of explanation about your choice? And I know it's not an easy task, having plenty of choices here among the 93 listed guidelines.[00:05:32] Ines Akrape: It's like making me choose between children, which one is my favorite? I only have one child ! but I guess I would go for avoiding unnecessary assets. That would be the first one that goes straight away towards what I think digital sustainability is a lot about - its just reduction in itself as well, just less, less, less. So I would say that one. Then as well, same thing with the third parties. So again, I come from a very, very web performance perspective here and these third parties is something that I've seen so many times in my work, that they are just being dropped here, and left, and then just sit there, and which of course, are being transferred every single time a user visited the website (so for years) As well, I think I would go with the one that I'm actually currently working on with the client, which is browser caching as well. This one goes towards the line of bringing data closer to the user, not having to travel long distances, which we all know this is kind of a current proxy for for carbon measurement when it comes to the web. So I think those those would be kind of the three I would go for.[00:07:02] Gael Duez: your three favorite Children. Oh, how terrible that sounds. And by the way, the third party issue you've mentioned, made me think about the tool ‘aremythirdpartiesgreen’, by a fellow web performance and web sustainability expert, Fershad Irani . Did you ever use his tool?[00:07:25] Ines Akrape : Not yet, but I am planning to, I'm a huge fan of his. [00:07:30] Gael Duez: Yeah, he was the very first guest on the show. So I've got always like a soft spot for him. And what about you, Łukasz? Uh What are your top three guidelines?[00:07:42] Lukas Mastalerz: That's a tricky question. Indeed. But I'd maybe try to go with sustainable hosting. And the main reason for this, is that there's a big difference between a hosting and a region with a low carbon intensity of a grid versus a high intensity - it could be up to two orders of magnitude difference. So I think impact wise that's going to be a big one. Then I would maybe go for sustainable product strategy because obviously all these decisions have have to be first taken on the business side, to basically drive implementation of a more lower level guidelines. So without the right product strategy, there's small chance to implement these more technical guidelines. And then maybe on a more specific technical side, native features, because they're both more sustainable, usually faster and cheaper to to implement.[00:08:58] Gael Duez: That's funny that you connected both the design phase and the hosting phase , because (and I don't know if you share this view, but I would love your feedback on it) usually when I'm with a client trying to deploy a green IT or digital sustainability strategy, I used to tell them, the easiest and less impact phase will be the hosting phase, but that's OK. You should start with it. You should start with Ops people who start to measure and reduce because, this is very important stuff that we need, having measurements and having a clear understanding of what costs what, in terms of carbon and also environmental impact. That's usually pretty easy to do. We've got tools and Ops people are pretty comfortable with putting tools to measure things, but then be aware that the impact will be way less than when you have actually the hardest part, which is involving the design people and starting a truly sustainable product journey, which is challenging all the time : do I really need these? Can I reuse something? The three Rs, et cetera. And I kind of like the idea that you picked the two opposites, and so what is your take on it?[00:10:12] Lukasz Mastalerz: Hm. I think if someone is starting to build greenfield from scratch, then it's probably easier because, it's easier to now look into different metrics of hosting options and just go for green from day one. It's obviously not that easy if an application is already running and some changes have to be done there, as it's more effort and cost of course.[00:10:47] Gael Duez: Yeah, it makes total sense. So now that you hate me a little with having to pick your three favorites, would you like to share maybe one guideline with which you are a bit less comfortable?[00:11:03] Ines Akrape: So I guess I will have to disappoint you a bit here because I just, I'm I'm very comfortable with most of them. So we worked on them together. We revised them a lot and all that. So I guess from, from my perspective, I just think one is very, very hard to pick. I don't know. I just, I absolutely don't know which one I would say that I'm kind of not comfortable with…[00:11:27] Gael Duez: And that's a perfectly understandable answer. What about you Łukasz?[00:11:32] Lukas Mastalerz: Hm. I'm hoping this is as strict as it gets and you are not planning a third level of difficulty for the questions...[00:11:41] Gael Duez: The boss level.[00:11:43] Lukas Mastalerz: Exactly. But one of the things that probably needs some thought is maybe a guideline of open source, that would be the right guideline in general. But I wouldn't be maybe too dogmatic about this. I can imagine cases where something that's not open source could be a better solution than pure open source.[00:12:10] Gael Duez: And what would you be the key takeaways? You know, if you meet someone who was not aware at all about the W3C work, say you meet your colleague at the coffee machine and you say, ‘there are a few things that you should very seriously bear in mind about these guidelines. And these are…’[00:12:29] Lukasz Mastalerz: I'd probably say that across the world, especially in Europe, slowly in the States, we're starting to see sustainability regulation appearing and getting some traction. And obviously the digital world is a big part of many businesses. We try to align guidelines with existing taxonomies, which means that enhancements and web sustainability can be embedded into bigger picture of sustainability reporting initiatives.[00:13:10] Gael Duez: Ines ?[00:13:11] Ines Akrape: Yeah, I guess I would go again a bit more from a software engineering perspective. Which is that the accessibility guidelines that you mentioned before were so crucial to the topic, which is very important. Just because they gave a clear overview, they gave a recipe in a way on how to achieve something. And I think this is something that we're trying to get as well with the sustainability, that the users, in this case, that the developers, the product owners, the designers, everyone being involved in the development of the digital products has a place to look, to have a list - not to have to be spread around - but just somewhere where they have, let's say, just a checklist.[00:14:04] Gael Duez: Yeah, fair point. Now, moving from the ground level, I would say, I'd like to talk a bit and ask you to highlight to us a bit about the building the process underlying choices, etcetera. And maybe starting with the obvious question, with a bit of history first, how were these guidelines created? Łukasz, do you want to start?[00:14:29] Lukasz Mastalerz: Sure. So W3C is a sample web design community group which was created 10 years ago. Sometime mid 2022 the group started to actively work on what has been released a few weeks ago (the guidelines). The group consisted of about 50 people from roughly 50 different organizations, working together across five different committees. There was a committee focusing on user experience, web development, a committee focusing on infrastructure, business and community, one focusing on metrics. And we've been working together, having regular meetings, drafting what now has been transformed into ReSpec, which is W3C standard format and which was unched a couple of weeks ago in Seville during the annual TPAC conference.[00:15:34] Gael Duez: Ines, do you want to add some specificities or your personal point of view on it?[00:15:41] Ines Akrape: Yeah. Actually I joined the group at end of 2022 and it was a very interesting process. This is my first time creating something like this, participating in a W3C group. And I guess my favorite part as well was the discussions we had no, we have this monthly, monthly meetings and all the discussions about the topic. Because at the end of the day, it's a very complex topic. It was very, very interesting to do this, with colleagues who are interested about the topic.[00:16:14] Gael Duez: Now, that's interesting because a lot of things were discussed and maybe I'd like your feedback on the something that we've heard quite a lot about, which is the rating system. And actually the fact that, unlike the web content accessibility guidelines which uses A to AAA ratings and, correct me if I'm wrong, but in the future, I guess it will change to rating bronze to gold. You've chosen a system of low, medium and high and it's not exactly the same philosophy. Could you explain to us why?[00:16:53] Lukasz Mastalerz: So at the very beginning, we started to impact measuring from the mapping of the different types of impacts that we want to account for. Then, as the next step, we did quite a bit of research on how deep we can get into actual metrics. And then we could realize that with the current state of research in many of these areas, it's very difficult to give precise figures for this impact. That's how we ended up just rating them on this three-level scale : low, medium and high. And then with this, we also decided to use a report (which you probably know about because it’s a report that's underlying our material and also the Digital Collage)- the report from Greenit.fr, which distributes impact from their centers, networking and end user devices across different categories of impacts, not only emissions or energy use, but also materials and water usage. Then we score all the guidelines for their impact on data centers, networking and devices. And we combine these figures to come up with a final assessment and values for all these metrics.[00:18:33] Gael Duez: And that's a very important point, because you've chosen not to focus only on carbon, but also a variety of environmental metrics. And actually it goes beyond the environment because, correct me if I'm wrong, there are also privacy, social equity and accessibility issues. Why did you choose to have such a large impact mix? [00:18:56] Lukasz Mastalerz: I would say, yeah, that there was a big topic for discussion at the very beginning of uh of our work. And obviously we didn't want to go too narrow, to only focus on CO2 emissions, because that's not the only thing that matters. But then on the other hand, we had to be careful about not going too broad, because then it would be difficult to measure all the guidelines across all these different potential impacts. That's how we adapt, aligning with GRI standards which are used in sustainability reporting. And we started with four categories there. We started with CO2 emissions, energy usage, water and materials. But now aligning to GRI also gives us the ability to expand to many other categories in the future. So there are not only environmental categories, but we can also easily go beyond that into the full scope of what you would call ESG.[00:20:13] Gael Duez: Hm. And if I imagine a discussion between a web developer or a designer and an ESG expert within the same company, how would the use of GRI help them to communicate ? Concretely speaking, how they will leverage the W3 CG guidelines to connect with the two different spheres that sometimes are very distinct, especially in big companies?[00:20:44] Lukasz Mastalerz: It's a good question. And I think there are probably many different ways that these two worlds can be connected. But one thing I could imagine would be to go from impact from ratings of impacts, where the ESG team's primary focus is to transform this into set of guidelines that would help to implement improvements for the categories that the ESG team is concerned about.[00:21:18] Gael Duez: That's very uncommon today in the green IT fields and beyond, to try to connect with the main sustainability frameworks that are shaping our understanding on sustainability and, and which are evolving quite a lot. So, it's a very fast-moving area and I thought the idea was, was really enlighteningInes, there is one aspect of how the guidelines have been created that I thought was very interesting. But I still I wonder how practical this is, and I would like your feedback and maybe some examples from you. Is the cost or how important it is and how difficult it will be. Could you explain to us a bit why you made this choice and how we should use these criteria?[00:22:12] Ines Akrape: Yeah. So I actually really love that this part now, when you mean like a high impact, low effort, for example. So this is something that we've been using as well, describing some of the optimizations for web performance for a while. And since these guidelines are not done exactly the same way as accessibility, which has these levels as well, they kind of build on top of each other here as well. It's, it's quite, I would say, up to a level, random. So you don't have to go through the list. Number one, number two, number 93, you can pick anyone that you want. So usually when I talk about this, I say just go for the high impact, low effort. And this is something again that's very useful when it comes to these discussions inside of the development team itself. This topic is a very vertical topic and I think everyone in the whole team should be aware - from a product owner to the tester, content creator, of course developer designers, everyone. I do use this approach as well, while working now with clients, checking once I see the issues that we have. Of course, we go first for the one that's going to have the highest impact, but it will take the least resources, the least time, however you want to calculate it. But this is prioritization, and it's ease of putting something in the line, at the end of the day, to be developed and to be optimized.[00:23:58] Gael Duez: Aren't you afraid that all the guidelines with high effort, whether you have or not high impact, will be de prioritized ? And I take the example of something dear to the heart of many W3C members, which is ‘use open source tools’ :- high impact, but high effort.[00:24:20] Ines Akrape: Well, all the hard stuff, sometimes we have to take the harder routes now. I think (to answer your question), not necessarily. So depending on quality, of course, in the end of the day, you want your product to be (good), it should be done well, we all know that. So it's definitely with these things, it's some kind of faster wins. But overall, I guess we would encourage you to go through all the guidelines. This can just give you a bit of an order, so you can focus on those high impact/low efforts first. However, the high effort should be tackled at some point as well. So I guess this is depending on a personal level, like ‘eat that frog’ methodology. So, if you want to do that, first thing in the morning or you want to leave it for the last thing to do, it is something for every single team to decide how they want to tackle them.[00:25:22] Gael Duez: OK, so we run through most of the framework. There is also something which is a bit specific to these guidelines, or at least compared to other frameworks, which is the use of this success criterion. Could you elaborate a bit of why you've chosen to use a success criterion? And what is the philosophy behind it?[00:25:47] Lukas Mastalerz: Yeah, for it's probably simple. I see these as basically guidelines on how to actually execute the implementation, they are a helper for implementing.[00:26:03] Ines Akrape: Yeah, a bit of a checklist.[00:26:05] Gael Duez: That was what I was wondering. So that's really the philosophy behind it. You can use it as a checklist to make sure that you are aiming in the right direction. Ines Akrape Yeah.Lukasz MastalerzExactly.[00:26:03] Gael Duez: Now, regarding the overall guidelines - this draft version -there is something that we've heard here and there, which is people acknowledging that it is a huge contribution. There is not that many people saying this was a waste of time. Actually, I could not find a single comment that went in that direction. So obviously, it answers a need. But some people criticized it because it was too vague sometimes. And the guidelines were not that practical. What is your answer to this - by how much is it missing the point?[00:26:57] Lukasz Mastalerz: I would say that for some guidelines, they are very specific. For example, they go they down to sharing code examples, on what to do to actually implement them. Some of them are definitely more generic. Obviously, we cannot provide code examples for guideline within business strategy category. So they are maybe a little bit more open. But at the same time, whatever guideline is not specific enough for people to implement, we're looking for feedback, we're looking for contributions to try to make them more actionable.[00:27:42] Ines Akrape: Yeah, I would completely agree with this. It's just it was very hard to draw the line, what's more generic, what's more of practical. But yes, as Łukasz says as well, some are on one side, some on the other side. But there especially, I would again say for the web development part, it's quite practical. It's up to the code examples. [00:28:07] Gael Duez: And because it refers quite a lot at the beginning, at least to the six principles of the Sustainable Web Manifesto. And I was wondering, Ines, are these kind of principles used, and are useful on day to day coding activities according to you ? or are they more helpful as some kind of a North Star metrics, when you create something like these guidelines? But ultimately, it's too far away from one’s day to day job.[00:28:38] Ines Akrape: I think this is something that should be ingrained in the culture. I think this is something that we should have in the back of our mind while we are making the decisions when it comes design, development, any aspect of the actual product.[00:28:54] Gael Duez: A bit like a checklist once again, but more on a generic ground - am I still working in a way to produce clean, efficient, open, honest, regenerative and resilient code?[00:29:08] Ines Akrape: Exactly. That would be great if you actually come to the part where you're checking each one. But even if you have just a few - again, if you just have this at the back of your mind while you're doing stuff, it's already great progress.[00:29:25] Gael Duez: And to be honest, the regenerative or resilient part is not often checked on. I don't know about you, but resiliency is not that much on the agenda of many Dev teams, but that's a different topic.[00:29:43] Ines Akrape: Hopefully it changes in the future[00:29:44] Gael Duez: Yeah. Well, I think it will change in the future because what we used to take for granted, like available 24-7 cheap energy, and a Cloud completely unrelated to environment, it will, I guess at some point will be less and less the case . We've seen already what happened in the UK when they've been hit by a heat wave.So I got it, the guidelines - some of them maybe a bit too generic, or at least they have to be generic, because they embrace a wide topic. But some of them, as Ines mentioned, are pretty specific, especially when it comes to web development. So talking about this, if I was a designer or a web dev or someone working in a digital agency, and I had to start somewhere with this pretty intense document - we're talking about the 93 guidelines, I guess more than 200 pages – then where should I start? And how should I apprehend such a massive document ? Because of course, my time is scarce and I cannot necessarily run through the entire document and read all the 93 guidelines. I know it should be done. But hey, that's not how life is being played today.[00:31:12] Lukasz Mastalerz: Hm. Sure. So I guess I'll start probably with an ‘at a glance document’ that summarizes all the guidelines in a couple of pages. It's easy to read and it's easy to use to navigate to different parts of the actual guidelines content. Then obviously, depending on what you're doing, you'll be focusing on some specific category. So if you're responsible for strategy, you'd be focusing on business guidelines. If you're focusing on user experience, you'll be focusing on UX guidelines. So this is also going to help you to select a subsection of the document that you should be looking into. And then obviously looking for an impact that's big. You should be probably focusing on a high impact first. And then we also have tagging that helps in the navigation. So we can also use tags across all these guidelines to drill into some specific topic.[00:32:19] Ines Akrape: I guess Lucas said it all, but I would just say as well, bear with us a bit longer, because the team behind sustainablewebdesign.org is working on making this a bit more legible and to be able to navigate it a bit more easily.[00:32:37] Gael Duez: OK. Thanks a lot. I think that's, those are very valuable insights because people should not be afraid of the amount of work that has to be done, but start with the step by step approach. So actually, Łukasz mentioned that if some people are not comfortable with some guidelines, when they say they're too generic or not actionable enough, they should provide feedback, which leads me to a very important question : what's next? what are the next steps for these guidelines?[00:33:11] Lukasz Mastalerz: Yes, there are at least a couple of different things that are happening now. First of all, guidelines have been published to W3C's github repository and now we're accepting issues to be raised against them, and pull requests to recommend changes. So that's a community contribution. At the same time, a we mentioned before, these are community guidelines. And in order for this to become W3C’s recommendations, which is a, is a term for like a standard, there is quite a bit of work that has to happen. We need to form an official working group with W3C and go through a pretty detailed process of moving these recommandations towards standardization. [00:34:11] Gael Duez: And are you confident this will happen?[00:34:15] Lukas Mastalerz: There's going to be a lot of work. Definitely. But we've seen over the last 16 months, that we have reached a strong community that are supporting this work. So I'm pretty sure that this is going to continue. And in addition to members who have already kept contributing, we're starting to see quite a bit of interest from public. We're starting to see people interested in these issues, in Git lab now. I think it's probably also the right time to invite people who would be interested in joining and continuing this journey with us. The community is open, so if you're interested in this topic, feel free to join us.[00:35:04] Gael Duez : Ines, did you have time to review some of these contributions in the github repository?[00:35:12] Ines Akrape: I just actually quickly scanned them. So not many because at some point I actually had to disable the notification since it's for so many different contributions. [00:35:22] Gael Duez: But that's the very good news.[00:35:23] Ines Akrape: Yeah, it is, it is to be honest, it really is. It’s very nice because I guess one of the things that I definitely don't like is people who complain and then don't offer solutions. So here are a lot of solutions and improvements being offered and being raised. So this is great. So again, an invitation to everyone, please review the guidelines, give us your feedback, because this is the best way for us to make them even better.[00:35:55] Gael Duez: Definitely. And to those who do not want to join, the huge majority of people working in web development and for whatever reason will not join, I guess it will still impact them. Am I right?[00:36:10] Ines Akrape: Yeah. Well, hopefully it impacts everyone now. Unfortunately, as we've seen with accessibility, not much happens until it becomes a law. So hopefully this goes towards that line. But, my hope would be that everyone comes across them at some point and again hopefully implements some of these guidelines.[00:36:35] Gael Duez: makes total sense. And actually, I would like to ask you to join in another little game to discuss what we can reasonably expect. Because it all revolves around this ‘hopefully’ world that you've described Ines. So I'd like you to share with us three sentences structured like this : * In 2024, since the release of the WSG, people working in Web Dev have experienced something, noticed something, et cetera. * In 2026, since the release of WSG version, X (you pick the number) people working in Web Dev have done …. ?. * in 2030, since the release of WSG (version xx !), people working in Web Dev have accomplished …. ?

This will help us structure a bit what we can literally expect tomorrow, but also to give us a bit of perspective. Ines, would you like to start first?[00:37:43] Ines Akrape: Sure. So I would say in 2024, since the release of the WSG, people working in Web Dev have come across them (the guidelines). I think it would be like they have just seen that they exist. So for this next year, I guess that will be already a great achievement. And in 2026 I would say people working in web dev have implemented some of those guidelines.[00:38:12] Gael Duez: And in 2030 ?[00:38:14] Ines Akrape: oh, in 2030 - legal, let's go with legal. Boom,[00:38:23] Lukasz Mastalerz: Get ready everyone.[00:38:24] Ines Akrape: Yeah. So for all of those who didn't do anything until 2026, here comes legal requirements!! I would, I would really love to see this becoming not only a standard, but something as well on the legal base, because, unfortunately, this is the only way to assure it gets everywhere.[00:38:49] Gael Duez: And Łukasz, what is your take on it? 2024, 2026, 2030 ? And what are according to you the odds that it becomes legal? But first, let's play the game.[00:39:03] Lukasz Mastalerz: So, in 2024 since the release of WSG guidelines, people working in Dev have contributed to them, have shared their feedback, to make them as accurate and actionable as possible. By 2026, given the fact that everyone was contributing for such a long time, we have a really amazing and very exact guidelines that can be executed and we're starting to see some early adopters actually implementing them and seeing big improvements. And by 2030 I don't know, I think by 2030, internet is zero carbon !! And yeah, all the work is achieved.[00:39:57] Gael Duez: Do you believe that, both of you, do you believe that it could be used or leverage in laws or regulations?[00:40:05] Lukasz Mastalerz: Yeah, I think so. So I'm seeing that it is something very similar to web exhibit guidelines. In fact, that was a really one of the main (my) inspirations for us. So I'm hoping that these guidelines are going to follow the same pattern.[00:40:24] Gael Duez: But Ines mentioned that it took a lot of time and it's still far, far, far from being achieved worldwide, accessibility, or even like basic accessibility, across many, many websites. So do you believe it will take us as much time, or that we will see a faster track of adoption here?[00:40:47] Lukasz Mastalerz: Hopefully not, because these guidelines would exist in bigger context of corporate sustainability, which is a separate, bigger driver for implementation of these practices. And as we've been discussing before, regulations are already appearing in many places. So hopefully we're not going to have to wait till 2050 for them to be implemented.[00:41:17] Ines Akrape: I would just like to add as well that they have so many benefits in general, for the business, as well as, at the end of the day, for both people and the environment. So, you know, starting with better performance brings up better SEO and all that. Of course, having less stuff on your infrastructure saves money from these two infrastructures. So I guess it's very easy to see the benefits that they will bring, not only to the environment, but in general.[00:41:48] Gael Duez: could we deep dive a bit on it? What are the, the main benefits that you see from adopting the sustainability guidelines?[00:41:55] Ines Akrape: Well, I guess now it's again, it's 93 guidelines. So it depends on which one. But I guess, well, everything sustainable web, as well as everything designing for that goes towards the user. It's just this user experience. So hopefully we see through all the guidelines, first and foremost, a (small) decrease of the worldwide waste and the sheer amount of stuff on the internet now. So that's I like one thing I would also hope for.And then other than that, as I already said, the the less things you have, the less it costs and to keep it where it is, the less it costs as well. For example, what I was mentioning, one of my favorites, is caching. So if you don't hit the infrastructure so many times, again, it’s less cost. So I would say some of these things are beneficial for business as well, not only for the user, which for me would be having a great user experience, as well enable people to use their devices for as long as possible.There was this one thing that I heard recently : my friend told me that her dad had to buy a new phone and it was not an old phone, like 2-3 years old, maybe, because his parking app start stopped working. So, I guess, going towards eliminating these behaviors, it's something crucial. You want to pay your parking. So it's not something where you can just select a different app. At the end of the day, you should not be buying a new phone because of that.[00:43:37] Gael Duez: That's terrible. Indeed…. It's just I'm under shock, you know, software obsolescence at its finest… So obviously, the W3C guidelines is a heavy document on its own. Actually, it has been built on (I didn't count the this time) but more than 100 references. Still, I wanted to ask you - are there any other reference or materials that you would like to share, to either better understand these guidelines or be able to apply them in a better way?[00:44:20] Ines Akrape: Well, I guess the main point would always be sustainablewebdesign.org website. So that's also where the guidelines are planned to be implemented in a, let's say, more user friendly way.[00:44:34] Gael Duez: And to end on a positive note, the podcast - and that's cool, pretty cool because for once the podcast was quite positive. It is a big achievement and we are moving forward definitely toward the right direction.Could you share one piece of good news which made you optimistic recently about our past toward a more sustainable world ?[00:44:59] Ines Akrape: The random piece of news that I've seen recently and that I was positively surprised about was that – I am living in Munich, Germany - July 2023 was the record month for the amount of renewables inside the German power grid - it hit 69%. So this was key information. I was ‘ whoa’ I didn't expect it. So that was something that made me quite optimistic, at the end of the day way, in the way that we're evolving.[00:45:40] Lukasz Mastalerz: I just came back from New York Climate Week. And yeah, obviously, plenty of people working in the ‘climate space’. There are plenty of connections, it’s really great to see this level of engagement. One of the things that feels really amazing is that we're seeing so many new applications of AI to solve climate problems. A couple of examples I came across would be 1) using AI to flag greenwashing and systemic reports or 2) using AI to increase the number of acid level data analysis by two orders of magnitude to measure carbon emissions, instead of just relying on company disclosures. Or, another example, a tool that was used to talk to sustainabiity documents using natural language. We all know that AI has its own environmental impact, but it's great to see that it's also used as a solution.[00:46:53] Gael Duez: Łukasz, you're aware that the first AI you mentioned, the one about greenwashing, will on a very short period of time, drag the entire remaining resources on planet earth because there is so much green washing… [laughter all round].[00:46:53] Lukasz Mastalerz: That's right![00:47:19] Gael Duez: So, thanks a lot, both of you. That was great to have you with all your insights on the Green IO show. Thanks a lot again for joining on a very short notice.[00:47:24] Lukasz Mastalerz: Thanks a lot for hosting. It was great to be here.[00:47:28] Ines Akrape: Thank you so much.[00:47:29] Gael Duez: Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode made in my daughter's bedroom. So I hope you enjoy the sound. In episode 26, we will go to Latin America, to meet Ismael Velasco, yet another active member of the W3C sustyweb group, who is based in Mexico, and also Catalina Zapata, the founder of ‘La Web Verde’, based in Colombia. We will talk about the progress and roadblocks of digital sustainability in this continent with its 300 million digital users. Stay tuned.And before you leave a small message from our sponsor, I'm kidding. Green IO is a free and independent podcast, and so we need your help to keep it that way.You can help us by supporting us on Tipeee - the link is in the episode notes, but if you cannot donate, that's fine. You can support us by spreading the word. Rate the podcast, five stars on Apple and Spotify. Ask a friend to do it too - each vote is worth 1000 likes on youtube. Believe me, Sharing an on social media or directly with a relative is also more effective than many ads. Seriously. Thanks for your support. It means a lot to us, us being me, but also Tani Levitt, our amazing podcast producer, and Jill Tellier, our amazing podcast curator.Stay tuned by subscribing to our Green IO your monthly newsletter. The link is in the episode notes, but you already know the drill. You will get carefully created content, episode wrap-ups and exclusive articles. It is as free and independent as the podcast itself, and, as my daughter loves to say,- and you might have noticed it in the latest Green IO episodes - it helps you, responsible technologists, build a greener digital world… one bite at a time.
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How do you decarbonize your operations when most of the action takes part outside of your organization? 🕵️This is the issue SaaS companies face with IT sustainability. 🌱In the latest Green IO episode I (Gaël Duez) sat down with Tereze Gaile to get insights from Salesforce’s approach. Tereze is the lead author of the “Sustainability Guide for Salesforce Technology”. We also partnered in this episode with Niklas Sundberg, author of “Sustainable IT Playbook for Technology Leaders” and a pillar of sustainableit.org to take a step back on Salesforce’s feedback and get a broader context.
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Learn more about our guest and connect: * Niklas' LinkedIn * Tereze’s LinkedIn * Gaël's LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website * Green IO newsletter

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Niklas’ and Tereze's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* Sustainability Guide for Salesforce Technology * Niklas Sunberg’ book Sustainable IT Playbook for Technology Leaders * EU CSRD legislation * Sustainableit.org * Boavitza * ClimateAction.Tech * Science Based Targets initiative * Green software foundation * Dr. Melvin Vopson 'The environmental weight of data' * Environmental Variables podcast * CIO CO2 in Sweden * Harvard’s course Enabling a Sustainable Digital Transformation * Sustainable Business Network’s course on Leadership in Sustainable Business * Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s GitHub repository

Transcript
[00:00:00] Gaël: Hello everyone! This episode was a bit of a stretch in terms of scheduling. Tereze Gaile is based in Wellington, New Zealand and Niklas Sundberg lives in Stockholm, Sweden. 10 hours of time difference and a 17 400 kilometer journey. Was it worth the effort? Definitely. This dialogue is a great opportunity to get actionable feedback from two experts in the field of sustainable IT, especially for software companies.

How do you build greener software and how do you make sure your customers will use them in the greenest possible way? Niklas and Tereze have a lot to share about it. Their experience might be different, but they also share quite a lot in common. Both are authors, Niklas having recently published 'Sustainable IT Playbook for Technology Leaders' and Tereze being the lead author of the 'Sustainability Guide for Salesforce Technology'.

Both are doers. Tereze is a technical architect at Mulesoft, a Salesforce company, and she is also its Global Sustainability SME. Niklas is Senior VP and Chief Information Officer at Assa Abloy Global Solution Divisions. And finally, both are sustainability advocates within their organizations, as well as in NGO and professional groups.

So I would dare to describe them also as activists in a suit, borrowing this expression from Rainer Karscher, Allianz' s Global Head of Sustainability. Welcome Tereze, welcome Niklas. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.

[00:01:36] Tereze: Kia ora. Thanks so much for the opportunity, Gaël.

[00:01:39] Gaël: Oh, kia ora. That reminds me of some wonderful times in New Zealand, when I was hiking and meeting wonderful people. Oh, thanks a lot for these days. Hi, Niklas.

[00:01:53] Niklas: Hi, happy to be here. Looking forward to a great conversation.

[00:01:57] Gaël: Yeah, we're looking forward to it too . I'd like to start with my usual question, about your journey towards sustainability. So how did you become interested in sustainability and maybe IT sustainability? Therese, would you like to share a bit about it?

[00:02:17] Tereze: Yeah, sure. So I've always had a strong affinity for nature. So I grew up on a farm on the border of Latvia and Estonia. So I was always quite blessed and privileged to have the wildlife literally on my doorstep. And I guess that's one of the reasons why I moved to the beautiful Aotearoa (Maori for New Zealand), for its incredibly unique fauna and flora.

[00:02:40] But I think the penny drop moment for me was when I started thinking about how I can make the most impact. And I came to the realization that's probably through. Being a change agent, if you will, within a big organization like salesforce. And because I felt no matter what I do in my personal life, you know, I could fly less, I could EAT less meat or, recycling, et cetera, et cetera.

I just had this feeling that that's not enough. So. What more can I do to move the needle and pretty much from joining Salesforce, the very first thing that I did with MuleSoft is I wrote a blog on Sustainable engineering practices with MuleSoft. Very humble beginnings. It was just, you know, I didn't get a big splash or anything , but this was two and a half years ago and since then, we've come a long way.

Gaël: Well that's funny because you know there is this great debate, especially among young engineers, whether the software engineers or engineers in pretty much everything or graduates, shall I quit, shall I leave the regular big corporation work to make an impact and join an NGO, etc.

And obviously we need a lot of these great people in NGO's, but that's also true. I remember, I think it was, Antoine Monnard. Yeah. Alexandre Monnard, who told us in a conference recently, do not quit, do not leave. We need change makers within a big organization, because if everyone leaves, there will be terrible issues to move the needle, as you say. So I guess you're the one who will make the change within the organization. Am I right?

[00:04:25] Tereze: Exactly. At least I try to.

[00:04:28] Gaël: Yeah, you can try. And after, after a while, if it doesn't move the needle that much, then you've got a free pass to try something.

[00:04:39] Tereze: Exactly.

[00:04:39] Gaël: Exactly, and the second thought that just popped into my mind is, you have the, as you say, the nature on your doorstep, and that connects with something I read very recently :- when you assess how many animals can be spotted in Walt Disney movies as a proxy for how much kids are exposed to nature in cultural content. There is a dramatic reduction, like something from several dozen in early 50s and 60s movies to one or two animals, that's pretty much it, in other, more recent movies like Aladdin, (it's not that recent, but anyway). And that really resonates because, with my daughter, I need to expose her a lot to nature and a lot to movies or TV shows with nature, because that is actually the very best way to make people aware of just being connected to nature, which is not that easy in cities.

And what about you, Niklas?

[00:05:42] Niklas: Very similar story, I would say. What I love about technology is the impact you can have on a global scale. And, like Tereze was saying is that, yes, you can do a lot of things in, in your personal life, getting closer to nature, living more sustainably and so forth, but if you really want to move the needle, make an impact, you need to apply it into your corporate setting .

And fortunately in my role, I was also tasked to, to create a sustainable IT strategy as part of our overall enterprise sustainability strategy. And this is about two years ago. And as I started researching into a number of areas, I had a lot of revelations in terms of the impact of tech and IT, here and now, but, but also what lies ahead in the next, seven or eight years, to 2030. And, that sort of had the revelation for me to put together a playbook, based on my own learnings, based on our own findings, our own journey within my company that I work for. And that turned out to be a playbook for technology leaders to apply in their everyday life. And I really want to make something that's very hands-on, very tangible, something that you can really pick up, read a few chapters and then you can start applying it into your business environment. So that was the whole idea: to empower, to inspire and to activate people to get started. Because I think we have a big knowledge gap in terms of the impact of tech on climate change.

[00:07:15] Gaël: Absolutely. And actually we're going to use your book during this podcast episode, and we're going to start with two questions. I would love to ask Tereze first, about her journey, writing the book with Salesforce, and how Salesforce and MuleSoft, obviously, the entire salesforce company, is moving toward being more sustainable regarding its software practices. The focus of this episode is really sustainability in software companies or departments building software. So, Tereze, you've got a unique viewpoint and I would love you to share with us how and why your company recently released this sustainable it playbook, and I would love then Niklas to [reply] , I will come back to especially one chapter in Niklas' book a bit later. But Tereze, if you could start, that will be great if you could explain to us a bit why this book, why it was released, and what has been achieved so far at Salesforce and /or MuleSoft.

[00:08:15] Tereze: Of course. I think before I jump into how the guide itself came about, I just want to spend a moment or so just covering the fact that sustainability is actually one of our core values. And I think given that it's embedded essentially in the organization, it made it a lot easier to get support from leadership and to influence internally. So in terms of that initial journey that I alluded to initially, and I just wrote a very humble little blog on sustainable engineering practices, but that over time snowballed into being connected with the core sustainability team. :- we love this ; how do we elevate it? What more can we do ? and being connected across different leaders across technology and product organization as well. And they're saying, look, we're working with AWS on the sustainability pillar, and we're trying to do this. And it's like, how do we marry all of those things up and really combine it all together? So I think It was a real mammoth group effort, to be absolutely honest. We had some product managers, for example, who had already put some ideas around. So, for example, if you're creating products or services, what are the kind of principles you need to think about. So, for example, even things like a webpage, how long does it take to load? How heavy are the graphics? Things like that. So, really the whole initiative spanned from starting to raise that collective awareness internally, but how can we really make it really polished and share it with the world, share it with our hundreds of thousands of customers that we have, and take them on that journey. Needless to say, I'm sure Niklas had a similar experience. But it went through many rounds of reviews and so many different feedback and ideas. So I think the tricky bit was actually, how do we still make it true and useful, but also not letting perfection get in the way of progress. So really, this guide for us, it's a conversation starter. By no means is it perfect. It's just to raise that awareness. It has practices across architecture, design, architecture, development and operations, and the idea is to give a couple of really practical examples of what you can do across the software development life cycle to reduce the impact of using our products.

So, I think, in terms of what resonates the most, and it was always a surprise to me, the majority of the time we speak to customers, they're completely oblivious that technology, of course, has an impact. You see these very polished products, but actually they are hosted somewhere on a data center. And just even using statistics like data centers actually emit more than the aviation sector, which is often quoted. And you just see the penny drop because they realize they have a huge footprint with our products and then well, what do we do ? How does it tie to our sustainability strategy? So just as one example, I can speak a lot from a MuleSoft angle because that's what I've worked with organizations on. So one thing, and I think this is maybe a little different to what's been covered in the past, is also looking at API usability and what's the impact of that, not just from a technology perspective, but also in developer productivity.

So a piece of work that we did recently covered, let's look at it more holistically, not just the tech as well, but actually the human element, as if you don't need 3 times more project teams to create this, because you're already thinking about reuse and having it create all these composable little building blocks, you can leverage that for future projects. The human aspect in terms of emissions saving is also something you should not ignore. And for others, it's just learning that organizations often have their sandbox environments completely unchecked. So there's applications that are running, burning resources in the cloud.

So if you had really good governance around decommissioning APIs or applications, but they're no longer required, and actually having numbers or a process. So as another example, Salesforce has these demo organizations, you can spin them up quickly, but they expire after a certain period of time. So then it takes away the problem of 'Oh, I need to now go do some work and decommission it’. So I would say [these are] a couple of examples that usually get people to really understand how impactful it can be.

[00:13:09] Gaël: So you take seriously the issue with the cloud zombies - to quote Anne Currie. I love her expression about this. I can imagine zombie hunters.

And Niklas, I recall you dedicated a full chapter to software, which is, quoting you, one of the fundamental building blocks of sustainable IT practices. I just don't remember if there are five or six in your book, but you will update us on this.

Does what Therese just described resonate with you, especially focusing on software and SAS providers?

[00:13:45] Niklas: Yes, absolutely. I think like Therese was saying, the first and foremost principle when it comes to software development, is to relocate. We usually talk about 3R principles: in terms of relocate, re -architect and right size - the application. So, by putting the container or the workload that you want to run in a low carbon area, that's going to have a big impact, obviously. But then obviously zombie loads is important to reduce. So shut down your test beds, your automatic testing and so forth when you're not working on it, for example.

And, to really try to visualize it, to put the power in the hands of the software engineers, so that this doesn't become an activity that you do once a year, just because you need to calculate your current footprint. Rather giving a dashboard to the software engineers where they can actually see in real time, what is the energy consumption, what is the carbon emission on their code in their different environments and so forth, to really create that engagement, all through the organization, to have that instant feedback. I think it's really, really important when it comes to software development.

[00:14:59] Gaël: And this instant feedback approach, does it connect to your sustainable SDLC [Software Development Life Cycle] practices, or is it something different?

[00:15:10] Niklas: We are exploring in terms of how we can utilize it in the best way, to bring awareness into this because just like the rest were saying, the awareness is not there and it requires a bit of awareness, education in order to bring this to the table. As a software engineer, you're obviously tasked to bring products and solutions to market quickly. So, I think it's also important to embed this into the software development lifecycle, and not make this as a separate thing that you need to do in isolation. This should be embedded into the software development life cycle rather than doing it in isolation. So making it as easy and consumable as possible. I think it's really, really key. And I think we will see a lot more of these types of tools surfacing in the near future, that you can connect to both on premise, environments, but also obviously cloud providers like Amazon, Google.

[00:16:11] Gaël: Yeah, there is some work being done at Kubernetes level in the Kubernetes community, for instance, to get an instantaneous or a carbon footprint, using it and incorporating in your CI/CD pipeline, the carbon footprint of your code. But I'm always wondering that, both of you, you're hands on people. So you do it for real, in real life all the time. And how much do you believe this automation is kind of the best possible outcome? Because this is, as you said, you need to make it very visual, you need to make it available all the time and not some kind of yearly committee where everyone gets nervous two days before and then forgets about it. So having it automated in your CI /CD is a great achievement, but Is it really doable? And could you share any examples where it has actually worked or is it too early at the moment?

[00:17:08] Niklas: No, we can definitely say, I think, if you incentivize and you tell you software engineers to shut down your cloud environments over the weekend or when you go home from work, because we want to save costs, that's not really a great motivator, but if you can visualize that this is how much CO2 you're burning when you're not actually utilizing your code or your environments, then I think that's the best motivator. And, and I have a colleague, Elsa Westin, she says that ' it's not my wallet, but it's my planet'. And I think that's probably the best motivator you can have, to really visualize it, and we've seen, that this really works, that the people are actually taking this seriously and decommissioning resources far more readily than they usually do.

[00:17:56] Gaël: ' It's not my wallet, but it's my planet'. I really love it. Therese, is it like integrating in CI/CD pipeline, at MuleSoft or Salesforce? Is it something that you've already done or how do you enable or unpower I would say, your developers to make the best possible decisions?

[00:18:14] Tereze: So I have two things to say here. I'll start with a custom example and this echoes what Niklas was saying. If there's really demand and desire, developers can move really, really quickly. So for example, I was working with a large bank based, based out of India, and initially they said, look, we're starting our green computing journey, we are really curious to know what MuleSoft's point of view is, what data can you expose, or how can you help us shape our strategy? And the next time I checked in with them, they were using green algorithms. They had integrated it with their CI/CD pipelines. They already had dashboards set up, like, look, 'we can see the missions per API per environment, and now we're essentially collaborating'.

Okay, this is awesome. You essentially created your baseline. You can track and you can actually see what's the impact of each respective action. So going through identifying those greenhouse gas emissions opportunities, from both architecture, both from operational perspective and so forth. So that's really exciting. I think that's the first thing, there are tools and if you have backing and you really want to do that, you can go really fast and it can be really, really amazing.

The other thing is we fully acknowledge that we need to be transparent with our data and we're really actively working on how we expose that data through the UI or so that then you can programmatically retrieve it via our platform APIs. So there's work being done on our core platform. So for CRM, it's not officially released, but it's essentially in the works. So I've seen a couple of demos, just had to play around with it. But it's really, really fascinating because it actually shows you what different apex classes, what are the carbon emissions, for your different components that you've configured, the front end or more back end, if it's making calls to back end systems, and exposes all of that out of the user interface, which is really, really powerful, and which is the biggest thing customers constantly ask us for. And it's something that there's demand for, and we have to do our part in making sure that data is available, so they can also start making better informed choices. Because the minute they can see what the emissions are, and start to understand what that actually means, they will want to do something about it. So that's the first thing that we're focusing on.

[00:20:45] Gaël: Well, I've got a bit of a dilemma because of the two examples you gave, I would like to dig a bit deeper. So let's park for the moment your great example with this bank in India, because I wanted to connect next about which kind of support they got from their leadership level. And I know that there is a full chapter in Niklas book about it as well. So let's park this for a moment and let's go to this data question, because that's something that I hear over and over among my guests here in the podcast and people that work with, for instance, in the climate action tech community or Boavizta that the data is not here, data is not transparent, data is only scope one or scope two the website. So, how much do you know, and how much Tereze do you believe that Salesforce or maybe only MuleSoft, you tell us, would be able to provide open and checkable data, including scope three? And how much pressure can you put on your own suppliers? Because as I recall, Niklas, just quoting it by heart, but there is something in your book about leveraging your purchasing power or something like that.

[00:22:00] So I'd love both of you to come up and maybe Therese, if you can start first on what is your ambition with data so far?

[00:22:08] Tereze: Great question. It's always a little bit prickly, isn't it when it comes to data ? But no, that's why it's important to talk about it. So I guess the first thing to mention here is MuleSoft is built on Amazon Web Services. So actually, we have been working very closely with AWS and pushing them to share more data and be more transparent because, of course, we put our products on their infrastructure, so it's another layer. So, from a customer perspective, there's like layers and layers, and it can become very tricky then to try and calculate what the emissions are.

And that's progressing, so I know. That pressure, and I know it's been talked about in previous podcasts as well, but that's 100% our strategy, and me being in the customer success organization, I'm always educating the customer to say: put pressure on us because that's how we shape the product road map. The minute we have every customer demanding this, it will be there. So, I'm essentially also a customer advocate in that regard because I show them the art of the possible, but also say, look, sustainability is important for any large organization. I started asking the questions of how, as part of your 2030 strategy, you also want to reduce scope for your missions, which is purchasing goods and services, which means us.

So, I sort of plant the seed and that also helps us get more momentum and how many resources we can put on to expose that data. And while we're working all of that out in terms of, what's the method, how much can we share, there are other ways at the moment that I've used to help customers at least get a really good ballpark figure. Because often the best that you typically get from vendor is : "let's look at how much you spend with us and that spend proportion is your missions out of our entire missions", right?

It's like a spend-based allocation method, and for most organizations, that's just not good enough. It's not granular enough. So then using a third party API, for example, ThoughtWorks framework, we can actually reasonably well go back [and say] ‘Okay, so you're hosting your MuleSoft integrations and APIs in this region, on this kind of worker, the CPU is roughly this’, like that's enough input for me to actually work out what those emissions are. And then, it's granular enough also to track if they do something, what's the impact. And that's actually something we're doing with a couple of large organizations. And the reason why it's so important is if we have those success stories, we can go again, go back in and say, look, this is the impact you can have, and we need to amplify it.

[00:24:55] Gaël: Yeah, you know, when I'm listening to you, I always feel a bit schizophrenic because when I listen to you, I'm like, oh, great, there are these great doers inside big corporations pushing, and basically raising awareness in departments and companies, where the simple idea that your software or your data centers is actually an issue, an environmental issue. It is something that is not here at all that's great et cetera, and then i made i made this very hands on activist - we're already talking about scope 3, we need also to pay attention to resources and not only carbon, and we need to have way more information from big cloud providers especially at AWS (which is not the number one at the moment in their wish list I would say). Because it's not only the carbon which is emitted by the energy you use, but also the quite significant carbon footprint when you build a hardware and you've got even other issues with water usage, et cetera.

So I always feel a bit schizophrenic. So, Niklas, can you, can you be my shrink here and help me, with all the different experiences you've got in this, also your very important role in the sustainable it.org, are we getting better? Is it bad, doctor?

[00:26:19] Niklas: Well, I think, if we take the doctor example, I think we're all starting to come to a realization that the patient is sick. And in this perspective, it's the planet that we need to create, or come up with a remedy for. I think also, as I state in my book, is that no-one has all of the answers. I think this needs to be a very collaborative approach between technology leaders like myself sitting on the buyer side, but also working with the vendors like Salesforce service now, Microsoft, and what have you.

I think it's really, really important that transparency is key, because if you're not going to have transparency, I think a lot of companies are going to be doomed, to be honest. So, it's rather better to have an approach saying that we are working on it, we don't have all the answers. These are the assumptions, this is how we're trying to work it out. Because we're also have emergent legislations in, in Europe, for example, with the CSRD, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive; that by 2024/ 2025, you need to start reporting on your full scope one, scope two, and also your scope three. So these tough questions need to happen.

And it's just a matter of months and, and less than a year, where we need to start getting these type of data points from vendors. And, I think that will probably be enough to start driving impact, because as we discussed in the beginning of the podcast as technology leaders, when we put something into motion, we do it on a global scale and it has a massive impact if you do it right from the beginning.

So, I'm very confident that once we sort of have an established baseline, I've seen examples where you can reduce your CO2 emissions by two thirds, quite rapidly, if you use some well equipped levers to do so.

[00:28:13] Gaël: That's always something that I love to ask ‘What is kind of the top actions or the top tips that you could share that are workable pretty much everywhere in every company ? And what are the actions which are more specific to each company?’. So obviously you cannot list all of them, but more like, if you want to start and achieve this very successful results in a matter of months or years, whatever, what you should start looking at pretty much in any companies and what is usually a bit more company specific ?

[00:28:47] Niklas: Yeah, so we already discussed the cloud and the impact that you can have by choosing the right location on the right provider. Software development is always one key. But then also, in my role as a CIO, you usually. managing thousands of applications and having a good application portfolio management around those. And this is the great thing about that, you're not not only going to reduce your CO2 footprint by rationalizing your applications and moving things to the cloud and migrating things and removing legacy applications, but there's a very compelling IT cost reduction built into that.

So you have sustainability, you have IT cost reduction, working alongside together. So application rationalization on a bigger scale is quite important to work with, as a CIO, as a CTO. One thing that we haven't mentioned is the embodied carbon, for example. And when I mean embodied carbon, I talk about all of the hardware that you procure, for example. Anything from your smartphone, your laptop, your servers, your network equipment, and so forth. And, if we take some examples, just an Apple iPhone 14 emits 70 kilos of CO2 over a three year life cycle. A typical Dell laptop, off the shelf, roughly emits 320 kilos over a four year life cycle. So I think also, as consumers, we need to make sure that we prolong the longevity of the hardware and make sure that we can find a second life and we can pass them on in the value chain, by not only disposing [of] them. But to work with a reputable partner that can give the asset a second life, they can refurbish it, they can repurpose it, they can take apart components and put them into new or old assets. And recycling should really be the last asset to be honest. And from what I hear talking to some of these vendors like Apple and Dell, is that we haven't really done a great job of creating circularity, where these assets actually come back to them. Apple, for example, have created the robot Daisy and they have them on a number of locations across the world, [and] from my understanding, they only get back a very, very, insignificant portion of the number of assets or number of smartphones, for example, that they are putting out there in the marketplace.

So I think we also have a responsibility to make sure that we apply a more circular approach to this, to prolong the longevity of the assets, but also when they become end of use or end of life, then we make sure that we work with a solid partner that can provide us with a transparent supply chain that provides us with good data, and to make sure that the assets are being refurbished or recirculated.

[00:31:54] Gaël: So to sum it up, the three main culprits to investigate first, if I follow your ideas will be 1) be carbon aware with your cloud location 2) rationalize your application and decommission as much as possible of them. And then 3) be aware of the embedded carbon of your own devices and hardware and make sure that you go full speed toward a circular economy or the circularity of it. Am I right?

[00:32:25] Niklas: Yes, for sure. And then to the fourth point, is really to leverage your vendor ecosystem to start putting pressure on your vendors. So, so really leverage your buying power and work with the vendors that are serious about this. Look at the vendors, what type of commitments they have done, for example, and how they are working with it [sustainability] and replace the vendors that are not serious about it because there are a number of vendors that haven't really taken the series so far.

[00:32:57] Gaël: And so, Tereze, do you feel the pressure?

[00:33:01] Tereze: Well, as I joked earlier, I think we can always apply more pressure to really, really move the needle forward. But yes, similar to what Niklas said in terms of choosing your suppliers, we actually do have something called a sustainability exhibit. And the whole idea behind that is to put climate commitments into our supplier contracts.

The idea being, again, we want to take our suppliers on that journey and say, okay, do you have science based targets? If not, we can share everything that we're doing, to really knowledge share. Because at the end of the day, we only win if we all win, right? No-one wins alone in preserving and saving the planet. The more people we can get get on board the better.

[00:33:52] Gaël: You started to explain that basically you do a great job educating your own customers and actually that in a perfect world that should be the opposite. So do you [have] different kinds of customers or different locations? Do you experience more pressure from customers based, I don't know, in Singapore or in the U. S. rather than in other countries? Or is it mostly you who would actually, will actually, raise awareness, and explain that using Salesforce or MuleSoft, has some environmental impact and that they should be aware of it. How does it go today?

[00:34:33] Tereze: The first battle was actually raising awareness internally, and really, bringing to light the impact ,and again, it's not just carbon, right? As Niklas mentioned, it's also that all of our devices need rare earth metals. So there's a myriad of different issues, but coming back to the question in terms of organizations that we work with and customers, it is a really fascinating trend. Maybe I speak at a community event or, we do something with our developer community, all of a sudden a techie is like, 'Oh. This is fascinating, I didn't realize this', and we started to see more and more demand and requests around 'Well, what can you, what can we do? Do you have any guidance?’. And then they want to partner up. So, it is a little bit of push and pull. So, planting the seed, and you have to also remember traditionally the audience or the stakeholders from organizations that we work with tend to be your architects, developers and so forth.

So while these really mature, large organizations have a very mature sustainability or ESG department, the IT organization often has no idea. And those 2 departments are essentially in silos. So again, just for some of our work, we sometimes say, 'Hey, your organization has these goals. How are you working from an IT perspective, how does IT feed into the wider strategy?'. So that's again, how we influence and work with these large organizations to really make the penny drop, and also show them what could be done and share some of the successes from other organizations.

[00:36:23] Gaël: And I would love to bounce back on what you say, because the strategy part is something that I'm facing more and more with my customers. You know, you've got a strategy for everything, a strategy for accessibility, the strategy for sustainability, if you've got a strategy for security, cyber security, et cetera, et cetera, and obviously strategy for marketing a product… What would be your advice to incorporate a sustainable IT strategy in your corporation? Is it something that should be separated or connected with the sustainable strategy? If so, how? It shouldn't exist at all ? It's a bit like a digital strategy today, as that's a very wrong signal if you've got a digital strategy, because it means that digitalization is not that advanced in your own company. So what would be your feedback on this, Tereze?

[00:37:15] Tereze: I don't think you can use a cookie cutter approach, frankly. I think it really does depend on what your organization is, how it's structured, what your strategy is in the first place, and so forth. But, what I've seen at least with some of the organizations that we've recently partnered up with is they have a very strong and clear idea what their goals are. So, for example, by 2030, they want to halve their carbon emissions. They also have strategies around which sustainable development goals are priority for them, and I've seen IT leaders look at that and say, 'okay, so looking at our current estates, how does that feed up?'. And even I'm starting to see some of the organizations that we speak to actually have sustainability as part of their IT strategy as well.

So, before it wasn't anywhere written down and it's now formally captured and as part of that, they might have different domains that they call out to be a domain application or the cloud strategy. I think a part of that also echoes seeing some of the hyperscalers having sustainability in their well architected frameworks.

So, it's really fascinating to see that formally being part of the IT strategy as well. But again, that's just a few examples I've seen. I know for others it's completely different. So short answer, it really depends on the kind of organization.

[00:38:50] Gaël: Sure. But it helps to share some feedback nonetheless. And what about you, Niklas? Because you, it's a significant part of your book which is dedicated to strategy.

[00:39:00] Niklas: Well, I think it's important to first have an established baseline in terms of where you are and what are the levers that you can pull in order to get to a desired state. I think the journey is obviously going to be different for different industries, for different companies and so forth. But it's important to formulate that overall strategy, and similar to a digitalization strategy, it should be embedded into your overall business strategy or your IT strategy and not be a standalone piece, but to embed it and to make it part of the DNA as we progress with this.

So create a simple, actionable strategy that you can start with. It doesn't need to be something that's going to take you six months or twelve months to produce. It should be fairly simple. It should be action oriented. And, you should have a number of key tangible areas. We talked about data centers, for example, or cloud, how you'd reduce your embodied carbon with your end user computing, for example, how do you look at your application portfolio? So very, very tangible and, and really a great strategy should really also single out a number of items that you shouldn't do, and really focus on the key things that are going to make the biggest impact for you.

[00:40:22] Gaël: So you are a big fan of the 'you are what you want to do’ when you prioritize things

[00:40:28] Niklas: Yes absolutely . And I think one thing that we haven't really discussed in that much detail is dark data. And I think that's really something that's a bit concerning. I think going forward, as well, is that there's so much data that we store, single use data, and then we are never to retrieve it again. For example, and this obviously comes into the space of AI, autonomous vehicles and so forth, where we train different models. We need large data sets in order to be able to create a safe environment for autonomous vehicles and so forth. But I think it's equally important to make sure that we put good retention data in place for companies, to make sure that the data doesn't just grow indefinitely. And there are some numbers around this, that, in last year, in 2022, we generated 97 zetabytes of data, and that's 97 trillion gigabytes of data. And, by 2025, if we don't sort of break the curve or change the way in terms of how we manage data, this will double to roughly 180 zettabytes. So 180 trillion gigabytes. So it's an enormous amount of data, and we really need to reimagine the approach to how we manage data going forward.

[00:41:50] Gaël: Indeed, and you know, connecting with what we've discussed briefly earlier, which is that there is stuff beyond carbon. I always love to quote this study from Melvin Vobson about the material footprint of data. Because if we continue that space with the current technology, but Melvin Vopson made a very simple calculation, which is that under the current data growth by 2000, I think it was 2047, we will have to excavate the size of the Mount Everest every year just to build the servers to store this data. So I get this is where, as you said, sustainable IT strategy meets data strategy, and especially data governance about deleting, when you don't use it or do not create it in the first place.

[00:42:40] Gaël There is something that we briefly mentioned for you, Niklas, with sustainable it.org and not at all with you, Tereze, but both of you, you shared how much it's important to work in teams, to work collaboratively, both within your companies, but also outside your companies. And both of you are very much involved in all the activities, like I briefly mentioned, NGO and stuff. Could you tell us why a company today should not remain on their own when it comes to sustainability? And What are the commitments that you would like to highlight, in your professional life?

[00:43:22] Tereze: I guess I can go first. So I think it goes without saying, you can learn a lot. And I've been really inspired by the open source community, just the eagerness to collaborate, and two brains are better than one. And also some of the problems that we have, the really, really complex ones when it comes to trying to figure out how we solve it,because the systems have multiple layers, or different components, and then you have networking back end front end... You know, very quickly it can get very, very complex. So, [perhaps] partnerships with universities, because I know Salesforce does that as well in terms of what are the most recent papers that have been published in space? What can we learn from that?

But also giving back to the community as well. So how can we contribute to open source or, really get people on board? I guess from my perspective, I've been involved quite heavily in terms of MuleSoft developer community. So again, this is everyone across our customers and partners and so forth. So again, just sharing things around the guide or what we're doing. But also, for example, Green Software Foundation, I follow what they do, where I can contribute on their GitHub discussions or whatnot. So again, I just think there's a myriad of different really passionate people who really want to move the needle. And the only way we're going to solve it is by partnering together.

[00:44:56] Gaël: Yeah. I love the Green Software Foundation work and a kudos to their great podcast, 'Environmental Variables', a great source of information in the field, definitely. And what about you, Niklas?

[00:45:08] Niklas: Well, I think there's a great value of sharing. This is something that we can share across industries, among companies within the same industries and so forth, because this is really a common journey for the planet. And, so I would really encourage to get engaged with organizations like sustainable it.org where, where I'm part of the board and, and we've seen great progress with a lot of companies joining in the last 18 months. There are others like CIOCO2 here in Sweden and the Green Software Foundation as well is another one that is propelling the purpose going forward.

So look for case studies, look for other companies doing great things. And so far, I've seen some amazing stories from some companies getting involved in sustainable IT, and really inspiring to see the journey that they are taking and taking a holistic approach. But also being very open, in terms of the challenges that they have, or the challenges that we share. I would really like to direct you to sustainable it.org and the IT standards and environmental ESG, social and governance standards that we have put out. So that's a great starting point. It's a free resource to, to get into and start pivoting.

And it's a great complement if you're looking to create a strategy around this .

[00:46:31] Gaël: And I will put all those references in the show notes, obviously. Thanks a lot, both of you. And before we leave, I'd like to close now with a different question. So this is my first. Could you share a piece of news which has made you optimistic about our path toward a more sustainable world, to close on a positive note ?

[00:46:54] Tereze: It's not really a new story, me being me, I like doing something that's technically outside a little bit of the box. I did a course a couple of months back called leadership and sustainable business. And one of the key facilitators, Rachel Brown, she's been in the climate space pretty much all her life. She was even part of the cohort of presenters for Al Gore's 'Incovenient Truth’, and she's also co-founder of and CEO of the Sustainable Business Network in New Zealand. So needless to say, she's a very impressive individual, and she actually told us that in her entire career, this is the most momentum that she's ever seen in the sustainability space, and that for me personally was incredibly uplifting because I think we often see a lot of doom and gloom in the media and the more aware you become, it can feel like problem is just overwhelming.

So just hearing someone who's a seasoned veteran and expert, someone with a lot of clout, who said, well, actually don't feel disheartened, look after yourselves. But, if you're feeling down and need a little pick me up, just remember, this is the most momentum I've ever seen personally. And she's really optimistic for the future. So yeah, that's my little piece of good news.

[00:48:17] Niklas: And I really resonate with that as well. I think we've built up great momentum going forward. I think just in the last 12, 18 months, I've seen tremendous progress. We've had obviously some black swan events in recent years with COVID 19, but now also the war in Ukraine and you see how countries in Europe are pivoting for example. And the massive amount of creation of renewable energy in Europe at the moment is really, really staggering. And, if we can solve some key issues, for example, where we can create renewable energy in the Sahara desert, Northern Africa, for example, and the transmission, then we have a great opportunity to drive down the carbon intensity quite quickly. So, I think I'm very, very optimistic in terms of the momentum, the conversation. I also get a bit beaten down on the doom and gloom, from the news and so forth, from time to time. But, then I try to reset myself and really look at the big picture and see all of the great things happening, especially in the US for example, with the great infrastructure [Inflation] Reduction Act - it has also had great momentum in the U S and that's probably one of the most important [pieces of] legislation that has come across the hill in the last 10, 15 years. So, I'm really, really optimistic for the future.

[00:49:46] Gaël: Thanks a lot both of you for joining the show, sharing that much - which is something that you're used to when we see your track record, when it comes to NGO involvement and then professional groups involvement, but still very enjoyable to have you on the show and looking forward to the comments from our listeners.

[00:50:06] Tereze: Amazing. Thank you so much. It's been an absolute privilege.

[00:50:10] Niklas: Thank you so much. Very happy to be here and I had a really great discussion today.
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Our regular Green IO host Gaël Duez meets Harriet Kingaby and Mathieu Jahnich to get the low-down on greenwashing, and, more importantly, how to avoid it.Mathieu Jahnich is a consultant and researcher, and also a lecturer at Sciences Po, Paris, where he teaches responsible communication & marketing on several Masters programs. Harriet Kingaby is a strategic communications expert who focuses on responsible marketing and communications at the intersection of advertising, human rights and climate change.Together they cover multiple questions: How do you define greenwashing? How can companies effectively talk about their CSR actions and their move towards sustainability without falling into the trap of greenwashing? ...With concrete examples of best practice, and real-life case scenarios, Harriet and Mathieu also touch on the legal landscape, and the current and forthcoming changes that all businesses must be aware of.Don’t want to fall into the greenwashing trap? Listen in to find out more.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

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Learn more about our guest and connect: * Harriet's LinkedIn * Mathieu’s LinkedIn * Gaël's LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website * Green IO newsletter

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Harriet’s and Mathieu's sources and other references mentioned in this episode: EU "green claims" directive (project) * The Green claims code in the UK * US Green guides (should be updated soon) * Concepts and forms of greenwashing: a systematic review * 7 types of greenwashing by Carbon Collective * Planet tracker on Greenwashing * The Conscious Advertising Network * Harriet’s paper on Defunding the disinformation economy * The Climate Fresk * The Digital Collage * ACT Climate Labs * Media Bounty on Greenwashing * ADEME (French agency for ecological transition): guide de la communication responsable * Creatives for climate: network of practitioners * Newsletter The Crisps * And finally, all the examples provided on Greenwashing and best practices: + Infomaniak sustainability page: we pollute! + Organic basics’ impact report + F** Oatly website about Oatly transparent communication on their negative feedback + Adidas and the new Stan Smith (50% recycled) being fined for greenwashing + Volutea airline being called out (example by Mahieu) + ASA’s ruling against Shell for misleading greenwashing claims + ASA’s ruling against HSBC for misleading greenwashing claims + ENI facing 5M€ fine for greenwashing + H&M and Decathlon 400K deal to avoid being sued in The Netherlands

Transcript [00:00] Gaël“Hey boss, could we display our greener [website] hoster on the website?”. “Not so sure, I'm afraid of greenwashing.”“Hey, boss, could we train our people in eco-design without bragging about it?” “Well, not sure. I'm afraid of being accused of green hushing.”“Hey, boss, could we have a greener business travel policy?” “Well, not sure. I'm afraid of being labeled a green picker.”“Hey, boss, will you ever give me some green light?” “Well, not sure. I don't want to be accused of green lighting.”“That's a bad joke, boss.” “I know, but I'm not the boss - ‘Legal’are bosses, and they are crazy scared with all these new laws.” Hello, everyone, does this chat sound familiar? With regulations piling up, it will become even [more] familiar. This is why I'm super excited to welcome two renowned experts on greenwashing in this episode: Harriet and Mathieu.Harriet is based in London, and she has been the co-chair of the Conscious Advertising Network for more than five years. That's the media side of the coin. But she's also now the head of ACT Climate Labs, a project powered by Media Bounty, which aims to improve the communication on climate change. That's the tooling side of the coin. And before she took up these positions, she had a long list of experiences in PR, communications and branding with a sweet spot for sustainability. For instance, I discovered she used to hold a position as a sustainability strategist in 2012 - 10 years ago, that was not common. Kudo for this.Mathieu is based in Paris. If you don't know where to find him, try LinkedIn; he spends quite a lot of time there busting false green claims and educating people via his straight- to-the-point posts and comments. Since he graduated with a PhD in Didactics and Science Communication (sounds very impressive), he has spent the following 20 years combining research and action as a consultant, focusing latterly almost 100% on responsible communication.Welcome Harriet. Welcome, Mathieu. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today. 02:12 Mathieu Thank you, Gaël. 02:13 Harriet Thank you for having us. 02:15 Gaël So, to set the stage, I'd like to ask you my usual question. How did you become interested in sustainability? Did you experience some kind of lightbulb moment?02:25 HarrietSo, at school, we were a class of kids who weren't particularly well behaved, I have to say, and one of our science teachers was obsessed with climate change. We worked out, as a kind of collective of 30 kids, that the only way to derail a lesson and to not have to do our science work was to get him talking about climate change. And I guess the flip side of that was that he was absolutely fascinating. And he was so passionate about it. It made me really interested in the topic, and I ended up studying environmental science at university and, spoiler, I am not very good at the science side, but I can talk about it. And so, from there, through doing some technical jobs and working that out, and then being pinched by the PR team, because I could actually talk about some of the science behind what we were trying to do, I've ended up here. And I'm forever grateful to Mr. Brown, my chemistry teacher for that.03:29 GaëlYou just need one teacher to change the world. And that's a very good story. And what about you Mathieu?03:37 Mathieu Well, it was like, an opportunity, I was sensitive to environmental issues. Because mostly when I was young, I spent a lot of time doing outdoor sports. I was very keen on doing sciences, and so that was my studies - in hard sciences. And then I read some kind of research paper, talking about how the media are talking about environmental issues. And I said, 'Wow, that's very cool, it seems something that is relevant and useful for society. And I would like to do that”. And I applied for funding, and so then I could do my PhD on those subjects. So that's how I became focused on this matter of environmental communications.[04:24] Gaël So, it has been since your PhD 20 years ago, that you care about environmental communication.[04:31] Mathieu Yes, nearly 25 years ago.[04:36] GaëlI was trying to be a good host here, but okay, let's go for the hard truth: 25 [years]. So, I'd like to use the opportunity of having both of you here to ask you some clarifying questions, and maybe my first and most obvious one is: what is greenwashing and all the other subspaces, which appeared recently? Maybe Harriet, could you shed some highlights on all these new terms?[05:10] Harriet Yes, of course. So, there are quite a few different ways of defining greenwashing. And there are lots of different frameworks that actually you can use to look at [it]. But there are some particularly egregious practices that we commonly see. So actually, it's less common than you think to see just lies out there in the world. What we often see driving greenwashing is not necessarily organizations sitting down and saying 'How can we mislead consumers' (though we definitely see that). Often you might see an overexcited marketing team who were really proud of something that the organization has done, who actually, (I think, with the best will in the world), spotlight it, ignoring the other stuff that the organization does. So, think of an airline company, for example, talking about their vegan meals. And the problem is with even these quite innocent (well, I say, innocent, this is not innocent) but, you know, these kinds of well-meaning things, is that they mislead consumers. And that's the heart of this. And Matthieu, I know you've got very strong opinions about it. So, things like spotlighting issues that aren't relevant, things like shifting blame onto the consumer. Now, that's a very measured one. Think about Coca-Cola telling you their bottles are recyclable, but [they are] actually not doing anything about reducing the [amount of] plastic bottles that they produce. You gave examples within your introduction, Gaël, where actually organizations don't talk about all the good stuff that they do, they are afraid, and then they are missing out on an opportunity not only to normalize the fact that organizations are considering sustainability, but also to talk to consumers about ways that they can [be] better. So, at the core of this all, is, actually organizations talking about these issues in a way that's not helpful, doesn't enable consumer behavior change, doesn't change the behavior of the organizations themselves. And it's confusing, confusing and misleading. And the EU, in updating their green claims quite recently found, I think, that 40% of green claims are completely unfounded, use vague and misleading language. I mean, that's a huge one [misleading language] that we'll get into in a little bit. And so, what's happening is, actually, this is not helping the cause, consumers are overwhelmed. They're stressed out when they try and make these choices. And you know, frankly, as marketers, we've got to do a lot better.[07:43] GaëlThat's crystal clear. And fun fact, I didn't know that green lighting existed. I made it as a joke. [07:53] Mathieu Oh, yes - it exists![07:55] GaëlOkay. That's excellent. I'm cleverer than I thought. Okay - I'm actually luckier than I thought. Well, thanks a lot Harriet. Wow, quite a lot of definitions and concepts... And Mathieu, she mentioned that you have got a strong opinion on it as well. Could you share it with us, please?[08:16] MathieuYes, when I'm talking with brands, whether CSR teams, or marketing, or communications team or even the legal department, I am defining greenwashing as any message that may mislead the public about the true ecological quality of a product or service, or, about the reality of the company's sustainable development policies and approach. So, greenwashing is something that could be relevant at the product or service level, or at the corporate level. And then yes, you have different ways of falling into this trap. And I gave a number of examples. And so, this can be something very tricky. And I just tried to make sure that these people understand that it's a matter of: will the public be able to understand the quality of my product or my CSR strategy, or do I mislead or give false information or [do I give] unclear proof, etc.[09:28] GaëlMathieu, do you follow, here, I found this article, so, there are several researchers who wrote an article on a systemic review of greenwashing, published in "Environmental Science Europe", [authors: Vieira de Freitas Netto, Marcos Felipe Falcão Sobral, Ana Regina Bezerra Ribeiro & Gleibson Robert da Luz Soares] - I need to check my notes, I must admit - but anyway, they were explaining that you've got the deeper systemic review and the meta distinction between company-level greenwashing and product level greenwashing. And they also made a sub-distinction between 'executional' and 'claim'. Is it a framework that you use somehow as well?[10:10] MathieuNot really. Of course, we are talking about that, because sometimes companies are asking for my advice regarding sustainability claims related to a product. And sometimes it's about the whole CSR strategy. But I believe that they have to understand the philosophy of the issue regarding greenwashing. And that is, "do I give enough information?", and, "Am I clear enough about what I do?", and "What are the characteristics of my products and services and my strategy?". I try not to be too complicated about definitions, about categories, you see, but to take examples, and to make them better understand why people could react like this, or like that, in reading their content. And it could be text, or images, of course, or both. So, I tried to leave the posture that could be too analytic, and to go to something more practical.[11:27] GaëlAnd could you give us one example (and I will ask Harriet to share another one after) about good practices, like you said, that you need to give the consumer the right information, the good information, not to mislead them. But how do you do that?[11:43] MathieuSo, in my opinion, the first point I would like to say is that it's really important to give good examples, because it's easier to criticize. To do this [to criticize], it is not good - ‘this is misleading’, ‘you should not have written this like that’, etc. And so, it is important to show good inspiring examples. But that doesn't mean that the company itself is green, it is just that this particular campaign or this particular message is well written. And it's interesting to see both creativity and the respect of deontology [following of rule-based ethics], and, of course, about [respecting] the law. So, some examples. It's also a kind of posture of communication. When I read the content of LinkedIn posts, for example, I can understand that the company in question has understood the ecological issues as a whole, and also that the company is not only focusing on climate for example, and on climate, they are not talking about neutrality, etc. And for some good examples in the tech sector, I'm sure you know about Infomaniak [a major European cloud provider]. Something that is interesting, is that they've got an environmental page, and the title is "We pollute - yes, we know our activity is polluting, and what do we do to reduce that?". They are not trying to hide the fact that maybe they are compensating, or even that's why they do. So that is interesting. In another sector, in the apparel sector, there is a brand called Organic Basics. If you go to the environmental report or CSR report, there is a chapter about "our fuck-ups". And that's something very interesting, in my opinion, because they [Organic Basics] are okay to talk about what they wanted to do. And what they have failed to do about certain goals, that certain goals were not relevant, such as the goal of neutrality. Now, they admit it was not a good idea to set a target for neutrality, and from now on they will be talking about the reduction of the carbon footprint, for example.[14:08] GaëlWhat is interesting with these examples is (though I don't know if it will be the case for the entire episode), but I'm pretty sure you picked Organic Basics for their entire CSR strategy, but actually in the tech sector, and especially in the sustainable design sector, they are pretty famous for their websites. [14:30] MathieuYes, their websites, very good, yes. Now because they're very good, and that's interesting, because they are talking about what they do in a way that is original. And they are trying to propose new ecommerce websites. And that's very good.[14:53] GaëlI think they try to be very consistent, and I guess, because I'm not an expert in communication, that is something very important. Maybe Harriet, do you want to comment on it, and also share some positive examples, as it's way easier for people to understand.[15:09] HarrietYes, I completely agree. Let's talk about what's good. I mean, it's not [just] in the tech sector. But I do think that Oatly, with their, and excuse this [language], but their ‘Fuck Oatly’ kind of campaign, are really, really interesting in terms of the way that they are radically transparent about what their fuck-ups have been, essentially, and where they've got things wrong, and where there's either been a backlash where consumers have felt misled. And what's interesting, I think, is at least that Oatly's consumers, they are vocal, they are probably way more switched-on to environmental issues than your average [consumer]. But, you know, I think can be where some of the fear comes from, when organizations are trying to talk about their green credentials, is that they go "Oh, my gosh, there could be a backlash". You will always have people who are supercritical, that's the nature of passion. But what Oatly have done is they've really owned that, they've listed their failures, and they've said, "Look, this is how we've learned in response, and by the way, here's some of the press, and here's some of the comments that we've received, so you know what we've talked about". And I think things like that, the brand is very, very good at being honest, talking, and turning that into a real a real virtue. And I just think it's very good. And I think, if more organizations were honest about their mistakes and addressed them in that way head on, then I think we could have a much more mature conversation, because also, people could learn from others. On a much more subtle note, there is a really great example recently of Samsung, in their washing machines range, actually using the legal status of the energy consumption of a particular product to talk about why that product was better, that the product had a benefit to consumers and was environmental. So, the organization leaned into the, the A-ratings, the re-'high rating' of their washing machine, and actually use that to make a green claim about how this can help consumers. And I think not from a fancy "we're a super environmental leader" kind of way, but more of "we've got a claim here, that's factually correct, that looks at the full usage cycle of the product and is beneficial to consumers". I think that's a really, really good example. So, you don't have to be a super ethical brand, and you don't have to be doing something that's completely beyond the pale to make a really good solid green claim that consumers can really see the benefit of.[18:06] GaëlActually, I wanted to ask you the questions a bit later. But it's so fascinating that I'd like to ask you if you would be okay to work pro-bono for a non-existing [fictional] company today. But I would love to give you two or three cases where I've been struggling with the people I was working with, on how we should or we should not communicate? And of course, it's mostly examples coming from the tech sector. But I guess you can apply it to all sectors, so would you be okay to be our advisors today?[18:43] HarrietLet's do it.[18:44] MathieuYeah, sure. [18:46] GaëlSo, a very easy one to start as a warmup is: I want to put something on my website claiming that I've got a low carbon website. Unfortunately, sometimes people use a green website and actually that's the case, you know, you can use the Whole Grain carbon website estimator, or the greenit.fr ratings, and you've got a good rating. So that's an honest claim. Okay. The problem is, your IT department, (you're in the transport sector, for instance), and the IT department is something like 5% of the entire greenhouse gas emissions of your company, scopes 1, 2 and 3 included. What would you advise a company to do? Should they put on the label? They don't put on the label? Should they put it on, combining a specific way to communicate that it's not the main [source of] emissions but still, they are making some effort? What would be your advice, from both of you? Maybe starting with Mathieu...[19:53] MathieuMy advice would be, if you have somewhere where I can understand what is your strategy to lower your impact regarding climate change, and also other impacts, okay, because unfortunately, climate change is not the only ecological issues we are facing, then this claim regarding the low impact website is interesting, because it's true and because every single act counts. The idea is to put this information with regards to the whole strategy, and so we understand, as visitors of your website, or as clients of this company, that this is not your main action to reduce your impacts, and that you are clear about that.[20:46] Gaël The orders of magnitude are explained.[20:50] MathieuYes, it cannot be the only element regarding your CSR strategy. But if it's one element among others, and that we do understand that the majority of impacts are elsewhere, then it's okay to put it on your website.[21:05] GaëlOkay, Harriet do you want to add something?[21:07] HarrietSo yes, I would say, what Matthieu said, obviously, and then adding that extra element of your audience on there, because obviously, as you know from when you learn your skills as marketers, you always start with your audience. I would say that all of what Matthieu said, but also [any communication is] tailored and is adding value to your audience. So, whether your audience is a stakeholder, whether it's a b2b customer, or whether it's a consumer, that they can understand exactly what is being said, exactly what the benefit is, not only to the wider environment, but also to themselves. Because I think it's very, very important that when we're communicating all of this stuff, we absolutely we have that theory, that structure right, but we don't forget the mark, you know, what we've been taught in marketing, we don't forget to add value for the audience that we are talking to.[22:04] Gaël That's very interesting that you mentioned the audience, because actually, that connects with my second case example, which happens quite a lot. You are a startup, maybe a scale-up. But not that big, you know, in the tech sector, and you don't have that much leverage, all your tech stack is on AWS, Google Cloud, or whatever. You do what you can, but you're in this kind of growth mode, etc., that could, we could discuss a lot about the growth mode of other tech sectors. But that's not the point here today. Anyway, there is this huge challenge of employer branding and committing your employee beyond just what your startup is trying to achieve. And being very sincere, you've got the HR, the lead, who comes back to you and says, "Well, we've run all this training, or this awareness workshop, like for example, the Digital Collage, or Climate Fresk, etc., we've been truly committed to that, because 100% of our employees have followed those workshops, and we allow them some time also to volunteer, etc., and I need to be more vocal about it. Because I need to strengthen my employer branding, I need to attract younger people, more engaged people, etc. What should I do? “. Because that's pretty much the only stuff that you've done, at least as a CTO, in raising awareness. And you don't have that much time or that much money or that much leverage on reducing the rest of your carbon footprint.[23:35] HarrietTo be honest with you, the best ideas for how to make your organization more sustainable, they are going to come from people who are specialists who are working in these impact areas. And I think a lot of organizations miss a trick, because they have a couple of people who work on the sustainability of the organization, and they don't leverage that incredible hive-mind. What I would always suggest is, because there's two sides to this, the first of which is that, if organizations, particularly tech organizations who are so innovative, aren't leveraging, aren't using that innovation lens to get these better ideas from employees, and create networks of people within their organization who are making suggestions and making things better, then they're missing a trick. So that's number one. But that then spills over into your employer branding, as you said, because you have really beautiful, credible, stories, and lots of advocates within the organization who can kind of do your work for you. So, yes, you can have something that says, "Yes, this is what we do", as long as that plan is credible, and it is backed up, and there's a strategy behind it and it deals with your main impacts. And then actually what happens is, you know, you start to have points where if a potential employee starts to ask at interview stage ‘what actually do you do around sustainability’, you might have an advocate in the room. And one of the interviewers, someone in the room, might be able to just say, "Hey, you know, actually, we're doing this thing, I've suggested this thing, or I'm starting this initiative". And it starts to pay dividends. I think it's not just a communications thing here. It's about how you foster those networks of innovation within a company.[25:23] GaëlYeah, for sure. So, you would be pretty open in communicating, that's a first step. And, and we can communicate about it without being at risk of being labeled, I don't know, "green-something"?[25:41] HarrietJust to add to that, the Conscious Advertising Network, there's a lot of culture change, behavior change that comes along with a lot of what we do. And for those that don't know, we've written these manifestos that give advertisers, CSR departments, etc., a plan for how to make their advertising more in line with human rights and solving climate change. So, you've got the guidance there, but we found the most effective kind of organizations within our membership group have actually created these cross-department working groups that are looking at how they implement these strategies. So yes, as an absolute first port of call, I think it's worth doing a sense check of some kind, of what you're doing, whether the strategy or the communications that are going externally do [actually] match up. Because it is so, so important that what's being said, and that what is being done are matching up, and that will make it so much easier to make really credible green claims, and to do this stuff well.[26:47] GaëlAnd so, Mathieu, would you put some pictures of these workshops, Climate Fresk whatever, etc., on the website, or on the sustainability strategy page, for instance?[27:00] MathieuMy first reaction to this [hypothetical] case would be that I don't quite see how a company could organize training and workshops without actually changing, and thinking about a CSR strategy, even if it's at the beginning. I'm sure that a startup that would organize all those training sessions, just like I had said, and some people would say, “We have to continue and to work together, and we have to do things about transportation, about our business model.” But I'm sure there would be other things to talk about, more than just the HR activities. And so yes, in my opinion, it's always good to talk about what you do. The idea is not to let the people think that this will save the planet, or that it is making you a green company. So, it's to talk at the level of what you are doing, and what are the values created? What is the lowering of the impacts on the environmental or social or societal issues? And so, my answer is yes. All will be in the words that you will use to talk about that.[28:30] Gaël Context and order of magnitude basically, and a bit of humility, if I can read between the lines, okay. [28:39] MathieuYeah, that's the key. Yes. [28:41] GaëlOkay. That was rooted in reality for me, and I'm pretty sure, for a lot of the people listening. Before we jump onto the last part of this interview, and we talk a bit about ‘legals’, I'd like to grant you a treat, which is, do you want to share your worst case? Because we started with positive examples. And that's definitely what we should do. But if you've got to pick only one massive greenwashing advert or claim what would be your champion?[29:20] HarrietHmm. Okay. Can I take two lenses on this? So, I think what we haven't talked about, and I'll just chuck this in here, is that, as well as the kind of greenwashing that organizations might do, intentionally or inadvertently, within the creative of their communications (I mean, my specialty is advertising so I'm going to talk from that angle), there is also the issue of when organizations don't think about climate and other forms of environmental misinformation in their media strategies. So, to give a bit background, advertising essentially funds our media, funds the CAT videos that we watch on the way to work, also funds our newspapers. And when we only think about the content, in this case, advertising, we're missing a trick. What we often see is we will have organizations with amazing environmental / CSR strategies. And we will see them inadvertently funding climate denial content or anti-science content, online, usually, or occasionally on television. And so, the worst things I've seen are brands such as, and I'm so sorry to name you guys, you know, but Lush and Ecosia, on things like ‘climate change is a hoax’ [published] online. And I think this is a risk that we haven't necessarily talked a lot about yet. And it's not greenwashing per se, but it's just a kind of institutional failure to think about, you know, this is what we call a disinformation economy. Because it's also that this kind of horrendous content [is] out there, that is being produced deliberately to confuse people, deliberately to mislead them as well. So as organizations, when we're thinking about how we tackle greenwashing, we should think about the wider context of myths and disinformation as well. And then just in terms of advertisements, the recent ASA ruling in the UK around HSBC, it's a real warning shot for high carbon organizations, and organizations that invest really strongly in the fossil fuel economy. [Such a] case was essentially HSBC spotlighting its sustainability credentials and what it invests in, whilst simultaneously investing hugely in fossil fuel projects, and the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority, UK) specifically called them out for that. And I think that it is just everything that is wrong with that worst kind of greenwashing where a brand essentially launders its reputation by spotlighting something whilst having this incredibly, profound impact on the world, on the planet we live in and on the people that live on it. So those are the two for me.[32,28] Gaël
So Mathieu, you've got the right to share your two favorites as well. And the HSBC case is very interesting; I've seen it as well. And I really wonder how we will develop in France as well, because we do have the same issue with banks and actually, I guess, very honestly with teams in banks that are 100% sure that they are doing everything they could to save the planet, and a few folks next door or in the next building [are]doing the absolute opposite. And they don't talk to each other. It's a big organization. So, they stand on their feet, both of them, they're pretty sure of themselves, and that creates a lot of confusion in the public. But anyway, that was me commenting on it. But Mathieu, what are your two favorites?[33,16] Mathieu
Yeah, my two favorites would be, one advertisement from Adidas in France, regarding the new Stan Smith [trainer] that was supposed to ‘50% recycled’. So, the claim itself was not really clear. The consumer could not know the exact proportion of the shoe that is made from recycled materials, whether plastic or other materials. But the main issue regarding this ad, and you can find this logo in Adidas stores, is it's a logo, with the shape of the earth, saying 'end plastic waste'. Meaning, with Adidas, in buying those shoes, we will end plastic waste. So, it's a very big problem because those shoes are recyclable at the end of life. So, this is totally misleading the public. So that's the first one, because it's a huge brand and known all over the world. And the second one is from Volotea, an air travel company. Their slogan was (it was a kind of a concour [competition] - I don't know how you say that in English). And the ad was saying "I would love to connect with nature, please fly me directly to Lyon, Vienna, Milan, etc.", and you could pick your destination.[34,50] Mathieu Even if you were living in Paris, you could take an airplane to go to Lyon. And it was about reconnecting with nature - take a plane to do that?! And so, to me it's a very good example of the non-understanding of all our issues. Firstly, taking a plane is a problem, it is very impactful. But talking about nature, about reconnecting with nature by taking a plane, this is something that it says to me, "wow, you don't understand at all what we are facing today".[35,31] Gaël
Two very clear examples, and I will of course put all the links to these different examples and rulings in the show notes, as usual, with all the other references that you shared.[35,44] Gaël
And now I'd like to share an experience that some of you have already had. If you're based in France, or if you're not based in France, but you use a VPN with a French IP address, you just land on the Google homepage, and there you will see a statement, a link, to what we [Google] do when it comes to sustainability, and a link to the sustainability strategy page. If you do the very same exercise with a US IP address, or actually from quite a lot of other parts in the world, you will see a very different claim, with exactly the same font being used, and exactly the same place in the homepage, which is stating "carbon neutral since 2007". And of course, the reason is that recent laws in France prevent such claims without a strong backing. And I found it a beautiful example of what is coming for many companies with the new regulations and the legal environment, that they will be facing more and more. So, Harriet, Mathieu, maybe, could you highlight the main developments? Where does it [new greenwashing regulations] happen? Is it mostly in Europe, in the US, in Asia, or some other places in the world as well, and what are the main regulations that companies should be aware of right now, either existing or forthcoming?[37,17] Harriet
So I'm not a legal expert, I'll start by saying that. But I think to understand this space, you do have to understand a little bit of the legal background. So, forgive me, the legal experts out there, I am a comms person trying to explain it simply. So, what we've got is this rapidly changing landscape. The EU has released essentially a roadmap, a directive that's showing the direction of travel. And this kind of direction of travel is essentially one that means that there's going to be stronger and more precise kinds of regulations around greenwashing. And the way that they [the EU] have done it means that they've set a direction of travel, which is concentrating on things like vague and misleading terms. You talked about the 'carbon neutral' one there, which I would absolutely challenge anyone to define what carbon neutral really means and tell me what methodology there is for getting there. And of course, those kinds of vague terms, that's exactly what they're designed to do and that's exactly why they're misleading and confusing. So, those kinds of terms will not be allowed. Individual countries will need to adapt this direction of travel to their countries and to their own legal systems.[38,58] Harriet
So obviously we will have different interpretations and different enforcement across Europe. But organizations do really need to be looking at this space and listening to the communications that are coming out from the EU. And we're all waiting for them to firm up. In the UK, what we are seeing is actually the ASA and the CMA [Competition & Markets Authority, UK] are starting to actually define where they're going, through using these kinds of landmark rulings. There have been several recently that are setting a precedent for where we think they're going. And I used the HSBC example before, of organizations signaling that they are cracking down on organizations who are spotlighting particular green things issues whilst ignoring the rest of the product lifecycle or the usage lifecycle, for example. And there was a recent ruling around Shell, which I think everyone in my climate social circle was very happy to see, where again, they're signaling that this kind of greenwashing from fossil fuel companies just isn't going to be allowed. They're talking about much stronger fines and much stronger enforcement around that. So, it is a really big business risk for organizations.[40,03] Harriet
But what we know today is that it's going to look different across different markets. The US, with the political developments in the US, where the Republicans have majority control of the House, I don't think we're seeing an appetite for leadership there, frankly. We've got many organizations that work in the mis- and dis-information space, and who are being asked to provide huge amounts of documents to the US political system. So, I still see Europe as leading in this space, with close markets such as the UK keeping a very keen eye on what's happening and probably copying and using some of that. And I see markets like the [United] States being laggards.[40,54] Gaël
Mathieu, would you like to comment on this one?[40,57] Mathieu
My question now, regarding this hardening of the regulatory framework in France, in Europe and abroad, is, it's a good thing to have new rules and hard law tackling climate change. But the issue is what resources will be available to enforce the law, both financial and human resources. And for instance, in France, the neutrality claim is now strictly framed, but I can still see those claims in packaging, for bottled water, for example. And I don't know whether the directorate in charge of protecting the consumers are willing to fight against that, and to make the law be applied. So that's a question for me. At the European level, they are talking about having claims and labels to be checked by an independent and accredited verifier, and I don't know how this will be done. You have a very big number of companies that are communicating about their engagements, etc., and does that mean that every single claim will have to be checked by an independent party, and which one, and how much will this cost? So that's a very important sign that is sent by the European Union, that greenwashing is not an option, and that it's a drawback to the fight against climate change and against transition. So, it's important to fight it. But I'm waiting to see the final text and how it will be applied and followed by all the authorities.[42,55] Gaël
Quick comment on this, because A), you're right, you need to have some resources to check and the willingness to check. I mean, I've discovered very recently that less than 10% of the French companies that are now legally required by law to disclose their carbon emissions have been fined, because the Ministry of Economy is still in 'educational mode'. I'm sure that a lot of the other French taxpayers will enjoy knowing that they can be in 'educational mode' because most of the time they're not with us. But that's me being maybe too populist. So sorry about that. But I was really upset when I saw that. The second stuff [B] is like if you don't provide resources, I mean, this controlling body, if you've got 20 civil servants to deal with a million claims per year, obviously that's also a very efficient way for nothing to happen. But do you also have some ideas about the level of the fine? Because GDPR, for instance, really changed the game because for the very first time we were talking about real money. Not real money for Facebook or Google, because 4% is still small potatoes for them, but for a lot of big tech companies, getting a huge fine, which is a percentage of your revenues, that's something very serious. That's a very tangible risk. Do you know something about the potential fines on green-washing?[44,25] Mathieu
We had examples from the recent past. In Italy, for example, Eni was fined €5 million because of misleading claims. And in the Netherlands last year, H&M and Decathlon had to pay €400,000 and €500,000 (respectively) to NGOs, to avoid being sued by the authority in charge of protecting consumers. So that can be huge amounts. And that's another interesting point regarding the regulation, that NGOs will be more and more entitled to sue big companies.[45,13] Gaël
Yes, that's a very positive message, at least for the B2C sector and the B2B company which has some kind of public visibility because then the B2B sector is not really the one that the NGO will go after because they also need some publicity to keep the ball rolling. But still, that is a very positive signal indeed. Okay, so I learned a lot during this episode, and actually I learned very tangible stuff that I think I will apply with some of my clients and partners. So thanks a lot for that. Maybe one final question to both of you, Harriet and Mathieu. You shared a lot of resources and we will put them in the show notes (I've already mentioned that). But do you want to add one or two podcasts, books, articles, thought-leaders that you believe people should follow when it comes to greenwashing? And I would say on a more positive note, responsible communication?[46,17] Harriet
Sure. This is such a rapidly developing area for anyone that is on the Greenwashing front. ACT is hosted within an organization called Media Bounty. It's an ethical ad organization. We are doing a series of thought leadership pieces about navigating Greenwash. So go to Media Bounty's website and there's an event coming up in London on the 29th this month. As well for anyone that's based there. I do think that it is really worth following the rulings of some of these bodies. So going to the ASA's websites and looking at rulings around greenwash. I think looking at organizations, if you're kind of working in advertising and comms and you want to look at ways of doing things well, there's a community of people called Clean Creatives sorry, Creatives for Climate, who have a network. And it's a network of practitioners who are sharing good practice, sharing bad practice, and looking at how they can support each other. So I think if you're working in this space and you want to be connected to a community, I would definitely go to Creators for Climate and have a look at what's on there.[47,40] Mathieu
I would like to point out a really good newsletter dedicated to the fight against greenwashing. The name is 'The Crisps' and it's a newsletter made by Lavinia Muth and Tanita Hecking. And these are two women working in the marketing and communication sector, especially in the apparel industry, and they are sending one newsletter per month and two per month if you buy the pro-format of the newsletter. And that's really good 'crispy' content, very good content regarding Greenwashing,[48,24] Gaël
Thanks Mathieu and Harriett for joining Green IO and sharing all those new references on top of the others (references). I hope that you will keep on carrying the torch of responsible communication as high as possible. And I do hope that Green IO will help you in carrying it a bit higher after the release of the episode. Thanks a lot.[48,44] Harriet
Oh, thanks so much Gael. And thanks for everyone for listening. It's been great.
[48,48] Mathieu
Thank you. Bye.

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A special (northern hemisphere) summer one! An uncut, raw, spontaneous episode where Perrine, Tristan and Gaël discuss about podcasting in Sustainability, in Tech and in general! 🎙️

Enjoy it at the beach, in the moutains or in front of a warm fire if this is winter time for you 🎧

Learn more about our guests and connect* Perrine's LinkedIn * Tristan’s LinkedIn * Perrine'spodcast Déclics Responsables * Tristan’s podcast l'Octet Vert * Gaël's LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

Transcript (AI generated)[00:00:08] Gaël: Hello, everyone, welcome to and because this is a very special summer episode that we're gonna have both with and two great podcasters in French. But of course they speak beautiful English and you know what? We're not gonna talk that much about green it and digital sustainability in this episode because I really wanted to gather people to share what it is to try to be a voice in the sustainability field and avoid being someone creating content. And obviously, because I'm a big fan of podcast, I asked two fellow podcasts to join. But, hey, that's kind of the same questions that would apply to anyone trying to launch a newsletter, a youtube channel or whatever. So why did I invite and, and actually Richard Anna as well, but he couldn't join. Well, because these folks, they're kind of my heroes with Jerry mcgovern and Jerry, um like a Gillian, the, the other people when I discovered the podcast who convinced me that, hey, there is something to be done except that for me it was in English and it was with a very clear international focus trying to connect people across different countries, across different um line of businesses, but still people that I admire a lot. And there has been really role models in my very young journey as a podcaster and this is a summer episode, so I won't edit anything. It's just be, you know, um cool conversation as we were near a pool uh with of course, rainwater and not water drainer from the ground. And well, to be honest, um we are not super, super, super sure about what we want to say. So it's gonna be very spontaneous, but we wanted to share. Yeah, what it is to create content as a volunteer. And because all the podcasts are nonprofit podcast and you know, it might inspire some of you because we need more people in this field. So welcome. Welcome, Trista.

[00:03:05] Perrine: Thank you. Thank

[00:03:06] Gaël: you. So maybe just starting uh how do you feel today?

[00:03:14] Perrine: I feel a bit sleepy,

[00:03:17] Tristan: to be honest, iii I didn't uh my, my night was pretty terrible. But, uh, other than that, um, well, it makes me usually, you know, swear a lot and, and say stupid things. So, maybe, maybe it's gonna make this, uh, a more enjoyable episode. Uh, who knows?

[00:03:36] Gaël: Uh, I do think so. My night was not super cool as well, but for good reason, I must admit that I partied quite a bit yesterday. And what you barry? Now do you feel today?

[00:03:49] Perrine: I feel a bit sleepy as well, but also very happy to hear that I can be a hero to someone. So thank you, Gaël me.

[00:04:00] Tristan: The intro was indeed very flattering a bit of, but no, that's nice. I'll think it

[00:04:07] Gaël: but pure, pure truth to be honest, pure truth. Um And, and so, yeah, maybe we could start with we all slippy. So this is kind of the French podcast, a Sleepy Gang today. But uh we're still, well, we already energized when we are behind the ma microphone. So um maybe Perria, do you want to start? Why did you start your podcast? Why did you decide to create content uh in the, in the sustainability area?

[00:04:37] Perrine: That's a good question and a good story to tell. Um Actually in 2019, um I started to question myself about my, about my job. So I work um in ecommerce. Uh I uh I work in digital marketing more specifically. Um And I used to work for companies that sell goods online uh basically. And uh in 2019, I started to question so about my job about my life. And I joined uh green it, I started volunteering for Green it in 2019. And at that time, I discovered everything about digital impacts. And I remember telling myself that consuming digital as we did at that time, and I think nothing changed, could make it disappear in three or four decades. So I remember thinking about how my job would disappear and how the next generations would have to live without technologies. And I also remembered that general public did not know anything about that. They totally ignored the figures, the impact they, they did live in this digital world that we've been enforced to live in without wondering about the risks, the impact. So I wanted to start um communicating about um digital sustainability and digital impact uh with the key concept for those people actually starting with my friends and my family because they didn't know anything about uh digital impact. I wanted to popularize uh the, the concept, the digital impact. Um I, I think I, I have to say that uh we're still far from uh the initial objective about popularizing uh the concept of digital sustainability. I, I think it's still work in progress. Uh But I have to say that the audience we have on the mainly comes from people knowing already about the problems. So that's a, that's a challenge we need to to, to, to take,

[00:07:02] Gaël: yeah,

[00:07:03] Perrine: exactly. So that's the story behind the responsibility. And I also wanted to create a media, um, that was not, um, a newsletter or a blog because, uh at that time there were a lot of, um, medias like that. Um, and I wanted to have something, um, it was not, I wouldn't call it modern because at that time in 2021 when I, when I started, started the podcast, um, there were already a lot of podcasts. Um, but I think that, but the podcast and the audio is a good, um, uh, format. What's the word in English? Um, it, it's, it's kind of light um, in terms of weight, you know, and the weight of format and it's, it's good because when you're, um, I don't know in your car or, uh, cycling thinking

[00:08:09] Tristan: about you. No, no, you're not allowed to listen to a podcast with headphones. No, you're not, you don't know in

[00:08:17] Gaël: other countries, but at least in France for sure.

[00:08:19] Perrine: That's sad. But I'm pretty sure that people still do that. So

[00:08:23] Tristan: many people do it. II, I just don't,

[00:08:28] Perrine: that's, that's the

[00:08:29] Gaël: main grief, not abiding by the law. That will be extremely rare.

[00:08:35] Tristan: Maybe I'm the only, I'm the only one but III I do not use headphones on my bicycle and which sucks. It's the main, it's the biggest grief I have against bicycle is that it's not good for my, uh, you know, for podcasting, for listening to podcast.

[00:08:56] Perrine: So, yeah, that's the story behind the and um and yeah, that's it. So at that time, it was about popularizing the, the concept. Um It's still about that. Uh So this is why we still introduce um like positive initiatives against the impacts that digital can have uh environmental impacts, social impacts, also health impacts, ethical impacts um and making making it kind of positive, being enthusiastic about uh uh being sustainable. That's the, that's the objective.

[00:09:41] Gaël: Yeah, pretty cool. And what about you? Because I, I recon the green octet or green bite if you want to use the, the, the English word which is most commonly used um has been around for quite a lot of time now.

[00:09:57] Tristan: Yeah, it's, I think it took me like um it's, it's almost five years now when uh Nicola was a Minister for the Environment and France has resigned live on radio in the morning in, in August uh 2018. Uh and it's, it stroke me. Actually, I started writing on my blog uh in, well, just 20 years ago uh about uh sustainability uh uh oil, um carbon dioxide and, and, and, and climate change. Um So II I was, you know, writing on these issues for, for a while, but I gave up because it looked like nobody was listening. Um And suddenly, you know, uh that's the minister has quit live on radio, just hit me uh that I needed to do something. Um, being a, a computer engineer, an entrepreneur. Uh I realized that well, we had to do and I saw, well, I thought, well, what, what can I do? So, I started with, you know, so small daily gestures, like trying to ride a bicycle, not buying a new motorcycle and, and eating less meat and stuff like that. And I stopped flying. Um, but I, I thought that I may have a bigger impact. Um, and also I wanted to do something in my day job, you know, just, uh, not, not as a hobby. I wanted to spend my, my whole life doing something meaningful and that implied uh fighting climate change. So, uh but, but the issue is, you know, I'm a computer scientist and, and tech entrepreneur. So, uh what can I do? Um, and I thought really hard and, um, I used the uh ec I uh method. I don't know if you guys are familiar with it. I encourage you to look it up on the internet. Um, and I realized that what I can do is, is tell story and explain stuff uh to people. This is something I'm good at. And so a friend of mine told me, well, you know, if you wanna be considered as one of the specialists in the field of uh it sustainability, what you need to do is write a book and I, I had written a couple of books, one myself. One directed as a uh you know, book written by several people and such. And I didn't feel like I like writing another book. Um because I had another project regarding a book, I wanted to write fiction, uh will, will, will explain it later. But I had a, I had a plan to write some fiction about climate change. Um And, and so writing another book which were more like an essay on uh on climate change and, and it, you know, green it and such didn't uh make me excited and it happens that I had some experience with uh podcasting in the past. Um working uh on the, on the podcast with the French Daily. Uh the uh the, the podcast was called Cast, uh 56 Cast if you will as a, as a uh as a reference to uh to the speed of uh dial-up modems back in the days. Um And so, um I thought, yeah, maybe I could, I could do my own podcast. And so II, I chatted with a couple of friends that were uh journalist and doing podcast and radio and such and then told me how easy it was. Uh And so I, I started uh considering it and then I met someone on Twitter, uh who was uh working in the field uh as a sound engineer and he told me he would help me. Um And so I started, uh and I was already listening to Hanna's uh, uh, podcast, which I liked quite a lot. And I wanted to do something, uh, different, uh, maybe shorter, uh, because I realized that some, you know, some people need, uh, like 30 minutes episodes and, um, and I want to also make it positive and, and funny because the, the, the topic is, uh, sometimes, uh, or pretty much, uh, often, uh, quite heavy. And so, well, I, uh, I decided to make it fun because I think I'm a, I'm a, I'm a fun guy. Uh, I, I say funny things all the time. Um, and usually I try to hide that parts that side of my personality, uh, because no, it doesn't sound too professional but I decided this time to embrace it. Like the people need, need fun, need, need cool and fun stuff to listen to cool material, fun material and discuss, uh, what's a heavy topic, uh, which is, uh, climate change. Um, and so, well that there was, there was my mix, uh, some, something short and, and, and fun. Um, uh, also, uh, with a decent sound, uh, because, uh, uh, my friend was, you know, professional doing really good stuff and, uh, and that was it. So I started working on a list of, uh, people to, uh, to interview and also the same list of questions that hasn't changed in, in like three years, uh, always the same question to, uh, to different people. And, um, and here you go, you have the, the story of, uh, look and then three years after it's still, still going. So, uh, and I hope it's gonna go for 1/4 season again. What about you? Uh, again? So, uh, you, you have my version of it. How did you get started?

[00:16:37] Gaël: Well, um, fun fact, you know, Trista, I love you and I admire you a lot, but there is one time I actually hated you a bit. It is when I had to throw in my bin, an article that I've been writing for a while about how I used I guy to in my life because basically you wrote it for me.

[00:17:01] Tristan: I'm sorry about that. Well, you know, you, you should, you should we use the article, say, say your own words, go, go for

[00:17:09] Gaël: it. But that's honestly I read the article and I said, holy cow, this is exactly what happens. What happened is I finished for, for many different reasons because I, I didn't want to, to last in this position for, for ages. And because I also relocated myself in and because I was a bit fed up with management, I've been managing teams for like 20 years. Um I want to do things a bit differently, but mostly because I had this kind of urgency that something needed to be done when it comes to uh uh the environment and climate change. So two years ago, I quit my um my job at a group which is absolutely not known by anyone but uh, listeners in Germany will know what IMT is or I Web in Belgium or in France. So that's the kind of company I was working in. And, um, and I think, OK, what I, what I, what I need to do and I use the ki guy as you say it, like, you know what it is. What do I know? Well, I'm a tech generalist so I can speak to pretty much everyone in the tech industry. I'm not an expert in anything. So I will not write a book in Python or a I or whatever, but I'm very comfortable talking with any data scientist or architect. And um it was OK, I'm good at this. Um What do the word need? Obviously something taking care about the environment in, in, in, in climate change. Can I make some money in it? Maybe? I don't know. I'm still figuring it out, but I believe so. And is it something that I like? And yes, at last, this is really something that I like and it, and I actually thought I would take a six months if not 12 months break, you know, to read books, to find my way, et cetera. And using the IKI guy after one month, was it boomed in done? Um I wanted to investigate the sustainability uh field and more specifically the it sustainably field as you did. So that was it I guy power. And that so far I, I, I've, I, I've been happy with this decision every day since I've started being a freelancer on, on, on it. Sustainability. And then, and that's interesting what you've mentioned. Um Both of you about finding a medium that, you know, that resonates and, and, and I don't know, like you said, it is embracing who you are and, and the truth is that I love talking to people and connecting people. I, I used to love when I had like an engineer in, in a, in a product designer, hating each other, putting them in the same room and at the end, you know, making, making sure that they could, they could talk together. And of course, I enjoyed so much working in an international company because you connect different cultures, etcetera. So I said, mm yeah, I would love a medium where I could connect people. So it cannot be only me, I cannot really start, you know, a newsletter or, or blogging because it will be mostly me about me. And that's not what I enjoy most talking about. Even if I, sometimes I can have maybe decent I DS. But that was not really the point. And then, and it was OK. I, I'd love to make it international. And obviously because in French, in France, sorry, we, we, we were already blessed to have three high quality podcasts or two about the three that we already mentioned today. Um Let, let, let's go more in English, you know, and that, that's better for international connection and boom was um uh was born. So that, that's kind of the idea. Yeah,

[00:20:46] Tristan: I, I like that you uh that you went for English um because I've, I've been considering it, it just, I'm, I'm lacking the time to do it. Um But I think uh uh when we're totally off script right now, so I hope you don't mind. But really, I think the, I think the English speaking world needs more uh of uh such content. Um I, I do have the feeling that we're lucky in France to be ahead of the game ahead of the pack. Uh You know, in this conversation about uh climate change uh compared to other countries and especially uh the US and, and UK and, and basically most other countries to be

[00:21:38] Gaël: honest, but you're right. But you know, and, and that sounds super pretentious. Uh If you've got like three French people saying so, but, but the truth is everyone, I'm talking with my German friends, my Singaporean friends, my UKIP friends, uh Canada American, they all tell us the same for the moment and I hope that will not be the case in one or two years because that, that's a bad signal for the planet. But for the moment, the country where it sustainability has been investigated, the the most still remain French, which is not a good news. There is only like 70 billion million, sorry, 70 million people in France. So obviously, we don't want only one country to consider something as big as the digital industry and its impact. Um But for the moment, that's still the case. Uh things are, I mean, many countries are catching up like very great stuff uh are happening in Scandinavia and Netherlands, Germany UK is quite active as well. It's way more difficult in the, in the, in the US because of a very pro technology bias, I would say. But anyway, uh fun fact to answer your question. You know, when I started to research, who would be my competitors slash cooperators because I don't really believe in that there is a competition between podcast when you know, or, or, or, or impact media when you aim to do the same stuff which is raising awareness on climate change and environmental impact. Um I Googled and I couldn't believe that if you Google something like Bitcoin podcast or Blockchain podcast, you will get something like one or 2000 results only in Alaia. Uh If you do the same, even for even a hyper scale as Edible US, et cetera, you've got tons of podcasts tech for good or green tech. You've got dozens of podcasts. And when I really wanted to find podcast focusing on the environmental impact in now to green rather than uh green, I could barely find any environment viable which is a podcast II, I love from the Green Software foundation was not created yet and they were only, this is HED, this is Human centered design by the two Jeri and more specifically the, the the subtract uh worldwide waste. And that was pretty much it. So, can you imagine that there is between 1.2 and 1.5 billion people speaking fluently English in the word, this is the by Francois and we're talking about less than full podcast worldwide, speaking about this. So that was kind of a no brainer for me when I realized it's

[00:24:17] Perrine: a good story.

[00:24:20] Gaël: Um You mentioned like something that yeah is kind of music to my ear like today. Is it a true pain point for you to reach an audience which is not made of people already convinced. How, how, how did you manage? What are and actually what are the other pain points that you face as a podcaster?

[00:24:40] Perrine: I wouldn't speak about pain because, you know, the responsibility is like a fun activity for me. Um But yeah, truth is um when I started the podcast, I thought that um people would be super interested in, in, in, in that uh topic because everybody is concerned about um digital. I mean, everybody use uh smartphones and uh and devices like every day. Um But the truth is, I'm, I don't know if they don't want to see the truth. Um I don't know if they want to hear about things like that. But yeah, um the audience that I wanted to reach at the beginning is actually not the audience that I have. Um because the audience that um we have on the is mainly a notions from um from our world and by our world, I mean, people from or people from the uh um digital

[00:26:00] Tristan: class peers, basically people who, who are we fighting against climate change, like just like us, people who are already convinced of the emergency of doing something.

[00:26:15] Perrine: So in a way, I wouldn't speak about pain points. Um But yeah, that's, I, I would say that's a challenge. Yes.

[00:26:28] Tristan: II, I, I'd say, well, even I, I agree with you, I would love to um reach out to more people. Um On the other hand, the feedback that I get is that what we do uh is useful. It's, it's coming in support for people who are convinced but are needing energy and stories and, you know, emotional support to those who are convinced, who are fighting on a daily basis and we are feeding them with energy and motivation to keep going. That's uh that's what I hear. Uh Like, like people come to me and ask for a new episode because uh you know, they love this or that person and the story that he or she said, um and, and they want to hear more of it because, because it's useful to them. Um and they need it.

[00:27:37] Perrine: Yeah. That's good to hear that.

[00:27:40] Gaël: Yeah. Like more like a feel good or a feel good content or um tooling content. Like to strengthen your arguments and, and yeah,

[00:27:53] Perrine: I got inspiration as well. Inspiration. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:27:59] Tristan: And, and it's not me who's inspiring is the people that I pick right? To be honest, iii I,

[00:28:06] Gaël: I, I can say it but you can, but I believe that you are in, in your own way. But that's,

[00:28:13] Perrine: I'll take it.

[00:28:14] Gaël: But you can say it's early in the morning, it's a gift that's better than

[00:28:21] Tristan: a good way to start a day.

[00:28:23] Gaël: Well, you know, uh, full disclosure and maybe some, some of the people listening to it will actually, um, will not identify himself as peer already because I've been trying for the last two months and I will tell you how it goes, um, to go a different way, Trisa, you mentioned, um the sound engineer working for you. So I, I kind of did the same because I suck just too much and I take way too much time when I had to edit and, and sound, edit my podcast. So I tried to learn how to understand it. But after at, at some point, I had to hire someone and, and started to work with Danny, who was very experienced podcast producer. He's based in New York or kind of east coast now. I think he has moved to Phil here anyway. And after a few months working together, I'm like, OK, the audience are, are good, very international, blah, blah, blah. But hey, I don't find, you know, I don't get any exponential growth, blah, blah, blah. Maybe it's the product. Maybe we should do a better intro, maybe we should do this. Maybe we should do that, et cetera, et cetera. She told me something that I've said countless time to product manager and engineers. It's like, stop focusing on the product. You know, the product is good enough. Don't fall in love with your product, but actually no one knows about your podcast. It was like, uh, what, like, come on gale, I mean, it's, it should be listened by thousands, if not dozens of thousands of people. But the problem is at some point you need to sell it, you need some marketing stuff. And I'm like, I'm not a marketing guys and, and I decided actually to post a bit like the continuous announcement of the, of the, the podcast. Like, ah, maybe I should do this. I should do that, et cetera. And, yeah, I'm trying to, yeah, I'm a bit crazy but I'm, I'm trying to, um, for the very first time I will advertise on a newsletter so it will cost me money, but a newsletter. I respect a lot. So, um, so it's ok. And, um, and, uh, and I'm trying to pin more people on linkedin and on social network, you know, really like doing some kind of sales job. I don't know if it will work, but I, I really want to try to go beyond the people and there are many of them who listen to the, the Green Podcast and say, well, that, that, that's good concern. It makes you feel better. It helps me discussing with my colleagues et cetera. I don't know if it will work, but I will try, I will tell you, you know, end of, end of the year, if I run out of Monet or energy to do so.

[00:30:58] Perrine: Yeah, but you know, girl, that's also something that I um I thought about a lot because um when speaking about communication, well, actually that's my job. I'm not like you guys, I'm not um um a tech expert. Um I'm more like a business girl. So that should be my thing, you know, communication. But still when it comes to my, my job, my podcast, uh actually, it's hard. So, and I thought about also the frequency of uh posting um things on social media. Um because I read a lot about um you know, work from um uh great work from um when you don't have something to say, then don't post, don't post anything to shut up. Exactly. Exactly. So I also thought about being sustainable in the way that we communicate on social media and in the way that we communicate about launching a new episode. But obviously that concept has also its own limits. And, um, I think it's good that you're going to test new, new things, like new, uh, advertising, um, things. But, yeah, that, that's also something that's I thought about. Like, should I do this? Uh Should I communicate? Should I create a newsletter? Should I post um, twice a week or twice a month? You know, it's, it's hard to be not to be schizophrenic, you know. Um, and being, um we say in French, you know, I, I'm not sure if there's an expression like that in English. But yeah, being means your principles, we say, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I don't know if you, you had thoughts about this as well for, but that's, that's not easy, I would say,

[00:33:12] Tristan: yeah, I, I agree. I had similar uh questions uh coming to me when um for uh I, I wanted to try something. Um And, and actually the guy who's uh who's my uh s sound engineer is also into video. Um He does video production. And so we decided uh that uh we would do a couple of episodes on video too just to see whether it would attract more people uh or not. Uh seeing me doing the interview because uh uh right now it's only audio and so we, we did video too, but it's, it's not happening on a regular basis enough to see if it really brings a new, a new audience uh or not. But deep down, it's makes it makes me cringe a bit uh doing video because, well, first, I'm not a big fan of youtube uh because of their uh recommendation algorithm and, and such. Um And, and also just because video uh is a lot heavier when it comes to uh comes to bandwidth, it's like it's, it's uh I don't know, is it 100 times bigger or something like that? Um When it comes to, uh, ban wives bandwidth consumption compared to MP3, uh, ad. So, um, and I try, also, I try not to spend time on youtube and watching video. It's, it's just, for me it's mostly a waste of time. So, so that's it. Um, I, I don't know. Iii, I know I should probably do episodes more frequently. Um, but also, you know, for me, look, there, there is a hobby and so I, I do a new episode when I have time to deal with a new episode because when, when work leaves me enough time to make a new episode. So maybe I could take it more seriously and, but it's not a business. It's still a hobby for me.

[00:35:24] Perrine: Yeah. I think it's a hobby for, for the three of us. Right.

[00:35:30] Tristan: May, may hope to make some money out of it in the end. No, I

[00:35:34] Gaël: don't think so. I mean, I've, I will make some, I, I mean, we never get any money in my personal pocket because I think the moment, I mean, even if at some point I managed to, uh, to open a Patreon of Schema or even to get a sponsor that will be fully aligned with all of my values, et cetera, which usually are the people or the company which don't have that much money. So it's, but anyway, um, I think it was very clear that it will be to pay the cost because obviously I put quite a lot of money in the podcast at the moment. That's kind of, you know, why I, when I, when I build people doing consulting or public speaking or, you know, workshops, etcetera, I'm always very transparent that almost half of my time I'm doing nonprofit in volunteering jobs. So it kind of pay the green your bill as well. But even if at some point I manage to monetize the podcast somehow, um I will never want to get a salary on it, et cetera. I'm, I'm too afraid that it will create a bias in the way I interview people, et cetera. But that's a very personal uh stance. Uh But so even, you know, and it might, it might happen, especially if I don't manage to earn enough money just to make a living, I will have to uh to, to cut costs or to ask money for people, you know, to, to be able to still pay my uh my podcast editor and the different tools and a bit of maybe you know, ads or whatever.

[00:37:05] Tristan: Yeah. I, I, the way I would put it actually is, is with our relationship to money and, you know, making money out of it. So I, I don't try money to die at all. Like there is no advertising, nothing. I just pay everything. Um, but that's fine. I just consider it to be an expensive business card. It's, um, it's, it's a way for me to position myself as one of the guy who works on the topic and who's visible, that's it, it makes me visible uh uh on, on basically green it or digital sustainability. That's it. And that, that's enough. Uh I like it business

[00:37:50] Perrine: card. And also for me, um the, the, the real benefits out of the podcast is actually um a great way to meet inspiring people because without that, without, I wouldn't have been able to meet great people that I've interviewed. So that's, that's a good card. Um As you said, it's a, it's a good way to make you visible and that's also a great way to approach people that I, well, myself, I wouldn't have been able to approach.

[00:38:29] Tristan: Indeed. Yes, I, I, like, I, I interviewed the guy who's talking about the economist who was talking about the growth a couple of months ago and that was, that was fine and that was, that was lovely. It was a lot of fun and, and now, uh you know, is, is, is invited to many famous places and that's very cool for him. But I'm, I'm glad that I, I could talk to him and have some time with him and connect with him. So it's, yeah, I agree with you. It's like both a business card and a, and a networking tool.

[00:39:03] Gaël: I, I like the, I use the expression, a golden key. It opens almost every door.

[00:39:10] Perrine: Yes, that's true.

[00:39:12] Gaël: So, that's kind of actually if, if we, if I don't know, let, let, let, let, let's play this little game a bit. Like if you had to give one or two advices to people willing to, you know, create content and obviously we're more into podcasting, but that guess maybe some, some of your advices could apply also to other media. Um What would it be?

[00:39:38] Tristan: Go for, it

[00:39:41] Perrine: just

[00:39:41] Tristan: go ahead just, you know, just

[00:39:43] Gaël: do three words, go for it,

[00:39:46] Tristan: just do it another three words that works too. Um II, I did it 21 years ago because my, my blog is gonna celebrate its 21st anniversary next week. Oh, eventually

[00:39:59] Gaël: you're gonna be able to buy some, drink some alcohol in the US. So

[00:40:04] Tristan: finally, my blog is

[00:40:07] Perrine: age happy birthday.

[00:40:12] Tristan: So, um yeah. And uh it's funny because I still post on my blog 20 years, 21 years after. Um And, and that's funny because at, at, at the beginning, I was like, what, what am I going to say? And I, I think the, the first post was like, uh, I'm starting this thing. I have no idea whether I'm going and, uh, you know, 21 years ago after that, it's still going pretty strong. Um, so go for it and, uh, try and make mistakes and have fun. Uh, it's, uh, it's, it's fun. It's fun. It's useful. Um, so whether you're into writing or, uh, podcasting, uh, or whatever, uh, just, just go for it and learn and try and, and, and fail and get back on your feet and do it again and, and learn and rinse repeat. There you go.

[00:41:13] Perrine: Yeah, nothing better. You said every everything, no, I would say, don't be scared, don't be scared. Go for it. And, uh, I, I would say for me, um, I'm not super, um, self confident. Um, but taking the podcast as a hobby and putting absolutely no pressure on my shoulders actually helped. Um, because I went for it without being scared and, um, and if you

[00:41:43] Tristan: fail, it's not a problem. It's just, it's just a hobby. It's not, nothing

[00:41:47] Perrine: professional. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you, what would you say? What would be your advice? So, I

[00:41:56] Gaël: might be a bit more philosophical here. Uh So beware, I think it's a question of both. Um um It's a question of gravity in the, in not, not philosophical way, but almost astrophysical way that we need more content to shift the narrative. It, it's a question of gravity. We, we need to create a bigger planet or bigger sources of attraction when it comes to sustainability. And, and today, when you look the, the the sustainability field, there are still not enough voices to counterbalance the incredible noise made by people who basically didn't understand or didn't want to understand the magnitude of the change ahead of us. And I'm not even talking about climate deniers or these kind of assholes. Yes, I still use the first uh rude word. But um so, you know, it's OK to add a voice and, and, and you will bring something specific and you shouldn't be shy to, you know, add your voice, add your media to already existing one. I mean, that, that, that's something that I've learned the hard way because I was really concerned about. They are, they are in French. Uh They are obviously you folks um they are already uh this, this great uh youtube. I don't like it that much, but the, the great youtube channels, et cetera. Shall I add something on top of it? And the truth is, and that's my second concept. Diversity is key. So, so even if you do something for six months and 12 months, that, that's great because you would have added diversity and we did diverse approaches to make a change if there are only one or two big voices, I mean, if they are the greatest people of all, um it will not make it up against all those voices, you know, pushing for business as usual, slightly being green, you know, painted in green. That, that's kind of my stuff. Maybe that was not that philosophical actually. That was more,

[00:44:14] Tristan: I love it. Love it.

[00:44:18] Perrine: Well, you, you actually prove your points, diversity in answers as well. Oh,

[00:44:24] Tristan: yeah.

[00:44:26] Gaël: But it was, uh, it was, it's a cool episode, I think, I think we get, we get, we, we agreed to, to keep it short. So it was for all the listeners, it was really about, you know, under the hood, uh just two podcasters, three podcasters, sorry, because I'm gonna put, count myself in it. I talked a bit in, in this episode as well. So uh discussing about, yeah, why, how and why you should actually join uh join the concert of the voices willing to make a, a greener better word, not even a digital word, but um an entire world. So, yeah, that, that was the idea. So I think you enjoyed the episode and uh maybe a final word.

[00:45:10] Tristan: Well, thank you very much for the invitation. I think it's the first time that I do something uh in English. And it's uh I, I didn't dare doing it. So, and, and I feel actually comfortable doing it. So maybe, maybe you're gonna get some competition in the uh in the English speaking by your French guy uh category.

[00:45:33] Gaël: I don't know. But you're more than welcome, you know, that

[00:45:37] Perrine: diversity,

[00:45:38] Gaël: diversity once

[00:45:39] Perrine: again. No, thank you. Um Well, for me. No, I'm gonna stick to French, to be honest, it was a bit hard for me for my sleepy heads to speak English this morning. So sorry for this very bad accent. But um yeah, again, it was great and it was also a good opportunity to speak to you both guys. Um So yeah, that's a good episode. Thank you.

[00:46:12] Gaël: So now get back to your summer break and sorry about my, all my new Zealand friends, Australian friends and actually all the people living in LA Reign because it's not summer at all. It's winter. So go back to your winter break also and just enjoy life and talk to you soon.

[00:46:30] Perrine: Yeah. Bye

[00:46:31] Tristan: bye bye everyone

[00:46:32] Gaël: and that's it. Thank you for listening to Green. I make sure to subscribe to the mailing list to stay up to date on your episodes. If you enjoyed this one, feel free to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who could benefit from it as a nonprofit podcast. We rely on you to spread the word last but not the least. If you know someone who would make a great guest, please send them my way so that we can make our digital word greener one bite at a time.

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Are you ready to take a closer look at the environmental consequences of coding and join the movement towards green coding? What actions can we collectively take to minimize the harmful effects of software development on our environment?

That’s what we discussed in this episode on the harmful impact of code on the environment !

Join Gaël Duez to meet : Arne Tarara, Ceo of Green Coding Berlin in Berlin & Anne Currie in London, writer of several science fiction novels as well as the much looked forward O’Reilly book “Building Green Software”.

➡️ Arne and Anne shared their insights on green computing practices. We tackled various topics related to :

• green software, including grass-root efforts,
• integrating sustainability in training,
• tools for reducing environmental footprints.

✅ Don't miss this episode to explore "Green Software" and gain valuable insights on the tech industry's environmental landscape and web sustainability.

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

Learn more about our guests and connect
Anne Currie is a seasoned technologist with 25+ years of experience in the industry, known for her advocacy of green software and responsible technology. She co-founded the Green Software Foundation. She is a writer of several science fiction novels as well as the much looked forward O’Reilly book “Building Green Software” !

Arne Tarara is the CEO and Software Engineer of Green Coding Berlin Software, a company focused on developing open-source tools for Green Software to reduce the climate impact caused by bloated software. Arne's mission revolves around researching the energy consumption of software and its infrastructure, creating open-source measurement tools, and building a community and ecosystem around green software. * Anne's LinkedIn * Arne’s LinkedIn * Gaël's LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

Anne and Arne’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode* Tim Frick’s book "Designing for Sustainability" * Greenframe.io * Green software foundation * Green Coding Berlin * O'reilly book's "Building Green Software" (pre-release) * University of Texas paper working group and blog * Conference in Germany about computing and environmental: EnviroInfo conference * Scaphandre * CCF * Max Schultz SDIA * Adrien Cockroft's article : "Don't follow the sun" * Dr. Melvin Vopson 'The environmental weight of data' * Environmental Variables podcast

Transcript
[00:00:10] Anne: Write code that is absolutely good for the language that you're writing in. Because compilers do a fantastic job at optimizing your code for you. Don't second guess your compiler.[00:00:26] Gaël: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Green IO the podcast for doers making our digital world greener, one byte at a time. I'm your host, Gaël Duez, and I invite you to meet a wide range of guests working in the tech industry to help you better understand and make sense of its sustainability issues and find inspiration to positively impact the digital world. If you like the podcast, please rate it on Apple, Spotify or your favorite platform to spread the word to more responsible technologists like you. And now enjoy the show.So, Green Software. Quoting my dear friend Ismael Velasco, « Our code is harming the planet » and I am privileged today to have two of the best experts European-wide, and I dare to say, worldwide, to deep dive about it. One is based in London, England and the other in Berlin, Germany. Let's start with Anne Currie. When I think about her, I have this song from Dire Straits, ‘Lady Rider’ in mind, because Anne is a writer indeed of several science fiction novels, as well as the much-anticipated O’Reilly book ‘Building green software’ with her two partners in crime, Sarah Hsu and Sara Bergman. The book is in early release, and I can't wait to discover the animal, which will be finally chosen. Anne and the two Sara(h)’s, with and without the H, are also pillars of the Green Software Foundation, and are carrying the flag for sustainability in tech in many conferences like ‘QCon London’ or ‘Apidays Paris’ (a leading API conference series), just to name a few.When I had the pleasure to meet Arne Tarara, we went for a walk in a small park in Berlin. This is how he likes to exchange, outside, surrounded by nature. And during our talk, I was astonished by Arne's deep knowledge on green computing, and his commitment to build efficient tools for developers in the true open-source spirit through the startup he created called « Green Coding Berlin ». As you can guess, both of them are seasoned software engineers having decades of practice behind them.Hello Arne. Hello Anne. Nice to have you on the show today, and I'm going to be super cautious with the pronunciation of your names today, so that everyone will understand when I ask Anne, and when I ask Arne, to intervene, so as not to confuse too much all our American friends. And I'd like to start with the usual question I ask all my guests, which is: “how did you become interested in sustainability, and in the sustainability of our digital sector in the first place? You know, did you experience a light bulb moment, or was it more like something that was there forever?”. Maybe, Arne, if you want to start?[00:03:20] Arne: Sure. Thank you for the nice introduction. I think the important point is one you already mentioned, that I have already been a software developer for quite a while, 16 plus years or so. I had just finished with my former company, which was mostly in performance, marketing, advertising, online shops etc. So, one of these classical building businesses, I would say, at least at the time, and I wanted to make something that had more meaning to me, and had a more sustainable touch. So, I tried to branch out in different fields. It wasn't clear if it would be digital or not. We have a strong meet-up culture here in Berlin, actually, same as in the US, I guess. And I was introduced to the meet-ups about green coding. People that claim that they can make the world a little bit better, not only the digital sector, in particular by using software. On the one hand, it was a bit surprising that you can be a professional in your domain for 16 plus years, and you obviously know that there's stuff like supercomputer optimizations, and hardware gets better over time, and more efficient. But you didn't even think about this issue in Germany. We have this pro work [attitude], like sweeping in front of your own door, i.e., basically just checking whatever you do, and see if that could be improved, made more efficient in any way. And I was introduced to this meet-up group and I would say, yes, it kind of had this mind-blowing effect on me - it was like « wow ». Actually, there is so much you can do. And this niche opened up to me. I believe green coding is still to a certain extent, [an area] that you can get to know very many people very quickly, people who seem to be the top players, with what they are currently doing at the moment, and that there is so much potential to be lifted, there's so much to be done, so much you can do with software. So much efficiency gains [to be reaped] that are still lying around in software field. And I immediately knew, OK, this is what I would like to do, and I looked around, and there were not many tools at the time. The tools that I discovered which kind of had my idea implemented in part, was, for instance, GreenFrame.io, which is still around. And I think it's actually from France, right? I picked up the tool and I tried to use it, and it didn't work at all for me, and it was not open source. And then I thought, this the natural way I'm going to contribute, but it was not possible. They will not act; they are not interested. I contacted the support team, but didn't get a call back, etc. And I thought, OK, I'm going to re-implement it myself, I made the green metrics tool, which is one of the main tools we're doing and said “OK, I also want do it a bit more professional, and be a business, and want to carry out research in this field ». And this is when I created Green Coding Berlin, and set up a small team of people that we would al like to work with. And now we're doing research and trying to make the sector a bit greener.[00:06:10] Gaël: What about you Anne?[00:06:13] Anne: I've always been very interested in efficiency, and a lot of that comes from the fact that but I've been in the software industry since the early nineties, and back then everything had to be efficient. We didn't really have any choice in that. The machines were really terrible, you know, in many ways, 1000 times worse, 1000 times less bandwidth, 1000 times less power. We had to be incredibly efficient in the way we wrote things. So back in the nineties I worked for a while on the first version of Microsoft Exchange, in these days, with one of my co-authors, Sara Bergman. She [still] works on exchange, you know, nearly 30 years later. It's always been interesting to me, that it’s still effectively the same product. But it requires 1000 times more resources to do its job now than it did then. And when you look at the world and the energy transition that's going to have to happen, you realize that 1000 times more resources, that's a lot. And we could really be doing with using that electricity, those resources, as efficiently as we did in the past, today. Except there are issues with that, you can't just go ahead and do it. That's the tricky thing to be doing at the moment. How do we align them both? So, I wouldn't say I didn't have a kind of an epiphany, a kind of like religious belief that we had to do better. Just the knowledge that we really could (do better). And this is something that has to happen and therefore we will do it. And this is a key way that we will do it, through increased code efficiency. But that's not the only way, but it is a fundamental way.[00:08:02] Gaël: I didn't do any software engineering back in university, that is not what I studied, but I learned everything on the ground with a tremendous mentor called Jean Yves. And he used to tell me already about the old days, you know? And he had this expression, that in the old days we had to break every byte into two. And it started already to be, yes, quite convenient. The computing power was going up. Storage was less and less of an issue, etc. But I could not forget what he used to tell me: you need to pay attention to memory resources. You need to pay attention, and we completely lost sight of it. And it's quite fun to hear you referring to these times where resources were super scarce and super expensive, actually. And that actually leads me to the question I wanted to ask you, and so I might lose my bet, but I would dare to say that if I bet a dollar or a euro or a pound with you, and you choose your currency, that the words ‘green software’ was not that widespread, I guess, when you started coding. So how do you see the evolution (of it) today and, maybe more specifically, during recent years? Where are we? I mean, is it that widespread? Or is it more like do we (Arne, you and I) live in some kind of informational bubble, and we actually think everybody cares? But perhaps that's not the case?[00:09:37] Anne: I think well, I'll answer your first question first, which is ‘No’. 30 years ago, green software did not exist as a concept for two reasons, really. Software just wasn't that much of a hit on the economy at that point it, it didn't use that much electricity, the software industry wasn't that big. It didn't have the impacts that it does today. Plus, also, you know, culturally, we weren't thinking about these kinds of things back then. But ironically that the kind of things that you have to do, or are part of being efficient and using energy well, for software we were just doing it, because we had to, because we had those terrible machines. So, in some ways, we were great, because we were doing a lot of the right things, though not all the right things, but we were doing a lot of the right things. We had efficiency absolutely down to pat. But that was because it was necessity rather than because we actually had to do it. But these days, I think you're right in saying that there's a risk that we're all in a bubble, where we think this is something people care about now. But it isn't. But it has become, massively, massively, more top of mind in the past few years. I remember talking about this at conferences 5-6 years ago, and people looked at you as if you were crazy, and we even got complaints. When we ran tracks on this subject a few years back, people were saying, well, that's politics, it's not technology, it shouldn't be included, in conferences. But now nobody says that. Everybody knows that it has to happen. There has been, I think, the IPCC report that really woke everybody up. And the fact that the tech industry is one of the biggest industries. We have to do things and yes, some of it is going to be efficiency, just like we did in the nineties. And some of it is going to be time-shifting, which is in the long term, even more important.[00:11:35] Gaël: Could we say that the awareness has dramatically raised? But what about the practices? Maybe Arne, you want to comment on this one? Did you really see a significant change in the way people code, even if they are aware of the ecological crisis that we are into at the moment?[00:11:55] Arne: I think part of every business that everybody does (or should do) is to do a bit of research, asking: ‘has this maybe come up before’? Have people been talking about green coding before? Are we currently on a hype or are we currently in some kind of a valley [trough], so to say? And if you look back in the academic world, there were already, in 2007 – 2010, very many papers around green coding. There was the university in Texas who had this Archer supercomputer where you could actually measure all your code and before even RAPL was out there. Or perhaps it was around the same time. which I think we would come to technologies later. But let’s put it out there for the moment that one measuring technique is the processor itself. You could already do it on systems that were out there. But basically, nobody was interested anymore. And I would say a drought of papers in the academic world happened, and now it's coming up a bit again, at least in Germany. We have a conference about it ‘EnviroInfo’ where it's mostly about computings and ecology in general. So, I would say that the green coding, at least in my historical view when I looked at it, has already had its ups and downs. And now coming back to your particular question, especially, I would say in the last year, I wouldn't say that there is necessarily a stronger move on people adopting these techniques. So, a measurement you could, for instance, take, is one of the most prominent softwares, I guess, like, cloud carbon footprint. And Scaphandre [a metrology agent dedicated to electrical power consumption metrics].I would put out here for instance how many GitHubs do they have over time, is there a search or something? I don't have all the data as I'm not the repository owner, but this is my view on how green coding has evolved over time. But, if it's OK, I will elaborate on this one a bit because you also asked me about what we are doing and how we see the sector in particular. We at Green Coding Berlin do not necessarily do what people often think green coding entails for them in particular. When we talk to companies or young developers, they ask us for optimization. They say, “OK, how can I make my code greener in particular right now? Which tool do I have to use to emit less carbon?”. This is actually something we don't focus on a lot in particular because green coding, as from my view, if you look at the digital sector as a whole, (it) is not a problem that is coming from the industry itself. The industry doesn't necessarily have an issue with the digital product that it's using. It's rather something that's coming from states as actors, from developers, and from consumers. The industry itself, in my view, has an incentive to tackle things that they think are not efficient enough. For instance, the machine learning models, because they cost them a lot of money. I think this will be resolved on its own. A bit of additional pressure might be nice, but it's not necessarily needed, I guess, for this to transition. Or things that are not cost effective, so, if you look at something like YouTube, Twitch and Bitcoin, they are in themselves, for the most part of it, already cost effective. But people complain about them a lot and think ‘can we not make this greener in a way?’, because they often don't use these technologies themselves. You will rarely hear complaints from people that earn their money with Bitcoin, that Bitcoin should be should use less energy. And generally speaking, people that don't use Twitch are more likely to complain that one such streamer can emit x amounts of carbon. But for the companies that run them, like Google, that runs YouTube, or Twitch which I think is owned by Amazon, it's a cost-effective thing for them to use these platforms, even though they will produce an enormous amount of data, which is harmful on its own. But it works for them. The incentive is there, but it’s not that intense. And I think green coding techniques on YouTube will take a while until they're implemented if they are not directly cost effective, for instance. On the flip side, the developers are becoming more concerned. This is what we see, for instance, as a company. But this overlap of business and interest, I think this is still in the making, and I'm not really sure if this is the biggest driver. So, I think that green coding, and the effect (coming back to your question in particular), will mostly happen. And this is also what we work on at “Green Coding Berlin”, in particular through regulations. And this means that you have to have the transparency first. And this is what our tools are mostly doing. They are giving developers and users transparency. They make stuff comparable, and then some someone can step in, like regulators or society, to force that optimization techniques, or limits can be implied.[00:16:42] Gaël: And how do you enable more transparency to happen when we have so many issues? And I'm not going to brag or quote too much during this discussion, from Max Schulz from the SDIA. But he's got a point when he says, again and again, that especially the main hyper-scalers are not providing enough comparable and transparent data to truly leverage everything that we could do in computing. Do you also believe that it's an issue? Or actually, what you were saying is that with the tools that you've developed or the approaches that you encourage people to follow, there is a way to become more efficient? Even if some data are missing. And I know that all the hyper-scalers are, I would say, not doing things at the same speed. But I will not enter into this debate here.[00:17:38] Anne: It's interesting with the hyperscalers, they are interesting because you can put pressure on them. Even, obviously, Governments and things could put pressure on them, but it's amazing how much pressure users, customers can put on them. If you say, « Look, I want this, I'm demanding better carbon footprint, measure(s), I'm demanding this information ». They are quite customer, well, I say they are, not, they are. AWS. Amazon is quite customer responsive. Actually, Azure is quite customer responsive as well. Google not so much, but if you raise this, if enough customers raise it, and it doesn't require that many, and you keep raising it, they (hyper-scalers) will see that there's customer demand for it, and then they will do it. When Amazon talks about being customer obsessed, they actually are. If you keep raising (it), if a handful of people, not that many, just keep raising this, with AWS reps, we have a good chance of getting it. And we got those sustainability commitments. Whether they will be sufficient in the end remains to be seen. But we have made progress by getting folk to raise issues with their providers.[00:18:45] Arne: I think this is one of the big levers to go to, that you have to put the pressure on the cloud providers, either through the user side or through a regulatory side. And, for instance, this is what our tools are trying to do. A lot of people run an extensive amount of CI/CD pipelines, and what our tools do is that they simply create an easy machine learning model that's based on an open database of server energy consumption, called spec power, and then you plug that into a bit of code, so that it can be digestible by GitHub actions. This is their pipeline product. Or by GitLab CI. This is their pipeline product. And then you just see at the end how much your pipeline is consuming, and you see it for your hundreds or thousands of pipelines. And then you have a number, at least at the end of the month, and you can see if this number is going up or going down, and then you can go the route that Anne was suggesting and saying: “Hey, this number is maybe not the best because this company green coding building is doing it from the outside in. So why don't you give us these numbers? “. So, they go to GitLab and they go to GitHub or Microsoft in particular. And they say, « We want better numbers. It's not so hard for you to give them to us. And now we see that it's possible to actually, somebody can do it from the outside in. So why don't you give us these numbers so we can be better ». But we believe that people need to see this to a certain extent before they can even ask the right questions. [00:20:06] Gaël: It’s a bit like starting with the metrics, we have to create a momentum and then in parallel, put pressure to get better metrics and better data from providers. And if you don't mind, both of you, because we could discuss a lot about cloud providers and the general approach, but actually, I'd like to deep dive a bit more with you. Could you share the top 2 or 3 techniques or approaches that you implement, I would say on, almost on a daily basis, to reduce carbon or carbon emissions caused by software?[00:20:41] Anne: I'm a bit controversial on this one, so I'll start off and say, this is something that came up when we started writing « Building Green Software ». One of the questions that came up immediately from people [was]… “Oh, in the book can you cover some examples of efficient code?”. I used to write efficient code. Almost everybody I know writes efficient code and we all (this is terrible), we all laughed when someone said this, because almost the definition of efficient code is, it's incredibly custom. It is utterly and specifically custom to the very, very particular use case that you're interested in, and a really efficient code takes ages to write. It is incredibly bad for developer productivity, so generally it's quite hard to give people advice about how to write efficient code. I mean, you can say, ‘Well, I'll use efficient languages like C or C++ or Rust, rather than less efficient ones like Python. But even that's not so clear-cut these days, because there are new Python compilers that are compiling Python to machine code, or compiling Python to C. So, you can still write in the inefficient language and have it transformed into a more efficient one, because they know that developer productivity is really killed by writing this very, very highly custom code. So, it's hard to give generic advice. If you speak to folk who are really still writing with efficient code, for example, in the networking area, you're still having to write that high[ly] proficient code, the same kind of code that we used to write 30 years ago because you really, really need that super performance. And their feedback is generally: write code that is absolutely good for the language that you're writing in. Because compilers do a fantastic job at optimizing your code for you. Don't second guess your compiler. Follow best practice so that your compiler can optimize as far as humanly possible. It's a bit sad because everybody wants to hear some amazing, C technique, whatever. But fundamentally, it's just really, really hard and very custom. The best thing you can do is measure different tools. Get somebody else to do it for you. Don't custom write your own high proficient code. Find libraries and tools that are good and use them, which is what you need to use the measurement for. You need to measure to find out which are the good tools in the libraries, and you swap out poor ones for those more optimized ones, but don't attempt to do it yourself unless you are actually writing those libraries, I would say. It's a bit sad, but I would say there's no there's no killer technique that you can use because it's all hyper custom. You know, it's all basically asking around with your L one L, two L, three caches for a very, very specific use case. I don't know if, you might disagree with me Arne?[00:23:43] Arne: No, I actually have the same [outlook], I have the notion that we are very on a par here, with our view on the ‘optimal’, how good these generic optimization tips are. However, if you think about what we often get, [it] is requests from users who see these articles, that Amazon has implemented a new gzip or zlip compression technique in their S3 service and it saved them, I don't know, I think it was in the tens or hundreds of millions, because they had to use less hardware to store their stuff. Or that you see this article that states there is a 70% improvement in React by just stitching the virtual DOM, so apparently it is possible, on a particular product, to get these gains. However, I would very much agree that on a generic level, it's extremely hard to implement. So, there are techniques that have been known for many years, like using vector instructions, loop unrolling, etc., that do work if you really put the work in. But it's a very questionable if really, in the end, if you look at the whole thing. Also, the time the developer had to think in, how much the software will run in the end, how much it cost you building these 50 to 100 iterations until you get it working, if this really saved you something in the final calculation. So, I think this is a bigger question, and I think Gaël you might make a separate podcast on this, this whole idea of software life cycle assessment. This is also something that Max [Schultz] is very passionate about. But I would like to give you our approach on how we typically do it. I think we have the same idea that Anne mentioned, that measuring is like one of the first steps, when we typically consult with companies or when we do workshops with developers. We have these five pillars, so to say, so, first of all, it’s about understanding. People often don't understand the terms that are even used. If you talk about energy and energy efficiency, they don't even know how a network could even cost them in energy terms, that network costs can be linear, or they can be progressive in a way, and then [there is the question of] transparency. The measuring and transparency. Whatever you then have understood and measured, you should also show it to people and make it public. So as in GitHub, as a badge or something. Then continuity is a pillar we focus on a lot, so it doesn't help you if you look at it one time [only], so you have to monitor it over time. So, like the git-ops approach, that with every release, with every build, you basically have to check if your initial measurement or your initial assumptions are still right, or check if the product currently derailing, and you don't want that. Then the fourth pillar is comparing. If you are thinking about software, and you're looking at the goal at the end, the optimization, is to actually sav something, then comparing is often very helpful. So sometimes just looking at how much would database 1 - just technically identical to the database that I'm currently using - how much would this change? So just swapping libraries out, as you said, or swapping infrastructure out is often a better way to go than going on code level optimizations in particular. But they are obviously a point, so our first pillar is then code level optimizations’ wherever they make sense. However, this is then specific, so you have to really look into your product. It often means using specialized tools. So maybe VTune® or something, or code profiling techniques. This is very laborsome, and, these tools are also sometimes cumbersome.[00:27:18] Gaël: I would say it's a lot about measuring and comparing, rather than having one silver bullet, it makes sense. If it was that easy, everyone will do it. And I guess the question of software productivity, the productivity for your developers is absolutely key here. We need to take into consideration the full life cycle, and like you should take three or four times more days, to just release one little piece of code, and so actually, you could even use the energy better.[00:27:53] Anne: Unfortunately, it's more like 10 or 20 or 30 times as long! I remember how long things used to take. They used to take an incredible amount of time. I mean it is interesting, that in the 30 years of my career, there has been more than 1000-fold improvement in machine productivity, and we've used it to make developers more productive. And it's very hard to make the sell to your business that you should go slow, slow down, because otherwise you'll go out of business. So do you have to trade off what you can sell to your business, as well as what is a sensible thing for your business to do, as well as what is the green thing. You have to align them. I'm not saying throw out the green things, I'm thinking you have to find ways to align them both. And the good news is that ((there are)) all the modern ways of working with microservices, with open-source libraries with hyper scalers, hyper-scaler services. Arne said this himself, that there's an alignment, as if you're a big business, to make your stuff efficient because so many people are using it, it is worth putting in that 100 X developer effort to make it efficient because you've got so many people using it, (so) that pays off. But if you're only a small business, and you only have a moderate number of people using your software, you'll probably never pay back that developer effort to make it super-efficient, so you're better off just using a library. Don't do it yourself. Use a library. Use an open-source library, use a hyper-scale service. But I mean, we talked about code efficiency here, but I'm not even sure in the long run that that's going to be the big win that we're going make in the tech industry. I think it's going to be the time-shifting, because even now we're seeing that with renewables, you get huge amounts of energy at some times, and no energy at others. And that requires a whole different way of using electricity. In the old days, it was just, you know, flick of a switch, all fossil fuel driven.[00:30:01] Gaël: Is it something that you implement quite a lot, like chasing the sun, which is time shifting and location shifting, or not that much?[00:30:12] Arne: It is actually a technique we do implement, on workshops, with developers, because it's generally a very interesting technique to implement, as it suggests that there are immediate gains. I don't know if you've recently read the piece, I'm not sure who wrote it, if it was David Mytton or Adrian Cockroft, or maybe I might be mixing stuff up, where there was this piece called « Don't Chase the Sun ». It was like a counter argumentative piece. That [chasing the sun], at the moment at least, often doesn't make sense. I will elaborate on this a bit further, but I would like to say that I generally agree with Anne, that this is an enormous [energy] saving technique, and this is actually what, at least in Germany, we are implementing with the grid. I think every country it does, but I can only really speak for Germany by saying we want to have smart meters. So that in the end, when we have surplus energy, and we really need to not waste it by curtailing it, we want to charge electric cars at this particular time. And in Germany, we have a long way to go by incentivizing people to charge them at these hours so, that it's actually cheaper to wait. Currently, at the moment in Germany, it's not cheaper to wait, even if we would have smart meters, because there is a law that that makes the pricing even throughout the day. But if you look at the current state of how time-shifting works, we are currently implementing a small plug-in for GitHub where you can say, “Hey, I want to run this pipeline at this particular amount of time because the prognosis or the forecast says that there will be green energy at the time”. However, how the grid operators, to my knowledge, typically plan out how the grid is supposed to be, and it is very likely, if you're at some point where the forecast says there is a lot of green energy and the grid is already in a stable state and you demand more, then it will not come from solar or from a wind farm, because this is then already curtailed, because the grid needs this bit planning ahead so they will more likely act, drive the power plant that runs on coal a bit more up. But this is a temporary problem to my understanding, as if they learn these signals over time, so even if you do that 5, 10 times, the grid will learn, then they will actually not curtail the green energy so much, and you will get it. But it's the same as those network savings. It's often not an immediate gain. It's more a theoretical long-term thing until we can understand the signals better.[00:32:36] Gaël: It was Adrian's article, “Don’t chase the sun ». Anne, you wanted to say something, sorry…[00:32:43] Anne: Yes, I totally agree on both the « don't chase the sun ». You don't really want to be moving your data around. What you want to be doing is delaying it, you know, delaying jobs rather than moving data around to chase the sun. I agree with both Arne and Adrian on that one. It's interesting what Arne mentioned earlier: YouTube is an excellent example of one of the products that Google used to do their own kind of grid balancing, on their hardware. That, if you upload a video on YouTube, sometimes it happens. Sometimes you'll notice that it's transcoded very quickly, and sometimes it won't be transcoded for a while. And the reason for that is that they use that as one of their latency-insensitive workloads. If they've got a lot of stuff that's going on, if the systems are busy, they'll just shove that trans coding [down the line], it's a little bit later in the day when things are less busy, so they get better utilization on their machines. And right now, they're working on similar kind of shifting to try and move work to when the sun is shining and when there is potential to power it greenly. But Arne is right, that there isn't necessarily an immediate benefit to that, because right now, the grids might not have enough green energy to provide because that they may already be curtailing it. But in the long run, if you create demand at times when there is potential solar or wind to match it, then more solar and wind will be put in [to the grid] So it's not necessarily an instant win, but right now it's all about the transition. It's about moving to how we're going to work in that new world.[00:34:36] Gaël: I don't remember if he mentioned also this aspect in his article. But it's also that chasing the sun is actually an issue once you start implementing multi-criteria approach, because carbon is one thing, but water is another. And, you know, if you shift all the workloads in a country where you've got plenty of sun, usually water is pretty scarce. And we are experiencing several droughts here in Europe, and the same goes in the US. So, the moment you say OK, let's chase the sun for green electricity, you might also create a lot of problems when it comes to water stress. So that's also why I kind of like his expression don't chase the sun. Maybe ‘Chase the wind’ is a is a bit more accurate, but eventually I guess it's all about reducing the energy intensity, and don't go for a silver bullet or a quick fix that actually does not exist in this energy transition. That's how I understood his main message, and I could not agree more with both of you. If you're OK with it, because we talked a lot about measuring metrics, etc., so could you maybe share a bit, both of you, the do’s and don't’s when you measure, and maybe one or two examples on how you manage to measure for some of your clients.[00:35:46] Arne: What I see in particular is that people have very often very different setups which, I think is normal if people are trying to find ways how to measure things and there is no standard out there. I think you can separate it into two basic domains. There is a cloud at the moment whereby most of the measurement techniques are not available that we use. The cloud is typically more an estimation game. You have premeasured machines and I will come to in a bit how you do that. So, you have, basically, premeasured machines. You have something you could call a calibration curve if you want, I know it's not technically correct, but for some people, this term might mean something. But you basically have a curve that tells you at this amount of utilization, this machine uses this amount of energy, and this curve is typically nonlinear, which requires a bit more than just a simple M times X plus B. So already getting into the technical stuff, so [there is] more than a linear equation to solve this problem, so you need a bit more. So here an easy machine learning model is what we use, for instance, to get this curve, and then you can go into the cloud where at least the utilization, which is a typical Dev ops metric, or a typical monitoring metric that is usually available in many of the products, is what you can use. And you can, to a certain degree, assume that the configuration of the machine that you have already measured is very similar to the machine that's in the cloud, as this database, where we get the data from, are typically machines that are bought by cloud vendors and they often use standard configurations (not all, but some). And then you can get a reasonable estimate of how much a machine in the cloud would use in terms of energy. There's also a similar approach that cloud carbon footprint follows. They have a linear assumption, to my knowledge, but I haven't monitored it currently. We have this nonlinear one, which is supposed to be a bit better, and I know there are people out there who have even better models, but they are not open source. So how do you even measure it? Most of the academic papers show that people attach a power meter to the computer, which is something that everybody who has done home automation or who just wants to know how much [energy] a microwave is really using knows, so it's basically an adapter that you can put over your power plug, and it will tell you how much the machine that is connected to it is currently using in terms of watts or kilowatt hours, if you want to have more an idea of energy and not a current power draw. And they have also USB XS’s, they have Bluetooth’s so you can easily hook them up in a connected system that can also then run measurement drops for people. But for some people, (it is still new for developers, because it's kind of under the hood), there is a technique that is called Intel RAPL or more like a hardware feature, I would say, not a technique. It is something like a power meter inside of the CPU, it is still more of an estimation calculation, but it's very accurate. So very many papers have already confirmed that it's very accurate to their falsification standards & parameters. What it basically gives you, as a developer, is you can write Linux code, and there is a function you can trigger, or a hook, and then you will get the energy that the CPU is using. So, you basically say “Hey, I'm going to start here, and so you make a start point, then you run a bit of code, and then you ask it again, and then you get number B. Then you have number A and number B and you subtract them, and then you know how much energy has been used between these two points. And what we do for measurement in particular is that we ride around these frameworks that already exist, so [there are] external power meters on board, there are sensors that exist. There are also techniques like IPMI which are also internal power meters. So there is this RAPL stuff, and we glue them together in one big open source tool, the green metrics tool, we call it sensor, that can attach these different sensors. And then we give this out as a fully-fledged solution to developers that already have software, which typically is now written in container form, and developers have already set up their container files, something like a doc compose file. And then they can just say “Hey, please take this Docker compose file, similar to like a bash script or like a Linux Easy, and then I want you to run these lines, maybe run this node program, maybe run the browser » and then you're finished. And I would like you to tell me in between, for example every 100 milliseconds or every 50 milliseconds, I would like you to write down the energy consumed. And then at the end, you get all the energy nicely displayed in the graph. There are some statistics applied to it. [You can ask yourself:] “Has there really been a change from the last time you've tested it to the time you've tested it now ». And to make this even better, we then also offer a service, on the web for free, where we have a measurement cluster with pre-configured machines that apply best practice on how to measure. I can elaborate a bit further on them later, but they do exist. And then you get a better measurement. It doesn't fluctuate as much. It is more reliable. You don't need as many repetitions to get a good statistical, conclusive answer, and see if the code is really different to another piece of code. We try to bring it [the measurement aspect] into a tool so that developers can use it with techniques they already know, like starting and stopping containers, or firing up a tool on the command line. And then they get with the onboard mechanisms that already exist, like Intel RAPL, or using machine learning models through CP utilization. They can then already get a metric out, and so they don't have to be measurement professionals. They just need to know how to use a Linux tool.[00:41:44] Gaël: And this is where you can start comparing, I guess, or challenging the use of this library against another, and all that stuff that you mentioned earlier.[00:41:54] Arne: Yes, exactly. The way to go would be that you have a Docker compose file and then let's say one time you use, as a package manager, you use NPM to install everything, and you want to see if it goes faster or uses less energy. And then you use PNPM, or you use a different one. I think Yard is also a package manager. And you can see if this library or tooling swap will change anything in your build process or your program.[00:42:22] Gaël: Arne, you mentioned best practices. And I know that this is something that is very close to Anne's heart. Could you Anne, maybe tell us a bit more about these best practices, and Arne if you don't mind, you might want to comment on it.[00:42:38] Anne: Well, when I was talking there, the thing that immediately hit me and I thought it quite interesting, is, in the old days, you know it's worth thinking about, the reason why we did all of this stuff was performance. You know, it was like the machines where you had to ring every millisecond of performance you could out of systems. We didn't use to measure energy use, we used to measure performance; your time, how long every operation took. And that's a fairly good proxy for energy use, how long things take, how performant stuff is. But I was thinking about it when Arne was talking, and the trouble with it is, it's very custom if you instrument your code to say, «I assume when this message comes in here, and then this message leaves here, [I know)] how long that is, and if it's less (than previously thought). Because how long things take is often about how many CPU cycles it's gone through. And then how many CPU cycles it goes through is basically how much energy you're using. There's a good correlation between performance and being green, which is why a lot of these kind of highly tuning techniques are still used in networking, where performance is absolutely key; you've got that [indicator]. But the trouble with that is, it's very specific. It's very custom. You have to know what an application is doing. You have to know which messages are going through, and know where to put your instrumentation in. Whereas if you're just measuring the energy use of a whole system, that's more generic. Therefore, you can have tools that are generally more usable by everyone, rather than doing things that are very, very specific and custom. So, I assume that's the reason why we've moved over from using performance as the key kind of way that you measure energy use, to actual energy use, because it is more generic and therefore it's more widely applicable. But would you say that was true?[00:44:48] Arne: Well, I think you're absolutely right in what you're saying. And, if I speak to more seasoned engineers, then they often ask the questions like “Do we really need green coding? » I mean, we have performance optimization. « So where is the knob to tune if I don't take the classical performance techniques? ». And I think you mentioned some of the green coding techniques already. I think they are unique to green coding, like time-shifting in particular, it doesn't save you any performance, right? It only saves you green energy, or saves you carbon emissions in particular. However, how we see it is similar to how you [Anne] said it. If you think about green coding and energy is now so widely available through many sensors, why not make it the first auto-metric? Because this is actually what you care about, right? You don't want to save on performance at the moment. Or at least this is our mission. If you really want to save on energy, why not take it, even if it's strongly aligned, or if it's strongly co-linear, with performance metrics in particular? When these metrics are not aligning, there is typically something a bit wrong with your code in general. There are energy anomalies, and where you see that, maybe, performance goes up or goes down. But the energy budget goes in a different direction in particular, which could be like mis-configurations, for instance. You could have something like a vector instruction unit in the CPU nowadays called a AVX - It was called MMX or SSE before, to help get some gamers in the loop that might have heard these acronyms. They can be turned on, and then the CPU is using more energy. But actually, it's not doing anything, because it's currently not issuing any of these instructions, and this is typically a mis-configuration. Something turned the unit on, and then it's using more energy, when it's not needed. And so, it could be as though you have your hard drive mis-configured, it's spinning all the time, and so your disk is not going into a sleep mode or a pause mode, where it can stop spinning the disks. You know you are not using the hard drive in particular. This is also where discussions about idle time comes into play. So, your performance metrics could be perfect, but still, the machine is on. So a green coding technique, a classic one, and this also is what our tool shows, that if your code is doing nothing at the moment, does it really have to be on? Maybe it is an architectural decision here, where you say, maybe we move from a super, highly coupled, highly integrated, vertically-only scalable monolith, to something like a micro service architecture that we can actually turn off between requests, because we see more pauses. Then we really see activity, so the node doesn't have to be on all the time. Why not use the energy or the carbon metric as your first order metric? And then, however, if you lay hands on the stuff, [the metrics] you tune the performance metrics, but the measurement that you want to optimize against is the one that is actually following the goal that you want to achieve. Anne: That's a great point.[00:47:49] Gaël: Yeah, I do agree. Especially when we know that we will, more and more, as you mentioned Arne, have to take into consideration embedded carbon and full life cycle carbon etc. And that maybe, at some point, as you say, it will be environmental metrics and not just carbon. Because we have other environmental impacts that we do need to take care of. And this is really a question of which machine shall I use. And sometimes using less powerful machines, older machines, is also a way to save carbon. But that opens a completely different debate.[00:48:25] Anne: It is a different debate, but it is worth reminding that there are three ways that the tech industry has to improve things. It's not just code efficiency. It's not just ‘be energy efficient’. It's also about being hardware efficient because hardware embodies one heck of a lot of carbon. And time-shifting. Those are the three things and we have to do all of them. We can't just do one of them. [00:48:50] Gaël: Yes, I know, recently I was preparing for a conference, and I just found again this amazing interview that Jerry McGovern did with Melvin Vopson. And I know this is a theoretical work, just to raise alarm, but Melvin Vopson estimated the amount of mining that will need to occur to build the server to handle the 25% growth rate in data on a yearly basis that we have today. So, plus 25% data equals that amount [number] of servers to be built just to manage it all. And he discovered that in 2053, humanity will have to mine the equivalent of Mount Everest. So that's 175 billion tons, I think, just to build servers, just to handle the data - we're only talking about the data! And of course, then we can say we will have energy efficiency gains, but the scale is still so amazing, that it is something that we will have to pay attention to in the very near future. I know that at the moment we are focusing a lot on energy and immediate carbon emissions because of the electricity (consumption). But the embedded carbon is the next big battle, and actually it will be, I truly believe, that it will be the main battle at some point.[00:50:23] Anne: Yes, and not just in in data centers. Every time I have to throw away or give away or do something with a working device, like a phone or a laptop, because it's out of support, out of security patch support, but it (still) works! you know, there's just so much embodied or embedded carbon in that device. It's immoral, basically, for us to know ((that there is so much embedded carbon and)) to give up on providing security patches.[00:50:52] Gaël: Yes, that's true that we need to remember that, those end user devices. They account for three quarters of the entire environmental footprint during the ‘building’ phase, mining, manufacturing, transport, etc. So, of course, as professionals in tech, we focus on what we can do, which is mostly data centers and networks. But that's also true that when you talk with a designer, for instance, they are more and more aware of the tradeoff between “Do I want to enhance my code, even to do green coding, versus, how do I make sure I actually reduce the size of my code and not create extra complexities that will accelerate software obsolescence and hardware obsolescence?” But that's a very important battle as well. Can I ask you a final question on best practices? And I know Anne that there is quite a lot of good and sound advice in your book, and Arne, you already touched upon them a bit and if you want to comment, just feel free. But maybe, Anne, as one of the three authors of the next O'Reilly book, what are the best pages?[00:52:01] Anne: Well, the introduction summarizes everything in the whole book, and that's already available in very rough, pre-release form, on the O'Reilly website. And you don't even have to buy an O'Reilly subscription, because you can just do a trial and you can have a quick read of it. And eventually, when it's finally published, the whole book will also be simultaneously public, open sourcing. But not until it actually is finally published next year. All of that will be available. So, principles - this is a horrible thing, nobody wants to hear this, no technology person wants to hear this, but really, the best practices don't focus on optimizing your own code. Instead use code that's pre-optimized by somebody else. Because that is by far the most effective thing you can do. In the long run chat GPT is going to become much better at optimizing; compilers are getting much, much better at optimizing code. You try and push that job off on to somebody else. But do be thinking about architectures and designs that will work with time-shifting. Things like spot instances, and micro services where you can turn things off, as Arne mentioned, or you can time shift them. Think time shifting first is my advice.[00:53:21] Gaël: I guess, because you're influenced by your science fiction work and you want to travel across time, and this is why you're so obsessed by time-shifting! But it is finally happening. What about you Arne, do you want to travel in time again?[00:53:41] Arne: Yes, as I said before, I also think that time shifting will be one of the bigger gains in the future. And embodied carbon is one of the bigger battles to fight, although there, I don't really know how the optimizations will play out because it's so opaque at the moment, as most people don't even know how, for instance, S3 is implemented. And what kind of hard disk, so it's very hard to say how optimizations could even work for a system like this, which stores, I think, most of the of the data that the Internet holds at the moment. I think my take on optimization techniques is very simple. Although we speak a lot about these, as I mentioned before, particular, vector instruction techniques, and these energy and performance metrics anomalies, so we speak about them because developers like to hear these super funny edge cases where something goes horribly wrong. But I think for a daily business, if you really want to save energy in your code, most developers know how to do it. So, there's really nothing you have to tell the developers really, to do. It's more that they are overwhelmed, as business is not giving them the time and the support to do it. I would really say that the particular key [issue] at the moment is transparency. Wherever you can measure your stuff, even if it's not the best metric, make it public, if it's on your own block, or if it's in the git-hub repository, or even if it's just in your notebook, that you at least know what your code is doing. And then the other thing is, to ask your management how much is our code emitting? Can you [management] not supply these numbers? « Ask the cloud providers » is also something that Anne mentioned, which I think will drive a lot of the transition - you have to ask for these metrics. For instance, if I go to the supermarket and I always buy a product, and I'm always angry that it's not packaged in recyclable paper yet I never ask the vendor [about the packaging], how can something change. There is no mind transition [reading]. I don't know what the English term is for It, when my mind goes into his mind, and so he obviously knows that I'm happy (or not) with the product. I have to ask for it [change). So, I think this is really the key, and such techniques like time-shifting. And I really have to say, and maybe this is a bit of belly rubbing for you, Gaël, we should listen to podcasts like Green I/O because you will hear about new techniques that developers find, that are useful and that should be employed.[00:56:01] Gaël: Well, thanks. And that's a beautiful transition to my last question, which is what are the main resources you would advise the developer community to go for, when trying to green their code. But Anne, you cannot mention Environmental Variable because I’m going to do it first and give a big kudo to Chris Adams and Assim Hussain and the wonderful work they do with the regular guests like you. So environmental podcasts are Definitely podcasts to listen to and I personally I'm listening to pretty much every episode. I've taken this example, so you need to find another one![00:56:38] Anne: Well, of course I'm going to mention my book. “Building green software ». And I have good reason for mentioning this because we are publishing it every month. Ideally, hopefully, we'll be dropping a new rough early chapter, and we're looking for feedback. So, contact me at: buildinggreensoftware@gmail.com, and you'll be able to send us feedback for what you'd like to see in the book that has not already been covered. So, if there are questions whilst you are reading it, contact me - I'm on Twitter, Sara's on Twitter, Sarah's on LinkedIn. We're very happy to hear you come back and say « But I wanted you to answer this question ». We will attempt to answer the questions.[00:57:24] Arne: I’ll also pick up the question, so, I'm monitoring what’s out there a lot. I have Google alerts that alert me about new stuff coming out. I read the Green Software Foundation newsletter. I read the Climate Action Tech newsletter. I'm a follower of this podcast. But I would say that there is no one [single] resource. I think this is what you what you are shooting for Gaël? So [for me] there is no one central place where you can find the all the best information. But if I have to name something that I think has given me the most value so far, with the most helpful techniques, it is from conferences. I think if people get a conference talk in somewhere where you have a sustainability track, [it gives you] that something that is a bit bigger, something to be watched. I think if you just want to follow one resource in particular, get an alert of something like sustainability conferences or sustainability tracks at IT conferences. I think it’s there that I've seen the most valuable content.[00:58:27] Gaël: Well, that's music to my ears knowing that I will be in charge of the Sustainability track both at ‘Apidays’ in London and in Paris later this year. I've got a big blessing from you. Thanks a lot. But yes, that's so true, conferences, they're cool. I mean, you can interact, you can discuss with your peers, and that changes everything, I guess from, being just a passive listener. And, no, I didn't aim for a single source of truth. I'm always a bit dubious with these approaches, but, that's great, actually, that you mentioned conferences because we tend to mention articles, podcasts, etcetera. So yes, conferences and the big fight made by the Green Software Foundation. I mean, they've got a speaker repository now, and I know that their approach is no conference today in tech can spare having a sustainability track, or at least some talks on sustainability. And I think that's a great approach. And I've gathered people from all over the world saying, « Hey, these folks ((are good speakers)), and as far as I remember, both of you are in this cohort of speakers in IT/TECH/sustainability, and I am well as well (full disclosure!) But, these folks, they can talk, if you cannot find anyone, then just connect with them. But you cannot have a big conference without someone talking about carbon, sustainability and so on, so it makes definitely a lot of sense. Well, thanks a lot, both of you. That was a very lively discussion. I really enjoyed it and letting you converse with each other. That was really was music to my ears. So, I'd like to thank you once again for all the feedback and insights that you have shared with us today. Once again, thanks a lot.[01:00:16] Arne: Thank you, Gaël. It was great to be on the show.[01:00:18] Anne: Thank you very much.
[01:00:19] Gaël: And that's it. Thank you for listening to green IO. Make sure to subscribe to the mailing list to stay up to date on new episodes. If you enjoyed this one, feel free to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who could benefit from it. As a nonprofit podcast, we rely on you to spread the word. Last, but not the least, if you know someone who would make a great guest, please send them my way, so that we can make our digital world greener, one byte at a time.

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What about the 53.6 million metric tons of e-waste generated worldwide ?

How can we, as responsible individuals and global citizens, take action to address this critical issue?

That’s what we discussed in this episode on e-waste !

Join Gaël Duez to meet : Jacqueline Mukarukundo, co-founder of Wastezon in Rwanda and Vanessa Forti, Associate Programme Officer at UNITAR.

➡️ Jacqueline and Vanessa shared their insights on the complexities of e-waste and the steps needed for a more sustainable future.

✅ Don't miss this episode if you want to explore e-waste and gain valuable insights on creating a more sustainable future.

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!Learn more about our guests and connect
Jacqueline Mukarukundo is a passionate advocate for the environment, co-founder of Wastezon, a Rwandan clean tech startup driving a waste-free world. Her zeal in Marketing led Wastezon to emerge as the best E-waste Solution Provider-East Africa in 2019 Build Magazine’s Recycling and Waste Management Awards.

Vanessa Forti is an Environmental Engineer with an innate passion for the environment and sustainability. At the United Nations, she has been actively involved in promoting and monitoring sustainable development, while ensuring the environmentally-sound management of natural resources and waste. Vanessa is dedicated to encouraging global sustainable development.* Jacqueline's LinkedIn * Vanessa’s LinkedIn * Gaël's LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

Jacqueline and Vanessa’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode* GEM 2023 - Global Transboundary E-waste Flows Monitor 2022 * FUTURE E-WASTE SCENARIOS * Wastezon * SMART CITIES AFRICA * UNITAR * Global E-waste website * Apple’s article: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/04/apple-will-use-100-percent-recycled-cobalt-in-batteries-by-2025/ * SCYCLE : Sustainable Cycles Programme at UNITAR * UN Comtrade database * WHO : World Health Organization * ODD = SDG * EPR : Extended Producer Responsibility * Global E-Waste Monitor * International Telecommunication Union * ISWA : International Solid Waste Association * United Nations Environmental Program * "Urban Mining, the relevance of information, transaction costs and externalities" by Science Direct

Transcript
Gael: Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO, the podcast for doers making our digital word greener, one byte at a time. I'm your host, Gael Duez and I invite you to meet a wide range of guests working in the tech industry, to help you better understand and make sense of its sustainability issues and find inspiration to positively impact the digital world.

If you like the podcast, please rate it on Apple, Spotify or your favorite platform to spread the word to more responsible technologists like you. And now enjoy the show.

In this episode, we go to Germany to meet Vanessa Forti and to Runda to meet Jacqueline Mukarukundo to talk about electronic waste or e-waste. You know, once someone tries to run a proper lifecycle assessment of a digital service or an IT equipment, E-waste is often narrowed down to "yeah, we know it's bad, but we don't have any data to quantify it".

Well, there is actually a big source of information, at least on the quantitative side, which is a global e-waste monitor published by both the United Nations University (UNU) and United Nation Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), and Vanessa the associate program officer at UNITAR, is the lead author of the 2020 edition.

She's also a true European globetrotter, an Italian who graduated as an environmental engineer in Italy, did research works in Norway and in the Netherland on circular economics metrics, especially on metals. In a nutshell, could we dream of a better expert to be with us? Well, we could dream of having someone bringing also experience on the e-waste circular economy, having her hands full of its potential as well as challenges.

This is why I'm delighted to have Jacqueline to bring a unique perspective on e-waste. Jacqueline is a Kigalian entrepreneur who co-founded Wastezon almost four years ago. Her work has earned her many awards and a wide recognition as an inspiring African woman leader. Currently, she's also working on the Africa Smart Cities Investment Summit, which will be held in Kigali from the 6th to 8th of September this year.

To be honest, she's also the kind of person whose entrepreneurship helps me remember that many of us in the so-called global north take things for granted and complain about issues that will build joke elsewhere : not having received or delivery in 24 hour, finding how to recruit talents. Well, when I first discussed with Jacqueline about the best time to record our session, she told me that morning is better because there is less power outage in Kigali at that time.

Hence, a better internet connection and still her company is thriving, food for thought. Welcome, Jacqueline and Vanessa. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.

Vanessa: Thank you. Thank you for the invitation.

Jacqueline: Thank you for having me.

Gael: My pleasure. I'd like to start with the usual question I asked to my guest, which is how did you become interested in sustainability? E-waste in specific, but sustainability in general. Jacqueline, did you experience some kind of like "bubble moment", for instance?

Jacqueline: Wow, that's a very good question. So I remember very well that I became interested in sustainability when I realized the harmful impact of electronic waste on environment and people's health. This was actually in 2018 when, back then, basically I was after high school and starting university and I started to realize these specific issues of how we deal with electronic devices we have in our house, specifically in my country, but also in developing countries like Africa.

So this literally worked me out to start to think about how I can bring up solution to the table and specifically green technology industry cause that's one of the things which I'm missing in African countries. So I saw an opportunity to create sustainable solution to this problem. Also I wanted to focus on reducing and creating environmental impact of electronic waste.

In that moment, while I can also create economic opportunity for communities, basically creating a win-win solution to both those who have electronic waste, but those one who correct it, which are electronic recycling industries. So, I never really experienced a light bomb moment, but rather a gradual awareness of the importance of sustainability in our business practices, but also it's a positive impact on society and the planet.

So I would say that this awareness has really fueled, kind of feeded me, my passion for creating innovative solutions, but also sustainable activities to the environmental challenge. So at the moment, I feel like I'm very inspired to continue to create positive impact that can work and have a larger impact to the whole world.

Gael: Yeah, that's interesting because it's really about focusing on the impact and not focusing too much on the problem, which is obviously something that we will discuss about the e-waste. And what about you, Vanessa? How did you become the environmental engineer that you are today and working so much on the e-waste area I would say?

Vanessa: Thank you Gael for the question and this enables me to look back when I was a child. I remember that at elementary school, I had a teacher that was teaching us how to fold plastic shopping bags in a proper way so that you can store it in your drawer and reuse it when you need it instead of throwing them away.

I remember that lesson, in a very clear way. That was very inspiring for me when I was a child. Since then I started indeed folding shopping bags and keeping them just for reusing instead of buying or getting new ones.

So I would say that is a light bubble moment I had in my life. And since then I've always been sensitive to environmental issues. Also my parents remember I was getting mad at people when, in the 90s when I saw them throwing things on the street and back then it was pretty common. So I guess since then I really hated the waste problem.

I wanted to do something to improve also the sustainability in general. At least I tried to do simple actions so that I could improve at least a little bit from my side. The little world I was living in. Since then, I always had that interest and I continued my path by studying environmental engineering.

Then the driver was ready to try to find solutions indeed, to the problems. I've also been very much interested in developing solutions because we know there's many problems out there. We need to find solutions to leave a better world for the future generations as well.

Gael: Excellent. So, Vanessa, I read, not entirely, but a good chunk of the global e-waste monitor because I wanted to get some sense of proportion. So in the global e-Waste Monitor 2020, it is assessed that 53.6 million metric tons of e-waste was generated worldwide. And I was curious to see how I could compare.

So I calculated the weight of an Olympic swimming pool, and I got that actually this amount is 21,440 Olympic swimming pools. And you know what? I couldn't yet truly picture what 21,440 Olympic swimming pool meant, so I converted them in square kilometer, which is 26.8 square kilometers, and it is roughly a quarter of the area of Paris, okay. Not exactly but roughly.

So if we want to store all the West generated in the last four years worldwide, we will need to erase Paris and replace it by swimming pools in four years. So providing that the density of electronic equipment is closed to the density of water, which is not the case. So we might save some presence luckiest.

This data. Well, they, they were just super impressive and I wanted to ask you, where do they come from and how are they crunched? How do you build such a database?

Vanessa: Thanks for the question and thanks for making the comparisons. Indeed it's a lot of data and we do actually compile worldwide data on, well, we start from analyzing production and trade statistics at worldwide level. We do this exercise for all countries in the world that are UN member states.

So basically we analyze the sales of electric and electronic products every year. Then we also analyzed and imports/exports and the domestic production. And these are data that are available to the open public as well because they're published in the UN Comtrade database.

So what we did is to really have a list of all products that are, that can be classified as electric and electronic product and we compile all this information at global level. We make a simple calculation that it seems simple, but then when you run this model for all countries in the world, sorry, then this will of course increase the complexity.

But the simple calculation that we do is imports minus exports, plus domestic production. So basically we account for whatever is sold in the country as such so whatever comes in, minus whatever goes out, plus whatever is produced domestically in terms of electric and electronic products. So that's the simple idea let's say, and then we link it to the lifetime of the products.

So we made over the years assessments on by linking this average lifetimes to the sells, we would know when this product will become waste. So at the very end, we have a database that goes from 1980 up to the current year. Then we are able to make estimates also over time and we have made estimates up to 2050.

So that's a bit how we come to those data and hopefully this provides a bit more insights also.

Gael: Oh, he does definitely. And how accurate should we think about there's 53.6 million. Is it like plus or minus 5% or plus or minus 50%?

Vanessa: Well, that's a good question actually. We have tried to assess this over the years, and all in all, we can say that we feel confident with the data that we provide and that we calculate because they're based on real data that are actually reported by countries. So the production and trade statistics are official data from countries.

Of course there is a certain level of uncertainty when it comes also to domestic production because domestic production, it's an indicator that is not easily or readily available at international level, and many countries may not disclose that information or may not be available. So in that sense, indeed there is a certain level of uncertainty. However, the model compensates for potential lack of information at domestic production level, let's say.

So we run many statistical corrections when we are on the model to make sure to really limit the level of uncertainty at the very end, we guess and estimated the level of uncertainties indeed around 5 to maximum 10%. But it would not be more than that in my view.

Gael: Plus or minus 5%. So that, that gives a good idea of what kind of number we should share with the general public and you mentioned trends. Geographically speaking, but also maybe by time of equipments., What are the trends that you've noticed recently?

Vanessa: When we look at the categories of e-waste the trends that we have observed is that of course temperature exchange equipment are growing at high speed. So there has been an increase of 7% compared to 2014, for example, and that's the highest grow rate among the 6 European categories. There is a very big growth on consumption on air conditioners, for example, in the global south that we have noticed in the past years and therefore this is definitely impacting the future e-waste generation for sure.

When it comes to screens and monitors, for example, the consumption in terms of number of units is increasing and has increased a lot during Covid as well, especially because of the, we guess it's because of the increase usage of those appliances at home from smart work. Therefore we have seen an increase in that sense. However, at the same time, those screens and monitors are becoming lighter and lighter over the years. If we imagine that we transition from the old CRTs to the new technologies and screens that are now very flat and very light, they became much lighter.

So in terms of weight, the screens and monitors is the category that is decreasing over time. But of course they're increasing in terms of number of units. Just to answer your question on the regional aspect and regional differences, we notice a rapid increase in new waste generation in the global south.

Especially Africa has been contributing to the E-waste mountain with a lower speed compared to higher income countries. But African countries are now also showing a very rapid increase in the past years. So that's a trend that maybe makes sense to highlight as well as the Asian situation that of course, being Asia continent that is very populous with many billion people, of course, is the continent that is contributing the most to the global e-waste generation.

Gael: And there is one figure actually that struck me, that we've got this big increase in e-waste, sometimes in weight, sometime in quantities and sometime in both. If I understood you well, especially regarding IT equipment, and then there is this recycling issue. I remember this number that less than 18% of a global e-waste is recycled.

Can you tell us a bit more about it?

Vanessa: Thanks. I think very relevant point to highlight. So the trend that I would like to highlight is that, we have noticed, the global e-waste recycled is growing at lesser of a speed compared to the increase of the speed at which the global waste generation is instead growing.

The global waste generation is growing a much higher speed compared to the e-waste recycling figure, and that is for several reasons.

The first and very important one is that, while the global waste generation is modeled, it's our data that are modeled with the model I just explained. The e-waste formally recycled is actually coming from data that we collect and gather directly from countries.

So these are data that are reported by governments around the the world. So the figure reflects what is currently available at national governments. It is also true that many governments, especially in the global south, don't have this figure so don't gather the figure and therefore we do not receive information on the amount of e-waste formally collected.

The reason could be many. The main one is that if there is no legislation in place, there is no formal obligation for governments to report on the e-waste formally collected. There is definitely also not a system in place to monitor the recycling facilities or to survey the recycling facilities.

The second reason is also that, of course, the countries that don't have a legislation would hardly have a well-working e-waste management system because not having any obligation no business is willing to establish in a country. So it's a sort of a loop with no legislations, it is easier or let's say it is more difficult for the US recycling to establish.

Other way around if no US recycling is happening, it's harder for the governments to regulate the subject for countries with the legislation instead. The recycling rates are still low nevertheless so if we look at Europe as well, where there is a redirective for many years and the e-waste recycling is very well regulated.

But still most of the countries are far from reaching the collection targets.

Gael: And taking a concrete example, Jacqueline, could you t ell us a bit more on the situation in Rwanda when it comes to legal requirements, recycling rate, etc. Is it something that you can talk about?

Jacqueline: Yeah, so responding to that I would say that I don't have like accurate data to support it, but according to the observations and the experience I had, one of the main areas of similarity challenge developing countries are facing it's correction, as Vanessa said : The correction process and the capacity of recycling the issue of investment, but also automation about awareness, the effect of electronic waste.

We may think that normal people or public doesn't have enough awareness of electronic voice, but one thing which was being able to visualize is that : you find that majority of people have electronic devices in their house where they have this specific particular small room in the corner of the house where they drop out, maybe tv, which no longer work, maybe dvd, maybe phones, or like this particular mouse or this model, electronic devices, which are no longer being used.

They keep it in their houses for what? So first of all, they believe that these electronic devices has a value into it. So they're expecting at least to get a low cost amount of money, let's say maybe five US dollars according to the value of it, maybe 10 US dollars, particularly depending to how this holder of electronic devices feel like his electronic devices still has a value.

But one thing which happened back and forth between all the stakeholders involved in electronic waste management industry here in developing country is that you find that some of recycling industries are not willing to compensate the cost value this electronic deficit may still have.

Also those one who still have it in their houses, they refuse to give it back. And where to some point they feel like "okay, instead of giving to back, I will just send it to the landfill". So by sending to the landfill or at the downside that this increase the impact, the cremate and environment. So there is back and forth change and understanding the law each individual stakeholder must bring on the table.

That's why we find so many electronic devices on the dump sites, on landfill everywhere. You find recycling actors saying that they're not capable of finding enough tons of electronics they may probably need, for recycling just because there is misunderstanding the value law this electronic waste has.

This bring us so much understanding why the cycling blade is still very low in developing countries. Every, if I could remember, probably still below to 20%. So basically that's the situation, how the situation is, and I would support what Vanessa was saying. This is a very huge challenge mainly when it comes to developing countries, even though currently is cross boundaries prohibition for electronic secondhand electronic devices.

But still, it happened illegally on the block market. I think it's a bit chaos, but I say regulatory black market for electronic devices because some countries has already set cross boundaries, prohibition for electronic devices, but still for some reason it tend to be happen in one way or the other.

So that's also increased a huge challenge to how to deal with electronic devices. Yeah.

Gael: I've got a question for both of you, and this is a very basic question. How bad is e-waste? Obviously wasting things is not very good, but why do we focus that much on e-waste? And I've heard a lot of stuff about pollution, blah, blah, blah, et cetera. But I'd like to get your insights for both of you, both experts, regarding e-waste.

Vanessa: E-waste is actually, well bad in my view, when it is not disposed in a proper way. So as Jacqueline also mentioned there are many illegal practices when it comes also to recycling. Many backyard recycling is happening in many countries in the world. And when this happens, without the proper safety standards and procedures it is very likely that the person that is handling the waste gets intoxicated or inhale toxic fumes by burning cables or plastics. The plastics that is usually burned is containing claim retardant substances. Those are the ones that are very toxic for the human being, but also for the environment in general.

From what we have seen, this is a very easy way to get rid of the plastic and get to the available parts. For cables, for example, the plastic casing is incinerated. And then in order to extract the copper this is where e-waste becomes fed and toxic and polluting.

In the landfills where these illegal practices are happening, we as senior collaborated with WHO in the past monitors and we found out that there is larger impacts that we could not think of before. Even kids are affected or pregnant women are also affected by the toxic substances that are released on the environment by bad waste management practices.

Gael: And Jacqueline, is it something that you've witnessed it or that you can tell us a bit more about this non-proper waste disposal. There is a famous place, which is now closed in Ghana, which is at Agbogbloshie that used to be kind of a nightmare when it comes to a manage waste, electronic waste but, you know, it's just one example.

I've always wondered if it was something that you could find elsewhere or if it was hopefully for Africa, just a single example of bad waste management.

Jacqueline: So reason why e-waste is a very big issue, we tend to forget the reality of the world we are living. At the moment we are living the world where technology is the future. Everything is being turned into digital transformation is being turned to using ICT tools and all of that.

But we tend to think the lifecycle of these ICT tools we are using in our everyday life, we cannot really forget that we have specific iPhone brands, which are already on market each and every year or every two year. Maybe I would say maybe iPhone 14, iPhone 13. You know, there is always new version of the market and as a human beings and as a customers, we are always ready. We are always ready to consume these electronic devices, new product, new brand at the market. But the reason why we need to emphasize on electronic waste effect and how we can deal with it, it's by this reality of always higher conception rate all over the world of electronic devices and always new technologies which are coming on the table.

That's why we need to stress out a lot on electronic devices until we understand the life cycle system or secure economy of how new conception lead of all the branding new devices and all of that can be able to be treated. That's why manufacturers needs to come in.

I liked Vanessa's research paper, how it was mentioning the lifecycles of electronic devices by mentioning when this could turn out to be e-waste.

So by having all these supportive information and all the stakeholders on board, we can be able to deal with it. I would like really maybe to a repeat mention about the minors we find in electronic waste. Electronic devices have like a gold, silver, copper, and other variable materials into it.

But most of these come from traditional mining, and we all know the effect of traditional mining. So with having urban mining in place, we'll be able to extract this gold and silver, and create recycling process to be reused once again instead of finding them on the dump side or at the landfill. So this is all the involvement of why we need to really deal with electronic devices.

Yeah.

Gael: And that comes at the perfect point in this discussion because what you're saying is actually because of this hyper consumption worldwide, that we've got more and more e-waste and actually e-waste is a good proxy for this hyper consumption of electronic equipments.

We should pay attention to this indicator and still it has become, and it is become more and more a business to manage with this e-waste, what you call urban mining. I believe this is actually what you've done creating a business around circular economy and the Wastezon entreprise that you've created. So I would love to know a bit more about how you manage.

Can you basically pitch us what Wastezon does?

Jacqueline: Wastezon is still a startup, I may say. So basically what's Wastezon app, it's like connecting app between consumers or household manufacturers and recyclers who are looking for secondhand electronic devices or electronic waste. Where this app is being able to help with efficient tech empowered traceability services where it's helping them to generate value with value addition benefits to their electronic waste in environmental friendly. Where, as I said earlier, before, it's like a win-win situation where these manufacturers and cyclists need to understand that these people could get a value into their device they still have in their houses. Could be a little one, it's dependent negotiation between two parties who want to exchange these electronic devices.

Then I would say that for now we have more than 2000 users who were able to trust us and translate over 400 tons of electronic waste on our platform. This really brought our mind to- and it's sort of- show us that we are actually not even closer to where we are designed to be.

We always meet, people are saying "oh, I actually have these laptops", "I have phones at home", "I don't have any clue where to send it" but I also, at the end of the day, I know that it still have a value the only issue may be my smartphone have, it's the screen and I know I can repair it, but I don't have time for it.

So for us, we create a chain of value between two parties on Wastezon app to be able to sell between each other. So for the long term vision we have is to create a future of urban mining in electronic waste. Cause we realize that's where we are heading and this is the future and we have to believe it and see how we are heading.

Talking about urban mining and how it's the long land vision for us is that we have seen how manufacturers are waking up to be part of this journey. I have seen amazing work, Dell and some other, like even Samsung is collecting like batteries. I think has started or it's part of the plan to start next year to start to collect batteries in east african countries, but also in some part of Africa because that is sufficient of our batteries minors to produce new ones.

So they want to tap in into creating those one they already sent to the market and be able to process it once again. But also in a way of creating sustainability and environmental impact, which is the same thing Dell is doing I think in South America when I was reading the article in South America, in some part of India, I guess.

So this is amazing and shows how manufacturers putting those producer responsibility in their hands. So that's where we want to here to be able to help these manufacturers to trace and know where there is a materials or e-waste where they can trace it and channel it to their recycling site where it's being based.

So that's what we are doing at the moment and we are excited towards the future is holding for us. Yeah.

Gael: So 400 tons is already a very significant achievement, so congratulations. My question would be just to understand, well, the word urban mining, these manufacturers and these recyclers, do they kind of extract the metals by, you know, melting chipboard, et cetera, et cetera? Or do they also manage to extract some spare parts that they will reuse in new equipments on the market?

So is it recycling or is it just extraction of new resources?

Jacqueline: Okay, so explaining what's exactly will be urban mining, how it's work. This kind of the time, which is sort of like a processing, recovering variable materials and other materials from discarded electronic devices and even those which are as in urban waste.

So it's a form of recycling that's involved extracting and refining variable resources from West Stream that's were previously considered to be of a little or no value. So I give an example like a Samsung. So we have learned that they're going to start for them collecting batteries. This is part of urban mining cause when you find batteries, it has valuable materials inside. But now getting access to it- cause as we know that- to get these variable materials, normally it goes through the traditional mining.

So getting access to these materials, it's tending to be very hard. These materials are re non-renewable, right? So how companies are tapping into it, they're extracting those minerals they need maybe gold, they need copper, they need aluminum, or they need batteries according to what they want to use with it. Battery could be used even to create electricity. There is an amazing innovation happening with regards to how batteries are turning into electricity like in India, in some part of the world. The extraction which happen it's in a way of creating, like creating the value of it, and being reused once again in form of circular processing, circular economy processing. Yeah.

Gael: Yeah, it makes total sense. Is this extraction being done in, I would say good working conditions because both of you mentioned how toxic and dangerous can be waste and especially e-waste management previously. So these urban mining activities, you mentioned also that they're mostly done in the informal sector are workers or freelancers working in urban mining, getting more and more protected, or is it still a bit a Wide Waste I would say?

Jacqueline: I would like to clarify that for Wastezon, you're not recycling industry sort of, so we have this is just a service we do to support recycling household and manufacturers in form of traceability and supply chain of these electronic wastes. But responding to that question, according observation, many countries are setting up policies which need to protect environment, but also people health.

Here in Rwanda, the informal recycling doesn't no longer work because there is very strict, very strict policies for it, in form of protecting people.

So I don't know how in other countries it's happening but I know that for sure based on the experience I had in Geneva last year when we were looking at the position of e-waste treatment in a developing countries.

Many countries are setting up policies which need to prohibit and protect their people in terms of involving themselves in recycling or instruction of electronic devices. So I would guess that it's getting much better because of the involvement of both sectors, either on government side, but also on the private side, which are like entrepreneurs and yeah.

Gael: Thanks a lot. And Vanessa, is it something that you've noticed also at a broader scale. Jacqueline mentioned the work done in Geneva, for instance.

Things are getting better when it comes to urban mining?

Vanessa: Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean I see a lot of improvements at global level for sure. At least in Europe, there's a nice and big networks of experts continuously working on improving the accessibility of CRMs. So critical raw materials through recycling and by mining indeed the waste that is a creditor, but across the globe I've seen very nice examples and startups and businesses establishing now in order to improve definitely the recoverability and recyclability of waste.

So I'm optimistic about that. There's still a big and long path to get to the zero waste target or to the fully circular economy. But still I'm positive about it since I'm seeing very nice examples across the globe.

Gael: And actually, could you elaborate a bit about the potential of switching to a more circular economy? Because we talk a lot about circular economy, but I'm not always sure that everyone has the same definition of it, and especially how much it will help reaching the the ODD and not only the environmental impact that Jacqueline mentioned already several times, and how big traditional mining has a toll on the planet, but all the ODD.

Vanessa: Well, definitely, there are good benefits of adopting circular economy, approaches in the business sector. The way how circular economy is most commonly referred to as let's say the recycling part, right? So really recycling what is already waste and trying to get back the resources into the production chain.

However, circular economy is much more than that, and it starts indeed with sustainable mining and if we talk of mining of new raw materials, ideally is already not a circular economy in a way because that means that we need extra resources to produce new products that we are not able to get back from the recycling at the end of life.

So indeed it starts from the mining or the sourcing of the materials, and then it goes through the production phase and the usage phase. Also the eco-design is a very important aspect of circular economy that in my view, it has been explored very rarely I would say when it comes to electronics so far. The challenges of recyclers are still the same of 10 or 15 years ago, let's say.

So it hasn't become easier to recycle electronics, but it has become rather more difficult nowadays because of the products has become lighter, more compact. There's no more possibility to replace parts of a mobile phone or a laptop. So I believe that when we talk of circular economy, we need to touch upon all aspects of circular economy, not only recycling.

Eco design as a very important role and in addition what Jacqueline was mentioning, the production is also a very big role. Also not really decreasing production levels, but rather sustainable consumption of products is needed in my view to contribute to circular economy.

Gael: So Jacqueline, don't kill me on sight because it might mean the end of your business.

But if we really wanted to achieve a true circular economy, wouldn't mean to have an obligation for everyone manufacturing something to get it back at some point?

You know, you manufacture a smartphone, you have to recover it, not your neighbor, not in another country, et cetera.

But basically, if I buy a smartphone, even if I want to get rid of it either because it doesn't work or I want to change, I can go back to a shop or any shop actually and say, boom, "this is a Samsung smartphone, please put it in a box that should be shipped back to Samsung". I know it's a radical proposition, but I would love both of you to comment on it cause that will enable a more radical shift toward they could design.

So what do you think about it? Is it me just being crazy?

Jacqueline: So let me go first. Responding to that question, actually it has a positive, negative side, but I'm looking for positive side. So, first of all, the second hand market for digital equipment can really provide more opportunities for us, refurbishment and repair, repairing of electronics. This has a very core part of our own business at Wastezon.

That means that there could be an increase in demand of our services actually. People would come back either to be like, "okay, have these devices". So I'd sell it to manufacturers or sell it to manufacturers, or I actually need to refurbish it and repair it on my own and reuse it once again.

Also secondly, I would say as many people choose to repair or refurbish their electronic devices instead of buying new one. There is also a chance that we could be able to enhance and be able to see environmental impact, as I was always mentioning because of also this new regulation you were saying, which can come in place about repairability of taking back these electronics to the producers on manufacturers cause this is part of the extended producer responsibilities. That's the only way we are seeing the impact could be created.

And for the negative side, I would say maybe potentially this would decrease demand for on electronic devices. For that it could affect the sales of a new electronic product and in turn, it could also end up impacting the volume of e-waste generated, but also the services we're being able to offer since people are sending it back. But also maybe no longer need this repairing and refurbishment at the same point. But the main important thing here, it's to always understand that the world is involving, and this is not about making money.

The thing here, it's not about making money from waste. We are aiming for the social impact and creating share value benefit among all stakeholders, but most importantly to the world. So that's what we are aiming for. So we always try to stay up to date especially with coming with the technology needed at the market and how to make it easier to both involved people in those household and even those recycling or manufacturers.

So that's how we stay positive into it.

Gael: And what about you, Vanessa, what do you think about my crazy idea?

Vanessa: Thinking more of a global level, this is something we have been discussing also in the context of EPR. No extended producer responsibility multiple times, and this was maybe even the original idea when this extended pro responsibility concept was designed.

However, looking at the global dynamics and dimensions of the electronic industry, it does not be very easy to set up this system because as you can imagine there are few producers, larger producers in the world that are responsible for the majority of the production of electronics nowadays. But most likely they don't have one representated in each countries in the world.

So this would mean also cross-country shipments. When it comes to cross-country shipments, that is also narrowed down to cross-country, let's say, legislations and agreements on this. So that is a bit of the reason, in my view, why it has been very hard to set up such a system. Ideally, it would be a nice solution for sure.

So I agree with that. In practice, there might be challenges in doing that. But nevertheless the EPR concept somehow embeds this responsibility of producers because yeah, there is a obligation for taking back products. But nowadays, at least in Europe those products that are taken back and sent recycling are just a mix of different brands, they're not brand specific.

There are some examples though, in the northern of Europe where brands have established their own recycling systems for only their own branded products and have developed technologies on how to optimize recycling for their products. And that may be a good example and it could be in the near future that we will see more than these examples.

Gael: Oh actually Vanessa, that lead me to the final question to both of you. Could you share with us some resource about those initiatives and more generally what you advise us to read or to listen to understand a bit more the e-waste problem, but also some of the solutions that we are trying to put in place worldwide to solve it.

Vanessa: Yeah, sure. In general, when it comes to Unitar definitely you can consult the Unitar website where you will have access to all projects we are working at, and to the results of most major projects. Then I think there you would have a very nice overview of what is the current e-waste situation at global level.

Furthermore, we will, by the end of the year, publish a new version of the Globally Waste Monitor. It'll be at 2023 edition with an update of the data and with additional information, especially on recyclability. There's also websites that I mentioned before that is the globalewaste.org has been developed in partnership with the International Telecommunication Union and ISWA.

Since we are partnering in a global e-waste statistic partnership. Recently, also United Nations Environmental Program and the Carac Foundation joined forces with us to develop the new globally waste monitor. So maybe that website will also provide updates with regards to data.

Additional sources for those initiatives : well, I guess they're very dynamic and there are many updates every day and we actually are not, at the moment, compiling all those updates. But I suggest to follow main brands, the pages of main electronic brands worldwide and their sustainability area.

There it will be every now and then available information on recyclability and the efforts that the producers do in terms of improving recyclability.

Gael: And Jacqueline, do you have some materials as well? Documents, websites?

Jacqueline: For me as an entrepreneur I would share obviously our website. It really shows more about our work. But the moment you're revamping, re-editing it to make it more professional, but it has everything and more information about our work and the links to our apps.

It really shows about what you're doing and the impact you're creating. Additionally, I would also share the resources about this amazing article I was reading about urban mining. It has the title code : Urban Mining, the relevance of information, transaction costs and externalities. I found it on the Science Direct website.

It's a very long one, but the thing I liked about it, it's really shows the data cause they corrected data among 2,500 Swiss respondents and they even did experience with 15,000 employees of Swiss institutions where they were trying to understand and estimate the reason why people do not particularly value their retired funds and how many of them are not willing to give it away, just like that.

So it really shows the key output about urban mining and the future out of it. There is also this amazing article, which could be sort of like an example of how many big manufacturers are very keen to come in this journey of being responsible about the resources they're sending to the market and how they are involving in sustainability perspective like there is this also amazing article written by Apple.

I hope I'm not doing advertise for them in this podcast, but it's a real amazing one. It's really shows how urban mining is the future. Apple was saying how they will use a hundred percent recyclable cobalt in materials by 2025.

This is the approach they're going to take in terms of in industry reading innovation for their recyclable materials, batteries and even secular bulbs. So this is amazing. Actually there is so many amazing article out of there, which is showing how the involvement of different stakeholders in this journey will be exciting very soon.

And hopefully the issue of e-waste be resolved no later than 2030 as SDG is aiming for.

Gael: Well, thanks so much, Jacqueline, and don't worry. Apple will not give any money to this show so you are free to quote them, to mention them, because I'm not sponsored at all.

And if I was sponsored by Apple, I guess it will drain a bit less money on my personal resources to run this show.

So feel free to mention everyone you want. You've already mentioned Samsung and Dell, so that, that's perfectly fine. Well, Thanks a lot, both of you, because I've learned a lot of things.

That was an episode I really wanted to offer to the audience because we talk that much about e-waste, but it's such on a superficial level and having two of you in the show explaining the data, but also what it meant concretely, the business impact.

That was great. So once again, thanks a lot for joining and I know that many of us, we will have learned a lot of things listening to both of you. So thanks a lot again.

Jacqueline: Thank you so much. Thank you guys for having us.

Vanessa: Thank you. Thank you both and thank you Gael for the invitation and for the opportunity to talk about this important topic.

Gael: And that's it. Thank you for listening to Green IO. Make sure to subscribe to the mailing list to stay up to date on your episodes. If you enjoyed this one, feel free to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who could benefit from it. As a nonprofit podcast, we rely on you to spread the word.

Last, but not the least. If you know someone who would make a great guest, please send them my way so that we can make our digital word greener one byte at a time.

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What would be the three most harmful website design practices ? What are the actions that you can’t take without the client’s approval ? How could you convince your boss or customers on this sustainable journey ?

That’s what we discuss in this episode on sustainable design !

Join Gaël Duez to meet : Michael Anderson, Frontend Web Developer at Initiva AB & Founder of Sustainable WWW in Sweden and Sandy Dähnert, experienced designer and host of the Green the Web podcast in Germany.

➡️ Sandy and Michael shared their insights on how to face the challenges regarding creating sustainable websites through the lens of Green IT.

✅ Don't miss this episode if you want to learn practical advice on how to create sustainable websites and how to convince your clients of the importance of sustainability in website design.

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

Learn more about our guests and connect
Sandy Dähnert is the founder of Green the Web, and a freelance UX/UI designer with over 10 years of experience. She is also a social and environmental justice activist who advocates for sustainable web design. Sandy works with designers and companies to create ecologically and socially sustainable digital products that have a positive impact on the regeneration of our planet.

Michael Andersen, the founder of Sustainable WWW (World-wide-web) and author of Sustainable Web Design In 20 Lessons, is a problem solver who is passionate about making the internet greener. He has extensive knowledge in both frontend and backend web design and programming, and is committed to incorporating sustainable practices in his work.* Green the Web's LinkedIn (Sandy) * Michael’s LinkedIn * Gaël's LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green IO website

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

Sandy and Michael’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode* Tim Frick’s book "Designing for Sustainability" * Tom Greenwood book “Sustainable Web Design” * Green IO episode n°8 “Sustainable Design from the trenches” * Gerry Mc Govern : World Wide Waste * Sandy top website example * Sustainablewww * Sandy’s Green the web podcast * Sandy’s courses * Michael book “Sustainable Web Design In 20 Lessons” * Nick Lewis’ repository of lowwcarbon websites * The Ethical Design Handbook by Trine Falbe, Martin Michael Frederiksen, Kim Andersen * CAT community * Sandy’s list of recommended links * Atomic habits * Digital collage * SUX community

TranscriptGael: Hello everyone. In this episode, we go to Gutenberg in Sweden to meet Michael Anderson and to Cologne in Germany to meet Sandy Dänhert, and we will speak about sustainable design, but let me start with a confidence. We, and by we, I'm in the tech folks, whether we are developer ops, dev ops, data engineer, etc.

We have it pretty easy when it comes to IT sustainability. Okay. I'll hear you from now screaming from where you are. Are you insane Gael with none of the big cloud providers being fully transparent online, greenhouse gas emissions, the lack of open data and common standards, and the challenge of water and biodiversity where almost everything has to be built and the best practices for green coating not being agreed upon within our industry?

Hello, energy consumption of networks. Oh, I forgot to mention the maze of measurement. Okay, okay. You are right. That's not easy, but still. It's less hard than for product folks, whether you think about product owners, product managers, UX or UI designers, research ops, et cetera. Why? Because most of the time we are aligned with our CFO green ops = finops, and better code usually equals less maintenance and for Web developers better Web performance.

But when you try to implement sustainable design where it all starts and actually where the impact on reducing the environment footprint, either biggest, you are quite often challenged by business. This catchall term refers to sometime sales, marketing, business developers, or guardians of the PNL. Not that they don't care about sustainability.

They do most often quite a lot, but they are focused on the bottom line and fed by -self-proclaimed, per communication, or marketing- gurus with statements like "video is ever seeing, or the messages, the massage, et cetera. In September last year, we had a superb episode with Anne Faubry and Tom Jarrett called Sustainable Design from the Trenches, where they highlighted that this opposition was a myth.

I've been wanting to go back on the front line for a while to see how things have evolved, and I'm happy to do it today with two guests who are tooling designers and developers in digital sustainability. Michael, a seasoned Web developer, is the founder of Sustainablewww, a community actively promoting a more sustainable and environmentally friendly internet with resources, wiki and blog articles.

He has recently published his first book, Sustainable Web Design in 20 Lessons. Sandy is an experienced designer and a fellow podcastor. She has launched last year the Greener Web Podcast and has recently opened comprehensive online courses on Green UX & UI design. On top of it, she's also an active member of the sustainable UX community.

Welcome both of you. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today!

Sandy: Hi. Very happy to be here.

Michael: I'm happy too. It's an honor.

Gael: Same wise. So I'd like to start with my regular question, I would say to both of you, which is : how did you become interested in sustainability in the first place, and most, maybe specifically the sustainability of our digital sector? Sandy, you want to share some thought on it?

Sandy: Of course. Sure. Well, I can definitely remember it very well and I was already in my private sphere: more sustainable in what I wear, what I buy, and how I behave and stuff like that and I was doing a lot of volunteer work and I was freelancing at an agency at that time, and they had a meetup coming up and they said "why don't you want to talk about Sustainable Web design in this meetup?"

And I was like, sure. And I was thinking only about the social aspects of sustainability in Web design and about accessibility and hypocrisy and like the social justice in design and stuff. And I was going deeper into that. And then at some point I found the topic of ecologically sustainable design. I think probably either Tom Greenwood or Tim Frick, one of the first ones that I stumbled up on.

And I was like "What? Why does no one talk about that or very few people talking about it? Why have I never heard of it before?" and it was truly an "Ah!" moment for me, and I went deep, deep, deep into it. It was around Christmas time and usually I take off of work during Christmas and New Year's Eve and stuff like that, but I absolutely took every single minute to try to find more information about the topic for this meetup and loved it since then.

Gael: Well, that's super interesting. A meetup, an invitation to a meetup was a key.

Sandy: Yeah.

Gael: So just, you just have to invite someone and sometimes it triggers a chain reaction, a very positively chain reaction. That's super cool. But what I also like with what you shared is that, opposite to quite a lot of people I've met, and I have to admit, starting with me, you went the other way on the sustainability journey.

I hear a lot of people, the majority of the people I've met, they start with the environmental consciousness. We need to take care of the planet, take care of human or actually all living forms on the planet. At some point you realize that climate justice is very strongly connected with social justice and that all this question of inclusivity or let's take the example of AI for instance, it might drag some resources, but there are so many ethical questions on top of it that sometimes environmental for print of AI is maybe only the tip of the iceberg.

So we're quite a lot to have shared this road, like starting from the environment toward people, ethics, et cetera. And that's very cool to see that you can also take the road the other way around, starting from an ethical point of view, questioning, I would say, and then going all the way toward environmental without obviously losing the ethical acumen.

Sandy: Yeah.

Gael: So that's pretty cool?

Sandy: No, both is very important definitely for me as well. And I don't know, it just came in this way and I didn't know that green design was a thing and that it's possible to actually be more ecologically sustainable in my UX research, your UX and UI design, and I was like immediately in love with that and felt more of a purpose in my job then.

Gael: Than before.

Sandy: Yeah. Yeah.

Gael: And what about you, Michael? Did you experience a "Aha" moment or was it something more continuous?

Michael: It's a little bit, like you were saying, like most most people start out being conscious about the environment and I don't think that I was any exception of that. I grew up in a small city in Denmark. And as a child I was one of those kids, you know, that was always playing outside with my friends.

We were building stuff in a forest, playing street hockey and never really spending time, you know, in front of the TV or using technology at all. Kind of truly playing outside. I think that my deep connection with the nature kind of comes from there, you know, growing up in a small city, playing in nature, using the forest as your playground.

I think my connection with nature comes from there. One day, I was sitting in Sweden and I was thinking about like, "how do I combine these two big interests of mine?", you know the nature part and the technology part. Because I wanted a way to help the environment in my way. I was unsure if it was gonna be like, feeding programs or going into renewable energy or something.

But the best way that I could do it was to find a way to combine these. And that's when I kind of stumbled into this book by Tom Greenwood, a Sustainable Web design. It has been mentioned quite a few times on all of these different podcasts. I'm sure there is a reason for it because this is the book that got me into it all.

Like I found this connection between the environment and technology and I would say that's how I got started and became interested in sustainability. From there, it was kind of like a ball rolling, like I had to learn everything from the bottom up. So I invented the D plate over and over and found my own ways of creating sustainable Web design.

And then I realized that people should not have the same struggles that I had. So that's why, for example I founded the organization or foundation, sustainable worldwide Web.

Gael: So you avoid people to face the same hurdles that you experience starting from almost nothing and that's quite cool because both of you are in a very active sharing mode. Actually that's kind of the first question I wanted to ask you. Rather than listing all the do and don't, I would love both of you to share the top three worst examples of design, harmful design for the environment that you've experienced firsthand.

So maybe Sandy, do you want to share you absolute number one?

Sandy: Yeah, sure. I love that question. My absolute favorite, number one. Well, there are so many worst cases, but, well, one that was definitely striking for me was one client of mine- as I'm a freelancer.

One client of mine came to me with their website and they had so many different kinds of sliders on their website even just on their homepage, they had, I think three different sliders with imagery so they had up to 10 different slides per slider so the ones that you swipe through.

And so many studies show that sliders, no one really looks at them all of the users barely see the first or the second slide of the whole carousel thing and they had up to 10 different slides per slider and then I think it was three or four sliders on one page, and that's so much data waste of course, but it's just even also really bad UX.

Just wasted space and the first slider was of course, as we had in for a couple of years at the very, very top of the page to set the mood but there was just imagery, like really just images not even a headline, not even an introduction it was just images to kind of set the mood.

I got it why they did it. But it was just those 10 different slides in this slider, only imagery. No one knew in the first view port what this website is about. And immediately in the first view port, you have so much data waste and no scaled, no compressed imagery and that was kind of a really fun thing to do because I was like, okay, that's gonna be easy to reduce that carbon emission.

Gael: Yeah, obviously. So Michael, she has the slider loathe of card. That's a big one in her hand. So what do you have on yours?

Michael: Oh, it's hard to find a specific example because there are so many of them that I've been working with over the years but I guess one of the bad ones that I've had recently was a customer that decided to completely redesign their website.

I work in a small company and we focus on custom code. We even made our own CMS system and, and all of these things so everything that we build is custom and we have been working with this client for, I think, almost a decade now or at least my coworkers have.

So all of the different versions from the website has been piling up over the years, you know, with unused code and elements for the CMS and now they chose to completely redesign their website and it had to go so fast because here in May, they're going to launch it on a big event, but, Instead of redesigning the website and choose to clean up what they already had : like for example we could have built new elements for the new design so that we would have like a clean cut between the different versions then instead they decided to mix between the versions and take whatever, you know, came from like older versions of this website.

So the end product was that we had a completely new design, but now all of a sudden the code base was mixed between versions going almost 10 years back and now we have no idea like which elements are actually being used.

We have so much unused code in this project and no way to really figure out how to get rid of it.

Gael: So I believe the website was pretty big.

Michael: The website is pretty big and pretty heavy. It's out in three languages. So three big replicas of the same website.

Gael: Okay, so that's a very good one. So that actually is someone who say, well, let's try to have low maintenance website, or actually high maintenance website, multi versioned, blended website. Yeah. Pretty hard to maintain. I guess, pretty heavy to load. So that's a good one. Sandy, you've got a number two that you'd like to share.

Sandy: Yeah, I bet I won't be able to top that one.

Gael: That's a nightmare.

Sandy: Very heavy. But another example that I'm thinking of is, well, there are several websites that I've seen this with and from clients and not clients of mine that have so many animations and interactions. It's already just too much, way too much and you just come onto the website or application and then you scroll through and you know those websites where content like text and imagery and all kinds of other things are coming in from the sides, from left, from right, from up, from down.

Everything seems to be moving and then you have power X effects and then you have other things that are carousels that are auto moving and all kinds of things that are shifting and shaping.

Then I had this client of mine that had exactly that.

But that's modern and we want to our users to feel like we are up to date and we are cool and all of those things and I was like, "yeah, I know". We want to have this website to be very modern and up to date but definitely try to limit those animations and flying in texts and flying in icons and illustrations.

Just calm down a little bit because it's so overwhelming, even for people and for users who don't have cognitive challenges, but for the ones who do have, so to go a little bit into accessibility as well.

It's really tough to visit websites like that and animations and interactions they need a lot of scripts so this website was definitely so heavy and to just toning that down and calming a website helped tremendously for the environment, but also for users who might have challenges with it.

Gael: With positive business impact at the end? Or could you measure something like conversion rate or I don't know what was the business model of this website?

But could you see also some positive business impact with, actually them wanted to be super modern, but maybe the result was the exact opposite because they were chasing away users or potential customers from their website because it was just too visually noisy, I would say.

Sandy: Absolutely. We actually did usability testings as well, so talking with users or potential users and letting them go through the website and sharing what they feel about the website, what they like, what they don't like, how they use it.

Every single participant in this usability test was like, "well, there's just too many things going on and then all of the times, newsletter banners came in as well", and just things were all over the place and all of the users were like, "No, I would definitely close this website immediately" and once we did the redesign, we actually saw that there was much more of users coming to the page, staying on the page, actually going through the website, and then also converting.

Gael: Yeah, so this is really connected with what I say in the introduction that you can align business goals and sustainability goals. Okay, so nightclub website, let's say.

That's a pretty big one. Michael, Nightclub website. I love this one. Michael, you've got another one to share?

Michael: It's a client that I've been working with for a few years now. Lately we have been focused a lot on optimizing for SEO and that means that I have finally been able to go through the website and optimize in any way possible, you know, like optimize images style. Like everything I could come across.

And at the end of this project, the client chose to switch out the hero element on the front page and put in a enormous, one and a half minute long video that would have to autoplay in the beginning and with no controls.

So every single user that arrived on this start page was like forced to watch this one and a half minute long video.

They actually first allowed me to take that away again once they realized that it really hit their SEO.

Gael: I can't imagine this by video instead of this by PowerPoint. That's a website test by video. I love this one as well. Let's not talk about the bandwidth it consumes and the loading time I can imagine and Sandy, what about you? Okay, you've got one last shot.

Sandy: Well, we covered quite a bit of the worst cases already. What I often see as well is the topic of storage.

I do a lot of UX designs for applications, especially Web applications, business applications, stuff like that. There is so many things that get collected, so much data that could gets collected in so many ways.

I've seen websites with three different tracking tools implemented. Lately, there was one business that approached me. They had I think 1000 block articles on their website and they didn't really want to declutter. I was like, but we have to. No one reads block articles from 10 years ago. No one will do that, except if it's like a really brilliant one and then you should keep it but it was not that case.

In business applications, I see so many times that data is collected from different kinds of users and stakeholders in the whole system that we can easily reduce.

There's even laws and regulations for that in terms of storing user data when the contract is already ended and things like that you have to delete: the data and you cannot hoard data forever, especially if it's personal user data. But I've seen so many applications that still keep them, and I always say, yeah, we have to get rid of that and it's even legal requirements that we have to do that and there is a lot of data floating around that we can just reduce immediately and that is often forgotten because it's not visible in the front end, but it's very much in the back end.

But we still have to do that as well in UX design.

Gael: Absolutely. It reminds me so much about the example that Gerry McGovern gave in his book when he worked with the health organization with all these articles. Some of them having wrong information or, you know, not anymore scientifically based information still being on the website because no one was taking care.

No, there were no data steward or no data editor anymore. That connects a lot. But Sandy, I must admit that three different tools to measure traffic. That's a lot. I mean, I've met countless websites with two because "you know, we had a migration, but we still want to rely on the old ones." The migration was two years ago.

Come on, let it go. But you know, all the specific tool that you've got for a campaign and that the campaign is over for one year, and why do you have this single API call for every page on your website that is completely useless?

That's pretty cool. But like we could call it this one data tsunami turning 180 or point of view now.

What I'd love now for both of you is to share one true beautiful example of something that you're super proud of. You know, an inspiring story about a design which had true impact on its environmental footprint.

Sandy: All right. One great example would be a design for a brand from the US who does have home and body care products, like shampoo bars and conditional bars and cleaning soap bars and things like that. So very much rooted in zero waste, wasteless production, ethical organic materials in their products and stuff like that.

And then we got into talking through common friends and she wanted to redo her website and redesign it, wanted to have a evaluation from my side. Then I discovered that this website was more than, or weighted more than eight megabytes, just the homepage and all kinds of different, other pages below were very, very heavy as well. So the carbon emissions of this full website was just through the roof, and she was very much dedicated to zero waste and reducing her impact in general. When I came to her and said, well, this is the fact of your website, she was immediately stunned by it and shocked and was like, "well, oh, I didn't know that it has an impact".

As we probably all know, have faced this conversation at one point.

We went into the full redesign of really every single bit. She even has a new technology, a different content management system as well. So we rebuilt everything with also coming in new colors. So it's a little bit less bright, less white for example so we use an off-white in the background to reduce at least a little bit of energy consumption in devices. We use different colors that are more vibrant and darker colors here and there as well.

We use a lot less data heavy elements, whether that's imagery or videos. If they are introduced or implemented, they have actually a purpose and are there for better usability and finding the best product possible for the user but also really thinking again about the user journeys, because every single click means more data consumption means more carbon emissions.

So really thinking about what are the best ways to guide a user through this website without having to go back and forth. Plus, there are so many cool assets in there that are about green art delivery, so green shipping or donations made with every single purchase. As well as having little communication snippets of if you buy this shampoo bar, you will reduce six plastic bottles, so you will eliminate six plastic bottles that you would have to buy if you don't use this shampoo bar.

Things like that, like those small changes that also educate the user in a very gentle and loving way of, "yes, this is a good step for you as a user", to also contribute to a positive change for the environment.

All kinds of little bits and pieces we put into this website that I really love caring more about also the ethical and organic parts of the products. It's even has a choice with at least a couple of products to get it with packaging or without packaging. So even reducing more of materials.

So there's many, many things in there that I actually love and enjoy with this project.

Gael: It seems that consistency was key here, like your client was ready into this sustainable mindset.

About just a side question about the colors, because I've read a lot of debate about dark mode versus, you know, not that many scientific studies are backing it, but we do have some, but in specific context and the colors, et cetera.

What is your stand on it?

Sandy: Well, I do think that whatever choice we make, even if it's just a small contribution, I would like to consider it. I know there is not enough studies and like really diverse studies about color and its effect on energy and battery life and consumption. But I see a couple of studies and discussions around that reducing the brightness of colors does help for all edited place at least. So for example, I started to use less bright white as background colors and just sing a little bit of more tone down of white does help at least a little bit.

If I do it in every single website, and especially in business applications that are used for full days every single day of a week for hundreds of employees and just thinking about how can we scale it up it doesn't all have to be in dark mode, especially that's not accessible for every single person out there.

But just trying to find more ways of implementing colors in a creative way that might use a little bit less brightness of, at least for OLED displays.

Gael: And what about you, Michael? What will be your most inspiring use case that you'd like to share?

Michael: First of all, I would like to say Sandy, that's a very inspiring customer. You been working with there. I wish I had customers like that.

I would say I'm more like the person who works behind the curtains because most of the clients that I'm working with is not really that interested in the environment yet I can only push them that far.

So most of the stuff that I do behind the curtains where they don't see things.

But I guess the story I would like to share was was one of our big clients that we have been working with for many years. They finally decided to optimize their website because they were focusing on SEO and that gave me the opportunity to go in and focus on image optimization.

I was, for example, making it so that if they were adding images into like a card list element where the images would have like, somewhat a fixed size. Then on the back end I would automatically resize these images and convert them to WebP so that even though they were uploading images on like two to three megabyte, it would automatically scale down and create like an optimized version.

I was also doing stuff like removing jQuery and going directly into plain JavaScript, and we were moving the whole website to a green host located in Sweden which is known for having more renewable energy. We were simplifying the code base, the CSS like removing code that was duplicated. So for example, in CSS it's very easy to write styling that is overriding each other and goes again and again from element to element. So these were some of the things that we were focusing on.

We were also optimizing funds and trying in as many places as possible to put in system funds because that would reduce the data that each user would have to load.

And of course, also do stuff like reduce animations and only use them in places where they would actually improve the understanding of what was happening.

Gael: Well, Michael, you are an amazing guest because that was my next question for both of you.

What can you do on your own without asking the permission to no one?

You know, that kind of a debate of that hear quite a lot between developers or designers version A being: I cannot do that much if not anything because I don't have the support of my cto, cpo, the guilds, or whoever is in charge or defining how I should code and design things in my organization.

Versus option B being: well, you know, sustainability is a bit like security, you code security by design, we should do sustainability by design and there are a lot of things that we can do just implementing good craftmanship without asking the permission to anyone.

And obviously you listed quite a lot of examples as you say, according you working behind the curtains that things that you've done without needing your customer's approval.

So thanks a lot because that that was really something that this fine line, depending on the context is really something that I believe is at the core of the thinking of many people wanting to do things in a more sustainable way and send a" do you want to add something?"

What would be like the top actions, the top ideas that someone should implement as a good craftman without asking the permission to anyone, you know, being in steel mode, I would say?

Sandy: Mm-hmm. Well, first of all, I absolutely agree that we can do so many things already without anyone else noticing that is coming to more green design and ecological sustainability. Well, I always find, or what I struggled with most in the very beginning was that I felt like I can only design very minimalist websites now and applications and online shops, and I have to reduce everything and I cannot implement anything that's beautiful and colorful and with images or anything that's nice.

I absolutely found that's not true at all. I can still be very creative as a designer, even with ecologically sustainable design. I always think that I can even be more creative because I stopped from just thinking about this full width image on top of a page, but actually thought in different ways of how can I make this aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly and green.

So probably the first things that I changed without anyone noticing is the use of images of having even the permission slip to not use any images at all if they don't fit the brand or the purpose or the content of using images differently in a more, yeah, just blurring image edges or cutting off image edges and really using them with a purpose and not just for, "Hey, here's everything that I found in the database of this brand".

The second would probably be the use of text and fonts and all of what comes with that and even designing with fonts and designing with text is a really cool way of reducing data if it eliminates other data, heavy components such as videos or images. Plus definitely a cool thing that I love is what we already talked about colors and of trying to find new ways of selecting different kinds of colors that I haven't thought about before, that they actually do have an impact even though it might be smaller than imagery.

But it can still have so those are things that no one realizes that I'm actually doing them. And just being a good UX designer helps a lot as well, because then you think about the user journeys throughout every single website application or online shop and not complicating digital products is a very huge part in graining the Web because every single click counts so really reducing that and just saying, "Hey, we're just doing good".

UX is very helpful as well.

Gael: Yeah, absolutely. Perfection is rich when there is nothing less to remove, not to add. And, you know, it remind me the statement that you can do beautiful things in a sustainable way. It really reminds me the work, but I guess, you know, Nick Lewis' work on the low carbon repository, this list of "Yeah, I think it's a great initiative because it highlights that you can design beautiful websites, straight to the point, et cetera, in a very environmentally friendly way". I really love his work and I think it's a great source of inspiration like, you know, especially when you talk with a user or even more important a customer or a client.

And now going the opposite way, what are the actions that you believe you cannot really take without the support of your boss or some kind of support within your organization?

When and where, do you need help as a designer or a Web developer?

Michael: I guess when dealing with the website design that is like some of the major changes that you can do is definitely something you would have to take up with the client first.

Like what Sandy mentioned, if you get a permission slip to actually remove images from the website or Web page or if you decide to start out with a dark mode design and let the user switch over to a light mode, like all of these implementations is definitely something that I think you would have to run by the client to hear what they think first.

Gael: And how would you convince them or try to convince them?

Michael: I would definitely do it a bit like some Greenwood test: don't focus so much on the environmental side since most companies focus on the bottom line and the SEO. So try to find like a combination between the two. Of course, it's okay to mention for them that you are doing something great for the environment and all of this, but I don't think that it should be the selling point of it.

I can't remember if it was Tom or if it was Gerry McGovern that once said that all of these sustainable implementation shouldn't even have to be mentioned. It should be something that just comes natural to us as Web designers and developers.

Gael: I recall it was Tom, but sorry Gerry if I got this one wrong.

And Sandy, what would be the actions where you truly believe that this cannot be done on your own?

Sandy: A couple of things cannot be done if you are in a very big corporate environment where there is a huge universe of digital products and you really want to shift all of them. Then you just have to talk with colleagues and with business about actually introducing a more data reduced, but also environmentally positive design throughout all of digital products.

So that's about the sheer amount of digital products that there could be in a corporate environment. But also what I usually do or love to do is designing or creating non-human personas, really talking about environmental stakeholders that we effect in a negative way with our digital products, but also can effect in a positive way.

So really thinking about nature, about certain ecosystems, about animals, about oceans, rivers, and all kinds of things that we have an impact on. I can do that for myself just to center myself more into the environmental aspect in my work. But of course if I do that with the client or with the company, and really all centering on environmental stakeholders and non-human personas does help a lot.

And when I do it and people are open to it, it absolutely affects their way of business and how they do business as well, not just design itself for a digital product, but the whole business. So that is, for example, one thing if I want to, in bigger corporate corporations really want to hone in on the user journeys and reducing click pass and therefore energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Then I can do user journey mappings. Of course, if there's huge digital products, I have to do that with the team as well, and I can do it without mentioning.

Ecological sustainability, so it's just a typical UX method. But I can also introduce sustainability within user journey maps and talk about every single step and their ecological impact throughout a user journey.

So yeah, that's of course things that I then have to discuss with the team or with the client or with the company. So those are the bigger things that need to be done. Other things are the hosting provider. I cannot just choose one and say: "you have to take this one". Or talking about tracking tools, as we talked about before, I can of course recommend something, but it's absolutely their choice of then doing so.

What I often have as a freelancer, I do a couple of projects for a very long time and a couple of years supporting certain projects, but sometimes it's just a one time thing and you set it up. It's a new design, it's a redesign, everything's good and ecologically sustainable. Cool. But then you visit this website or application a year or two later, and then you see that there's new imagery, for example, on a website that is suddenly, again very big and very heavy, and you're like" no".

And then you write an email about, "Hey, can you compress that?" And still think about the workflow of data reduction and stuff. So you don't have everything in your own hands, especially if the daily workflows just are different for the people you are working with. So you have to sometimes remind people to scale and compress and export in the right format and things like that.

Gael: Now you shared a lot about do/ don't depending the context, flying under the radar or on the other hand, convincing your customers in raising awareness.

I'd like the three of us to take a step back and very simple question, what is the trend? What did you notice this last years in our industry?

Are you optimistic about a way towards more sustainability as Chris Adams like to say "a fossil free internet by 2030 or not that much?"

Michael: Over the years, I've seen many trends. Well, but honestly, most of them has been for the worst. What I mean is that like we see more and more of these heavy images videos, unused code power, hungry themes and and such on websites and like whenever I personally have talked to people about this, I've heard comments such as, "it doesn't really matter because, you know, the internet is so fast".

So 200 kilobyte image or a two and a half megabyte image, it doesn't really matter.

I have to go in and explain all of these, things like geographical reach, making the websites faster for even people living in places where they have like slow internet connections, all of these things.

I definitely think like as the internet speed becomes faster, the trend is going for the worse. That is what sustainable website is trying to turn around again, so that we can focus on creating lighter and faster websites that are more accessible, has a greater reach to people just like we used to do back when the internet was very slow, everyone had like a 50 K modem, if you remember those.

Everyone was really focusing on building sustainable websites because an image could take minutes to load. And that's kind of like where I believe that we need to go back again. Instead of focusing on building these animation heavy image, heavy video, heavy websites, we need to focus on making it even faster.

But I believe that we can, and we will. We just need to get this information out to more people. We need to get more people on board building these sustainable solutions. And if we can like spread awareness of how much the internet pollutes, then we will open the eyes for more people and change the culture of what is happening right now.

Gael: Okay, I got it. So it's a battle of technological trend versus ecological awareness, I would say. Okay. Fair point. And I do remember the sound of the 60, not 60, sorry, 56 K bottom. But you know, there is less and less people who know what we talk about when we mention them. That's quite funny. And Sandy, how do you foresee the future and what other trends that you've noticed recently?

Sandy: Well, I'm very hopeful. I've seen in the last years that I have had an eye on this bubble, this niche, that there's more and more designers and developers caring for it and actually talking about it. There's much more discussion, and I know we are still at the very beginning of this topic, and I know that there are so many more things to come, especially when we also talk about UX research and information architecture and stuff like that, that I have high hopes that many more cool things are coming along to help us to design in a greener and more sustainable way.

And I love that there's so many more designers and developers joining and talking about it, because if there's more designers talking about it, then actually companies and brands and clients are seeing that it is even a thing. Before there was just too few people talking about it. Now there's more that it actually attracts companies to think about it and then actually saying, "Hey, we need employees who are specialized in it or clients searching for freelancers who have more ecological sustainability in their spectrum of work."

There is a cool way of really broadening this horizon on all different levels, on designers and developers levels, but also in companies and for brands. I see definitely an optimistic outlook, but at the same time, I absolutely agree that we have to fight the new generation of very short form video based content as well as artificial intelligence tools.

We do have to fight for more ecological sustainability even more, because there's so much data, data heaviness out there in different forms now than it has been in 10 years or 20 years ago. But I am very hopeful that we will get that.

Gael: Me too. This is what I get up every morning.

Michael: I just wanna point out to my comment on it, that it was definitely not supposed to be meant as like a dark, pessimistic version. I am definitely optimistic about it. As I see it, so many people around the world right now don't know that data pollutes. And I think that is the problem right now because we see so many people interested and involved in the environment, you know, trying to remove plastic and all of these acts that leads us in the right direction.

But these people, they have been made aware that we have a climate crisis right now, but so many people still don't know that every single kilobyte or megabyte pollutes because of electricity consumptions and devices being built, like all of these things that both Tom and Gerry McGovern talks about.

Well, what I was trying to explain with my comment is that, we need to talk about the problem and make more people aware. Even people outside of Web design and Web development, like even the regular website owner needs to be aware of this because we all have a responsibility in this.

Like the data we pollute is the data that we need to maintain and remove ones, no matter longer valid.

Gael: Yeah, absolutely. You're right. This is what I'm less shy now reaching out to people on social networks or in conference or whatever, saying: "Hey, by the way, are you aware of climate change, sustainability, et cetera, and I'm like,

"Oh, you're in the tech industry, you are IT folks or designer? Are you aware of the environmental footprint?" No. Boom. You should listen to the podcast. You should read this book. Or you should join a digital collage workshop, you know, to raise awareness, et cetera. I used to be a bit shyer. Like, I don't want to bother them. They must know. They must know. It's so obvious, but the truth ? It's not. So now I'm straightforward. Actually, some people listening to the show for the very first time might have been connected quite recently to me, with me dropping a few lines saying: "Hey, by the way, you know, this is the podcast, maybe can be useful, use it."

If not, no big deal. I'm not here to sell you anything. But yeah, I welcome all the new listeners, obviously.

Which leads me to the last question about resources. So obviously you folks created quite very useful resources. I'd like both of you to mention them again.

And on top of that, what would be all the resources that you would advise people to know more about sustainable design, sustainable Web dev or even sustainability in general?

Michael: Yeah, I wrote this book "sustainable Web Design in 20 Lessons". And did it to give people a chance to get into sustainable Web design without having to invent the DPL over and over. After reading some Greenwood books on sustainable Web design, I was like fully into what the problem was, but I was hungry for solutions, things that I could like take to my website directly to make it better. And since I didn't really find, you know, books out there directly attacking this problem, I decided to create my own from these experience that I build up. So, for example, I talk briefly about what sustainable Web design is and what a carbon footprint is.

But it's not the main focus of the book. The main focus is to give the reader practical courses, actions that they can take to their website right away. So I talk for example about green Web posting CDNs and how they add security layers to your website can reduce the carbon footprint.

I talk about page weight budgets and death of content. You know, our responsibility of the data that we create. I talk about accessibility, which is both meant as accessibility in you know, creating websites that are available to people no matter their ability or geographical reach.

I talk about lightweight and minimalistic design, how colors for example can change the energy consumption. So, for example a blue has a shorter wavelength which makes the energy consumption a little bit bigger compared to a green and a red. It doesn't really make a huge difference like it does switching from a gray Web posting to green Web posting.

But after reading the book Atomic Habits, I figured out that if we take just 1% and we improve that again and again and again, we will eventually have the best version of the product. And that's what I'm trying to do with this. I'm finding all of these small things and putting them into lessons that both Web designer, developer, or even like the non-tech savvy website owner can use.

Funny story, right after writing this book, I gave it to my mom. And she is not into technology at all. Like, she's that type of person who ask my dad every time that she needs to do something on her phone or when the TV is tricky to use. And after reading the book, she came to me and she said, now I finally understand what you're doing.

And you actually wrote it in a language that is relatively easy to understand, even for someone like me who's not into technology. And that's what I wanted to do.

Gael: That, that's a very big compliment.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I I was very happy when she said that, because that is exactly what I was trying to do, like create a book that would be easy to consume for everyone, cuz to create a sustainable worldwide Web, we have to include everyone, even the website owners that does not get help from Web designers and Web developers.

Gael: And do you have any other resources, one or two that you'd like to share with the audience?

Michael: Yeah. I actually have three. I will definitely recommend people to read some Greenwood's book sustainable Web Design. It gave me so much knowledge about sustainable Web design and what the problem is. So for everyone who wants to get into it, it's a really, really good starter book. I'll also recommend worldwide Waste from Gerry McGovern.

That gives you really, really good insight into how much everything pollutes. Like just to pick an example, you know, that images pollutes more than words. You normally say that a picture says more than 1000 words, but in reality, when you're dealing with Web design, you can describe things in so greater details just by using words. As I recall it, I remember Gerry McGovern mentioning that about 150,000 words is equal to the size of one image, if I'm not totally wrong.

And that should kind of put things into perspective for you, that sometimes words might be better ways to describe things. The last resource that I want to recommend is the Ethical Designed Handbook by Trine Falbe. That was definitely also a great book for me to read because instead of only focusing on the environment and optimization, you also focus on the user journey.

Like Web websites has to be ethical, honest and focus on the best of users. Instead of focusing only on creating a sale by scarcity or whatever tricks in the book that comes up and is used today.

Gael: Well, thanks a lot, Michael. And yeah, both Tom and Gerry's books are very often mentioned on the show, but it's always a pleasure to put them in the show notes and to have more people sharing and understanding things. Thanks. So thanks a lot for that. Sandy, do you want to add other resources?

Sandy: Yeah, sure. Well, I definitely recommend the ones that Michael said, and usually I also mention this podcast as a resource to check out. Definitely always recommended as well as Michael's book. I was honored to actually happen to read it already. I'm almost through it. It's really cool to read and a lot of amazing and interesting things in there that I can still learn about, especially the technical parts because I'm not a developer. So well done, Michael.

I definitely would recommend my podcast as well. I love doing that, it's also about green and social sustainability.

In, especially UX and UI design. So I'm more into that side of like user research and design rather than development, what you both do brilliantly and I really like the sentence that Michael mentioned earlier about hungry for solutions, which is why I do or share a lot of solutions and things for others to have an easier entrance into the topic of it.

So I do have on my website also linked templates, for example, for non-human personas or for user journey mappings. So it's easier to not just think about, "okay, I could do that, but how could I do that?" But actually just using it for free. So there's templates on my website for things like that. There is even a block as well.

As you mentioned in the very beginning, I recently, two weeks ago I launched a course about an online course about green UX and UI design for others to have an easier entrance to not just guess and read blog posts through like hundreds of blog posts in a year, and then still not knowing what to actually do in what order and what there can be done in every single design process.

So in the course it's about user research, environmental stakeholder research, the information architecture, the UI design, as well as the development handoff. So there's all kinds of things throughout a typical design process for a UX and UI designers.

To step out of the guest work and to actually get into the real work and what I absolutely included as well what can we do as designers ourselves, without anyone noticing, but also what are options for us, especially in greening e-commerce, raising awareness and finding solutions that we need to have business approval with it as well.

Those are out there for you to check out if anyone is interested in that. Well, I have a full resource recommendation list on my website and the ones Michael mentioned before are on that as well even also the Ethical Design Handbook, I really love that one as well.

I'm very much into communities as I know Gael you're as well. For example, the climate action tech community, the sustainable UX community of feeling like there's actually other people who care about the same things as I do, and to not feel lost or to not feel alone of I'm just one single person that does something about it, but there's actually others and I can actually ask them about feedback or about like, just answers to questions that I have and especially if I or you don't have people around you that are in that mindset already, it helps tremendously. So I'd definitely check communities out as well.

Gael: Thanks a lot, Sandy, for sharing all these resources and especially mentioning the climate action tech community. My little darling, or actually not that little darling community not that little community because several thousands of techies are into this one.

And once again, a big thank you to both of you. That was great to have you on the show, sharing all those insights, playing the games of the worst cases when it comes to website designs, but also all those very practical tips.

So thanks a lot for joining and I hope that both your podcast and your book and your courses and all the great materials that you give away will be very successful in that it will help to raise awareness among many, many people around the world.

So thanks a lot.

Sandy: Thank you so much for inviting us. It was really cool. Love it.

Michael: Thank you very much. It has been a wonderful time. Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.

View Details

Can you deploy an impactful Sustainable IT strategy under market pressures? What if metrics are not there? What if your customers do not care? ..

To get feedback on these questions, join Gaël Duez to meet two great leaders : Drew Engelson, Starbuck’s Director of Engineering in Seattle and Dominique Bruinier, OCTO's Chief Operating Officer and Chief Sustainability Officer in Paris.

✅ Yes, raising awareness and training teams is key. No eco-design is not more expensive. Yes, many side-benefits can be leveraged on the road to sustainability.

➡️ Dominique and Drew gratefully shared their experiences and their views on the do and the don't when implementing sustainability in a Tech company.

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

Learn more about our guests and connect
Drew is the Director of Engineering at Starbucks, responsible for overseeing the engineering teams that manage the Starbucks Rewards and Mobile Order and Pay platforms. With a strong background in software engineering, cloud, devsecops, and architecture, Drew has worked with numerous leading brands such as National Geographic, PBS, Marvel, Gannett/USA TODAY, Zipcar, and The White House.

Drew believes in responsible use of technology and optimizing the digital carbon footprint to achieve planet-positivity.

Dominique is the Director of Operations at OCTO, with an added role as Director of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), where she actively works to drive necessary transformations in the digital industry, tackling rising greenhouse gas emissions and social inequalities. As a long-time advocate and a woman in tech, she puts all her skills and expertise towards causes that are close to her heart. OCTO is one of the best places for her to bring her convictions to life.

• Drew's LinkedIn
• Dominique’s LinkedIn
• Gaël's LinkedIn
• Gaël's website
• Green IO website

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

Drew and Dominique’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode* Cloud Carbon Footprint * AWS well-designed architecture framework * B Corp certification * Paris climate agreement * AWS Reinvent * AWS sustainable dashboard * RGESN in English (beta version) * Climate action tech community * Tom Greenwood's Sustainable Web design book * Richard Hanna - Techologie podcast * MOOC from INRIA : The environmental impact of digital technologies * L’octet vert - podcast de Tristan Nitot * Digital Collage

Transcript
Gael: Hello everyone. In this episode we go to Seattle to enjoy, a Latte and Paris to enjoy a coffee. Why a latte? Because we meet Drew Engelson, Starbucks director of engineering, whose teams deliver the Starbucks reward in mobile order and pay platforms. That will be an understatement to say that Drew is a well known voice in tech sustainability.

Having been a vocal advocate for Green IT in many conferences, reinvent not being the least, that will be an understatement also to say that we've been trying to have him on the show for quite a long time- more than a year- to be honest, since we connected via the CAT community. So I'm delighted to have him today.

And why will we enjoy a cafe? Well, because in Paris you can enjoy delicious ones. So we have Dominique Buinier with us today. She's the partner in crime of Meriem Berkane OCTO's CTO, who initially should have joined us but had to cancel for personal reasons. Meriem was kind enough to introduce me to Dominique who has an amazing track record.

And OCTO, a very well non-digital services provider in Paris and beyond. They are the organizers of the USI conferences. OCTO is also among the early advocate of agility in France and sustainability. Since several years without talking too much about it. An interesting choice we will discuss later. Dominique is a software engineer by training who graduated from ENSTA school.

She has held various IT expert position in OCTO and then management once, and she's currently OCTO's Chief Operating Officer and Chief Sustainability Officer. She is the one who led the B Corp certification project successfully. Why having these two great leaders on the show today? Well both have shared the same challenge.

How to successfully deploy an ambitious IT sustainability strategy despite being companies under huge market pressure, from clients for OCTO and from financial markets. for Starbucks. I am eager to share their experience to gain valuable insights on the do and the don't. So welcome both of you. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.

Drew: Thank you for having us, and it's great to meet you, Dominique.

Dominique: Yes. Thank you for having us. Nice to meet you, Drew, too.

Gael: So my first question is the usual one. How did you become interested in sustainability and more specifically in the sustainability of our digital sector in the first place? Dominique, would you share a bit with us your journey?

Dominique: Yes, sure. Well actually it started three years ago when we decided to run for the B Corp certification. At that time we were not measuring anything at OCTO, I mean, on a environmental point of view. So we decided to start to measure our carbon footprint and at that time we chose to do the measurement on the free scopes.

And then it was an emotional shock, I can say, when we got the results because more than 50% of our footprint was related to our core business. That means related to the digital services and the digital products that we design and develop for our clients. Our day-to-day job, the purpose of the company is precisely what was the most bad I would say, on an environmental point of view.

And this carbon footprint was really, really the first time when I got interested in digital sustainability. I would say.

Gael: And before that, were you into the sustainability field?

Dominique: Yeah.

Gael: Drew?

Drew: For me, it started as a very personal journey in my personal life. My family does a lot of things. I tried to be good for the environment. You know, we'd drive electric cars, we were early adopters of that. We had put solar panels on our house. We'd try our best to use as, create as little waste as possible.

But at work, I felt like I wasn't being able to meet that specific or scratch that itch. Starbucks has a sustainability team with a chief sustainability officer, and they do so many things that help Starbucks be a a better organization and a better steward for our planet. And in fact, they have a whole history of sustainability investments going back to 1985 when they started offering the first 10 cent reusable cup discount.

But for me, the work that I was doing in the work my team was doing, felt slightly disconnected from those broader goals. So I spent some time thinking about how can I make it more relevant to me and my team and realized that, and should have been obvious that we built software and we run all of our software in the cloud right now at least for my platform.

And those cloud services consume a lot of energy. So there is definitely a direct correlation to the work that we do and the carbon that is admitted as a result of that. And I thought to myself, well :how do we go about measuring the impact of our software? And that really kind of kicked off the journey, which for me also started about three years where we started trying to figure out how to measure the impact of our software and then see how we can do even better.

Gael: That's interesting to notice that you've started both around three years ago, Dominique, from the B Corp certification. And Drew more on let's line what the sustainability team overall in Starbucks is trying to achieve, how as software engineers we can do our part. So my first question for you, maybe Drew would be, how did you onboard teams?

You had like this kind of personal momentum, I want to align things better between my personal life and what I do at work, but were you the only one? How did you create a momentum?

Drew: Well, it definitely started with within my own teams but first educating myself and working with some of my peers to understand how we're using our cloud resources and where we have opportunities for using fewer resources. Measurement became an initial problem. So before we can actually measure, it was important to come up with some methodology for determining how my team or anyone else's team is doing, are we doing good?

Where do we have opportunities for improvement? So I started with my own team. I started educating, you know, my leads, my managers on ways that we should think about our software. And as engineers and as really, which is our engineering, is our craft, I believe strongly that it's our duty to be the best engineers possible.

And that can't be done while ignoring the environmental impact of the software that we create. So, I did start with me and others who were interested. I've met other groups within Starbucks and people who are as passionate. It really is a sort of a ground up effort, you know, sharing ideas.

Sharing wins, sharing opportunities, sharing stories that we learn from other communities that we're involved with, and that's where it continues to go.

Gael: Well, that's very interesting, especially because you started right from the start with the metrics question, and we will come back to this point later, but Dominique, was it the same grownup approach who took place at OCTO or was it more a top-down decision from CEO or the board or whoever?

Dominique: Yes, it was a top down decision at the very beginning. Actually once we did the carbon footprint and. Then we explained it to the board of the company and the board decided right away to meet the Paris climate agreement and to reduce the carbon footprint. And that was the first decision.

So a very top down decision. And then we showed the same result. I mean the carbon footprint results to different teams and it was voluntary to come to those meetings and we had a lot of people coming. That was really, really interesting. And then we, as a top down decision, we asked the teams to train everyone on IT eco-design. Eco-design was the very first step that was needed for us. At that time, we were pretty much lucky because we had around 10 people very passionate about that and with a very strong expertise. But those 10 people, the previous years that they barely couldn't do anything with their expertise. But then starting with our top down decision, we ask those 10 people to help the different teams to build the necessary trainings and to start to deliver the trainings.

And for us, we had to change almost everything. That means the way we design, the way we develop, the way we do machine learning, the way we choose the cloud providers, how we design architecture, and so on and so on. Just like Drew said, we do craft also, and so we really want to improve ourselves. So I would say that training was our way to onboard teams under sustainability tracks.

For example, for the last two years when we do have a new hire, they spent one day on sustainable IT within the first month when they joined the company. And at the end of this day, we show them all the trainings that they can have and they can follow as many trainings as they want.

It's kind of open bar green trainings. It's very important for us that if they want to train, if they want to improve themselves, they can do it. So this is one radical thing. I think it's the more radical one because other things, we are still on the process. That means that, for example, the designers, the product owners, we try to have them challenge the roadmaps, the story maps of their clients. Sometimes, they can do that. Sometimes they just don't all allow themselves to do that. So it is really where we want to go, but it's not that easy.

Gael: And what are the main challenges you face? Because that, that's very interesting because OCTO, you develop things both for internal use, but also mostly for your clients. And what are the main push bags or the main hurdles that you face with your clients when you want to implement eco design or some new architectural choices, for instance, that are more sustainable, that would reduce some environmental impact?

Dominique: First of all, the clients think that it's gonna cost them more to do eco-design because their teams are not trained because they don't really know about that. So most of the time they think it will cost much more. So this is clearly the first misunderstanding and when we talk to clients right now, our clients that are not really the French tech ecosystem. They are traditional clients, I would say. Sustainable IT is not an issue for them so far. It is really the very, very beginning. So it's pretty much difficult. So what we are trying to do right now is to switch to, I would say, eco-design by design.

That means that we don't ask any permission to develop like that. It is just the way we do the code.

Gael: Well, that's very interesting. This move like by default you do things in the green way, in a sustainable way, and you don't really ask permission for it. A bit like you would design things to be secure by default and security by default or that kind of approach.

Dominique: Exactly.

Gael: And Drew, you work mostly for internal clients, I would say, you have like millions of users of your platform. But I would say the product people are the one deciding with you what to implement, what features, et cetera, et cetera. Did you have the same hurdles? Did you face the same difficulties regarding adoption of a more sustainable way of delivering products, especially digital products?

Drew: First of all, I love that word, eco-design and I think design is actually the easiest time to think about the environment. Cause it tends to be a process of elimination and simplification. You know, do I really need that fancy animation on this webpage? You know, and it's easier to not build it.

It's cheaper to not build that fancy animation. So for me, you know, we had already built a lot of our platform before we started thinking about the sustainability angle to it. And had already done a lot of optimization just for cost optimization purposes, and some of the early understanding of how sustainability and how our environmental impact relates to other metrics, we have easier access to, like cost. You know, we were able to look back in time at some of our cost optimization efforts and saw that it very strongly correlated to lower carbon emissions. And that was really added fuel to the fire to continue to look for those opportunities. And really show that being greener is not more expensive in most cases.

In fact, I don't think any cases we had, we've made any sort of sacrifices to the capabilities of the platform. It's really how we went about building those capabilities and further optimizing them over time.

Gael: So that's interesting because to wrap it up. The two main issues you might face with your clients, whether they are internal clients or external clients, is this misconception of greener equal more expensive. Where actually it's more greener equals cheaper. Whether it's because you design less stuff, so you produce, you deliver less stuff or because you optimize also your costs, et cetera, et cetera.

It all goes back to raising awareness that you first need your customers or your clients to understand that there is something at stake. And otherwise they will not make the first move. So that's very interesting that both of you, you shared in with a very different angle the same challenge and eventually you say, well, that's all wrong, actually, greener is most of the time cheaper, not all the time, but most of the time cheaper.

Is that correct?

Drew: Yeah, and I could add, I mean, it's very simple math when you're running in the cloud, right? The more efficient your application, the simpler it, the fewer cloud resources you would need to deliver that application directly correlates to lower cost. So that's kind of easy math in my opinion.

Gael: So both of you, you mentioned tools. Before we discuss a bit more specifically, which tools did you use? What are the hurdles you might have faced using them? I'd like to go back to the question of metrics because the very first thing you started Drew with your team was trying to measure things and what triggered the decision to go full speed on sustainability.

On OCTO side, was this carbon audit ?And the huge impact that was created by designing and developing software services? What are the main issues you faced with metrics and what are the metrics you decided to track?

Dominique: Maybe I can start if you want, because it may seem weird as a consultancy company, but actually., I don't really care about metrics. And I don't really care if our metrics are really accurate or not. For example just to make my explanation more clear. When we started our first carbon carbon footprint, we knew it was gonna be wrong.

We knew that we were going to make lots of mistakes. What we knew at that time is that the real measurement should be way higher, way higher. For us, it doesn't matter because the main learning was not the level of our footprint, but the main learning was that we needed deeply to change how we were going to do IT services.

So for us, it was clear that it was going to be a change management program. So it's kind of weird, but metrics for us so far. I'm saying, so far, is not the key point.

Gael: Drew, how much are you aligned with this approach?

Drew: I do have a similar opinion. I mean, the very first question I asked myself is, you know, what is the environmental impact of the system? Our teams are responsible for delivering to this world. And I had no idea how to answer that question. So I started looking for metric. What metrics do I need to be tracking?

What tools exist? There were very few answers to those questions you know, three plus years ago. But I generally knew, you know, just common sense tells me that you know, if I consume fewer cloud resources, I'm kind of really having a lower environmental impact. It just, to me, was a sort of a common.

A statement. So really decided to build my own tool at first. And we did this during a hack week, a few years ago, just over about two days. You know, I've been thinking about it for a long time, but took this hack week opportunity to go build something with some other engineers and partner with our sustainability.

And I asked the sustainability team how they account for my team's carbon footprint. You know, and as you might expect for such a large organization, it's a very broad approach. You know, they have tables and mappings and things like that, but one interesting thing I learned at that time was Starbucks technology as a whole, accounts for roughly maybe 1% of the total carbon footprint of Starbucks. And you know, over 20% is just kind of the dairy that's used in our stores and that whole supply. So the reality is that because it wasn't a big target, there wasn't a lot of, you know, detail I can pull out of it. So I thought, you know, how do I go create my own metrics and, you know, ultimately said, okay, well I'll look at our cost that's directly correlated to the number of resources I'm using or our compute hours and for various services and built like a mapping between those metrics I have easy access to from our cloud dashboards. Apply some algorithm to it and, and come up with a number. Right? And I did that and we created, you know, a chart over time. And in addition to that also thought about building a recommendation engine. So not only what is the carbon footprint, which by the way, at that time was a complete wild guess.

Accuracy was not my goal, but starting somewhere was my goal. The recommendation engine are things that I just intuitively felt: if we did these things, we would consume fewer resources, we would be more efficient, and we would therefore have a lower carbon footprint on our platform. And just started listing out a whole bunch of those things.

And then came up with ways I can detect, well, am I doing those things or not? What opportunities do we have for improvement? For example, do we have greatly underutilized resources just sitting out there in the cloud, doing that a whole lot, could they be running on smaller businesses? Can we turn them off and move those workloads elsewhere and more densely pack and get higher utilization of our platform?

So those were sort of common sense things, and in the end, those are really the things that are most important to me. What areas do we have for just improving what we do? Not necessarily actual number.

Gael: Coming back to the metrics. I think that's maybe the most interesting aspect of our discussion so far, because you are both trained engineers, you are people working in a life of data. You put for accuracy, precise metrics, et cetera, and both of you, you come back with the, the same knowledge sharing, which is "we don't have that much accurate data when it comes to the environmental footprint.

It's getting better and better, which far from being something that much actionable, but we don't care. Because the trend, the momentum is way more important than the accuracy of the metrics." I think that's very interesting because it's very easy to push back for change, asking for more reliable metrics.

So do you agree, both of you, that metrics, it's okay to start with good enough or even garbage metrics if they are consistently immersed and that over time it helps improve and that all of their CTO, all of their CPO, all their head of engineering, they should, you know, cut a slack on the accuracy of carbon footprint and many other environmental footprints and start moving forward.

Is it an accurate way to wrap up what you've just both said.

Dominique: From my point of view, yes.

Drew: I'd agree with that, although I would also be quite happy if I did have accurate data.

Dominique: Sure. But we just don't want to spend time on that because we prefer to spend time on what you've said, the momentum, how you change the way people take their good sense decisions.

Gael: Hmm.

Dominique: Day to day work.

Drew: Yes, I would completely agree with that statement. And we are seeing better data coming from various sources. Our cloud providers are attempting now to create you know, a dashboard for their customers, to provide, access to carbon footprint metrics, which is something that really wasn't possible even just a few years ago.

Gael: How do you feel about those metrics? Starting to arrive and starting to be available. Are they good enough? How much? You mentioned in both of you, you work a lot with cloud providers, so the big three obviously, is it getting better or is it still a long road to go?

Drew: I'd say yes and yes. Like it's certainly a long way to go. But something is better than nothing. You know, I was fortunate enough when I presented at AWS Reinvent, I think it was maybe two years ago, two and a half years ago, I helped announce the AWS carbon footprint tool. You know, on the same day I was of my presentation, I co-presented and you know, I was happy to see that it get announced and launched a few months later. But it's kind of stagnated ever since then. I'd really love to see that get much more sophisticated, provide API access, and really provide a lot more granular detail for their customers.

Gael: Fair point because AWS is under a bit of scrutiny, I would say, these last days with all the layoff and not moving that fast anymore compared to others. But the trend as a very big AWS client, do you still see a positive trend toward more transparency and sustainability from the AWS US team?

Drew: I do and, and overall, you know, really kind of building on Dominique's point a minute ago. You know, it's one thing to have the data, but AWS also made some of the largest renewable energy purchases in the world over the last two years. I'd rather have them do more of that than get better data from me.

It's my opinion.

Gael: Where is a priority. Yeah. And they do have a lot of infrastructure to provide with greener energy because they're stuck in some region in the US with not that low carbon energy or not that low carbon electricity to be more correct. But, okay. That's good that we started to mention AWS USbecause I wanted to ask both of you, what are the main tools you used?

I mean, we talked a lot about metrics. Obviously you started with people. You started with training, raising awareness, et cetera. But what are the tools that you mobilized to achieve your journey into IT sustainability, I would say.

Dominique: Since last October, I think we are pretty much lucky in France because we do have a new tool, and this tool has been designed by the French government and its name is RGESN and it stands if I want to translate it in English, it stands for general framework for eco-designing digital services. This framework has 79 questions.

It only takes half a day to perform an auto assessment, and then you get a first score and you have ideas about what you can improve. So it is a very first step to be achieved For us, it's a great tool. Certainly it's not enough, but at least I think it would be really great if every company could use it because it's free. And now at OCTO, we are running this assessment on every project we do for our clients. And what's amazing is that you got a score out of 100%. And when the team sees that there are about 40, 45%, then the team wants to go further. So we are at the very, very beginning of using this framework, but so far I find it much more powerful than all the top-down decisions that we have been taking so far.

Gael: With a bit of gamification on top of it, I want to get top score.

Dominique: Exactly. Exactly.

Gael: And which areas does this tool cover? Is it only about how you design your digital service, or is it also on how you host it?

Dominique: Exactly. You have eight different topics. You have topics about where your cloud provider, you have topic about on which kind of mobile your service is going to be running. You have topics in every field. When you design and develop and run digital services. It's really a good wide approach.

Gael: And we will put the link to this tool description in the show notes, obviously as usual. Drew, you mentioned already AWS sustainable dashboard, but did you leverage other tools like the assessment, an assessment grid as Dominique's just mentioned, or other tools to empower your teams and hand them into the sustainable journey.

Drew: Yes. And that, by the way, that framework sounds fantastic. I want one. Starbucks is in every cloud, but I'll talk about AWS cause that's the one I work most closely with for my systems. Prior to our sustainability journey, we were already very familiar and had worked very closely with the AWS well architected framework.

We had been through several reviews to make sure we're secure, efficient, cost effective, and all the other different pillars they have or still haven't and had in that framework. But, you know, again, about two years ago also at Reinvent, AWS launched sustainability pillar to the well-architected framework.

And that's actually a very similar sounding kind of set of questions that get asked. And ultimately generate a report on, you know, how well you're doing, what opportunities exist for further improvement. And again, that's a similar thing. If you're doing well, there's just a few more things.

Let's go tackle those things and finish the job, or look how much further we have to go. Let's go ahead and tackle the most important highest priority element. Moving forward. So that's actually a big piece of it. Along the journey of trying to figure out how to measure a carbon footprint, it definitely leveraged other tools.

You know, one more tool that comes to mind that I depended on to help quantify our carbon footprint as well as some opportunities for improvement, is cloud carbon footprint. An open source tool that was put out by the ThoughtWorks team to help ingest cloud usage data, cloud diagnostic. Usage data and generate reports that show cloud usage and cloud carbon footprint over time.

Even to this day, I actually use some of the logic that's used inside of cloud carbon footprint, but I apply it to some of my other Datadog dashboards that I look on a regular basis.

Gael: Yeah, cloud carbon footprint was actually the latest question on the Friday pool that we have now, the weekly pool that we have on the Green IO channel. Cause we gathered so much knowledge from all our guests that we decided to have this little game. And that's quite fun that you mentioned it because that carbon footprint was actually the latest question.

Bouncing back on what you said, Drew, actually, I realize that the referential, the assessment grid that Dominique mentioned does not have an English version. If among the listeners there are any people who'd like to volunteer to translate it, to put it somewhere on the internet, I will be more than happy.

And I will actually ask this question also on a few social networks. I try to be active and that will be actually super cool if someone, of course, on a purely open source, with a purely open source approach, would like to translate it and put it somewhere. Yeah. We'll be super happy to give him or her a hand.

But I think that will be very useful. You're not the first English speaker to tell me, oh, actually, I'd like to have a look at it now. You've got a plugin also that you can put on your brother so that the way to implement your diagnosis. So, very interesting tool, and it might also help a bit the discussion we're having at the W3C.

It goes beyond simple Web design, but it's interesting as well. That being said. Let's try to take a step back and with everything you shared so far and all those experiences, ongoing experiences, because I do understand your message to both of you that it's still in early stage, you're still on a continuous improvement approach.

The job is not done. And I actually don't believe it could be ever completely finished. The sustainability is a journey. It's not a destination. What if you had the ability to fast forward yourself in the future, what would you say to your future yourself in terms of do and don't?

Dominique: If I were in a magic world. That means that I think my advice would be to hire already committed people. May seem very, very easy. But for me it's key to have a team fully aligned on the same purpose.

Drew: And I love finding the right people. That's actually a great one, and I think Starbucks actually has sort of inherently a lot of those people. To begin with, our mission, our mission statement, is to inspire and nurture the human spirit, one person, one cup, one neighborhood at a time. That's a very positive message, and it seems to attract people who want to do good, who have this sort of mission driven at their core. You know, if I were, you know, leading an organization in the future and I wanted to make sure we did this right, I would be, you know, super clear that this is important, right? It's important across the board. I would empower everyone to come up with ideas within their own systems.

They know what best engineers know their systems, on how they can do better, what opportunities exist frequently, and that's just the way they design things. But other times it does require investment. And we wanna make sure we match the investment with, you know, how important we feel this is for our company and the world.

Gael: So starting with people, I feel very much aligned with what you both said. Now, taking a further step back, I'd like to ask you a couple of question going beyond tech teams. And my first question will be, and that one might be especially true for you, Drew, how green for tech and green by tech initiatives work together.

Drew: Yeah, it is a good question and it's not something I've dealt with directly. I've not had, you know, what we call the business side, ask my team specifically to do some green initiative, but that does happen quite a bit, you know, in the sustainability team or some other business. Department is looking to, you know, achieve some results or deliver some new capability that tech can deliver.

So that happens quite a bit. The five tech initiatives are ones that tend to come out of like our just inspire people that have an idea and either kind of bring it up to as a proposal or do it as kind of hack sort of situation. A lot of our hack projects which we tend to do once or twice a year.

You know, they get voted on and some of the best ideas get shared much more broadly. They get presented to our executive leadership teams and very frequently, more recently, more frequently, they're getting actual funding to go even further. That's where I think a lot of the by tech initiatives come from.

Gael: Dominique, what about greenwashing? Was it an issue? Was it the reason maybe starting with OCTO that you decided actually to be quite quiet about this move, this internal move into tech sustainability?

Dominique: Well, just like I said, it's a journey and we are really afraid of greenwashing at OCTO. Not only greenwashing, I mean, when we advocate for something, when we communicate about something. We really want that there is no issue and so we have started to communicate about sustainability and we communicate about our efforts, our findings.

We communicate of what we try, what we succeed, but what we don't succeed. We are more communicating about the journey. And less about achievements. But I think that now with the new framework. I think that we will soon be able to prove, because this is, I mean, a state framework, we will much more be able to prove what we are saying.

Drew: And I think greenwashing is always a concern. Speaking for myself, I do talk a lot about, you know, sustainable technology. But I certainly don't do it with a lens towards," Hey, look at all this great work we did "and use that as sort of the main point. The main point is I think we're always learning. If I have something that I learned and I can share that with someone else that helps them, that's a win for everybody.

So I think it is about the journey, it's about the details and opportunities for constant growth.

Gael: Yeah, thanks both of you. A very touchy topic and I've got a second one for you. And then I will ask you easier questions, I promise. But the second tough question is that you are both working in companies with big objectives when it comes to growth. Do you believe that decoupling, so only talking about carbon emission, a greenhouse gas emission, sorry.

Do you believe that decoupling can be achieved, but you can grow a company without growing greenhouse gas emissions at some point?

Drew: I think to a point, you know, we've definitely seen that within some of our platforms. You know, let's look at the last three years for our loyalty engine doubled the size of that business. That doubled the number of active users on that platform. You know, the carbon footprint is significantly down from when we started during that time.

And costs are down too and operational costs. Now we might look at that and say, wow, we were quite bloated three years. Which is true, but I think that over time, the lens of cost optimization and then after that carbon optimization has really gotten us to decouple that the growth from the actual cost and carbon.

Now at some point, these two things coalesce into and become more tightly coupled, and that's where I think it's less about the metrics itself and more about what opportunities exist for us to become more efficient both from a cost and department perspective.

Gael: Thank you. And Dominique, do you have an opinion on it as well ?

Dominique: Yes, I have an opinion. It's a very, very personal one. And my answer is no, I don't think so. And it's very difficult for me to say that because I like IT. I like this kind of industry. But we know that we do have a big issues with planetary boundaries. And we know that IT honestly is not doing any good on planetary boundaries right now. So I really think that we need to change the way we do business. Probably IT could help sometimes, probably it could not. I know this is a very political point of view, but I think that we really need to challenge the way we do business.

Gael: Thanks for sharing it, Dominique. That's not always easy. No judgment on this podcast. So I'm very happy that you feel free enough to share your vision, and that is true that Planetary Boundaries is a true challenge on how much we believe we can grow our current system, especially then we incorporate social injustice and stuff like that and where people should catch up and where people should slow down.

But that's, I mean, you've got great podcast and, and all the content discussing this topic way better than I could ever done, but that's still a very interesting point of view. Okay, so that was a difficult question. I'm super grateful that both of you, you agree to answer it very openly and honestly.

My two last questions are easier promise. The first one is, you already shared a bit about this. In one or two sentences maximum. What are the trend that you noticed in our industry today? Is it going toward the right direction when it comes in terms of sustainability, of awareness about all those environmental impacts?

I know that we focused a lot on greenhouse gas emissions today, but there are more environmental impacts like water usage, abiotic resource depletion, et cetera, et cetera. But hey, that's the way you started your journey. So I didn't want to lead the witness into things that were not actually things that you wanted to share. What is the trend that you've noticed both in Europe and more, maybe specifically in France for Dominique and in US for Drew, but actually you're both quite involved in community like climate action tech, we mentioned it, tech rocks for OCTO. So what are the trends that you've not noticed recently?

I would say the last two years.

Dominique: Well, France seems to be moving fast on sustainable IT. When I see the communities, the numbers of experts on that topic, but it's always too slow for sure. And you're right, it's not only about greenhouse gases and energy anymore. Now in France we tend more and more to use the lifecycle assessments and we try to go beyond carbon emissions because it's also a matter of what the usage biodiversity.

So it's the beginning, but now we are talking less about greenhouse gases and well, I see two trends. And it's different among companies. For non-tech companies, IT sustainability is not an issue so far. Just like Drew said, most of the time, the sustainability issues are somewhere else not on IT, so it's pretty much difficult for those companies, or for us as consultancy company to move on that topic. And in the French tech ecosystem, you have a few companies which have really started to take IT sustainability into account, but right now it's far to be the majority of them. So I really, really hope that the new tool I was talking about will help.

Drew: And I think from, you know, a general perspective, when I started this journey, you know, again, three years back, I would struggle to encounter somebody who knew what I was talking about when I asked about sustainable IT. Fast forward to today, I think it's a fairly common topic. I think it, you know, ways to go as we said earlier, but at least it's understood.

There's a growing sets of communities of people thinking about these problems. And you know, as far as in sort of in the US, I actually looked to Europe. And what's happening there to understand really kind of the forefront of what we could be doing. So I appreciate what you're doing Gael and Dominique.

Gael: So thanks a lot for sharing your views on the general trend, both in the US and in France. And I promise this will be my last question, but if you had one or two resources to share with your audience to learn more about digital sustainability, IT sustainability, or sustainability at large. It could be book, it could be thought leaders, it could be articles, conference, whatever, podcasts of course. What would you like them to read or to listen to?

Drew: Well, I think we've already mentioned this one, but I really enjoy the climate action tech community. It's a Slack community. Amazing people with a fantastic set of organizers that are really kind of inspiring and help me learn and grow along my journey. And through that group, I learned about, you know, the Tom Greenwood's Sustainable Web design book that came out from a book apart a few years ago.

The kind of, you know, it's not a long book, but it actually does a very broad sort of overview of Web engineering sustainably and calls out a lot of different areas for sites can be improved and further resources are identified. I gave this book to every single person on my team as just a bit of inspiration.

Dominique: As for myself, those are going to be references for French speakers. Sorry about that. I really like a podcast from Richard Hanna, and the podcast is Techologie. So I find it very interesting because he invites different kind of of people doing sustainable IT just like developers, designers that they talk about accessibility, not only about eco-design.

Very, very interesting one. Techologie. And the second one is a MOOC it's a MOOC from INRIA, INRIA is a digital research organization in France. And I mean it's a MOOC which is free. And the name is the environmental impact of digital technologies. This is very well explained. Very well done to start on that topic.

Gael: And actually Dominique, you shared references that are available in English, so thanks a lot for that because INRIA has an English version. Yeah. And when I do a digital collage session in the English version of La Fresque du Numérique, I always mention obviously INRIA as materials to dive a bit deeper into the topics. INRIA has an English version and regarding Techologie you have a few episodes in English, I believe, and I must say that with the other French podcast L'Octet Vert so in English, I think it could be transferred by Green Byte. They are the two podcasts that inspired me to launch Green IO. I mean, there are two giants, Richard Hanna and Tristan Nitot that I owe a lot, and I'm very happy that thanks to you I can salute them and say to all the French speakers that please make sure that you pay attention to this two podcasts.

They're great. I mean, you can listen to almost all the episode, that's very valuable information. And when it comes to the climate action tech community, we've already mentioned it several times, but "hello everyone, so happy, all those great facilitators, all those great coordinators doing an amazing job."

So I'm super proud to be part of this community and I'm very grateful that I've been able to meet Drew thanks to you. And that's it. I would like to, once again, thank you for this beautiful conversation answering easy question. Mm, no, I don't think that there were that many easy questions. Very hard questions, very transparent answers.

So thanks a lot for both of you. I hope it will help a lot of tech leaders, product leaders, data leaders, sustainability leaders, to kickstart their journey or to ramp up their journey into sustainability, where tech is a great part of it, whether it's green by Tech, or Green for Tech. Thanks a lot, both of you.

It was a pleasure to be on the show. Have a great morning for Drew. Have a great evening for Dominique and I think I'm gonna call it a day now. Thanks a lot.

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Ready to explore the digital sustainability landscape of Singapore? Travel there with Gaël Duez to meet Thibaut, the local representative of both the Climat fresk and the Digital Collage in Singapore and Ian, founder of Greenie web. ➡️ Join us for an insightful discussion as we delve into the Singaporean tech ecosystem and its sustainability landscape. ✅ Our guests share their views on the evolving domain of digital sustainability, achievements, and trends in IT sustainability in Singapore and in South-East Asia, as well as their perspectives on the main environmental crises. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!Learn more about our guests and connect
Thibault is a versatile sustainability practitioner and digital footprint expert. He helps MNCs draft roadmaps for leaner technology towards the greater good, leads Climate Fresk & Digital Collage workshops, and is the co-founder of a VC-backed circular economy startup, Found & Seek.

A true advocate of an enthusiastic, solution-oriented sustainability that taps into the power of collaborative action.

Ian Chew is the Chief Executive of Greenie Web, a climate-tech SaaS company at the forefront of digital decarbonization.
Greenie Web helps enterprises achieve their net-zero goals, reduces internet-related energy consumption, and provides a low-carbon method to digitize traditional industries and build Web 3.0. Ian's expertise in this field has been recognized internationally, and he has been invited to speak at various EU countries' classes program in Singapore.

• Thibaut's LinkedIn
• Ian’s LinkedIn
• Gaël's LinkedIn
• Gaël's website
• Green I/O website

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

Thibaut and Ian’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode
Greenie Web
Found & Seek
E-wasteE-waste collection bins in SingaporeDatacentersRazer Inc.
Thibaut's medium (articles about Datacenters, Ecological Backpack or e-waste in Singapore)Transcript
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What if we unveiled the often overlooked environmental impact of data centers together ?

Travel with Gaël Duez to Sweden to meet Life Cycle Management expert Stanislava and to France to meet Benoît, co-founder of Hubblo and NGO Boavizta who works on impact evaluation and energy/material efficiency for businesses.

Join us for an eye-opening episode on how data centers can play a crucial role in building a sustainable digital future.

Together, we explore:

✅ The definition of data centers and their various types, including hyperscalers, enterprise data centers, and colocation data centers.

✅ Top tips and insights on how to make your data center operations more eco-friendly and reduce energy consumption.

✅ The automation and democratization of impact evaluation.

✅ The controversial topic of... cloud!

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, or stay connected in your own way so you never miss an episode!

Learn more about our guests and connect
Stanislava Borisová has a strong background in Life Cycle Assessment, with a Master of Science in Industrial Ecology and extensive experience in assessing the environmental impact of various sectors.

After joining the Research Institutes of Sweden, she focused her attention on studying the environmental impact of data centers. She now works as an Expert in Life Cycle at IVL and stays involved in the data center industry through her participation in the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance (SDIA), among other initiatives.

Benoît Petit, co-founder of both Hubblo and the NGO Boavizta, has nearly a decade of experience as a Cloud and SysAdmin engineer. His work is all open-data and open-source, reflecting his values. Benoît's background is primarily in IT infrastructure and cloud, and he founded Hubblo two years ago. The company helps businesses and communities reduce the environmental impact of ICT through impact evaluation and energy and material efficiency.

• Stanislava’s LinkedIn
• Benoît's LinkedIn

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

Stanislava and Benoît’s sources and other references mentioned in this episodeHubblo
Boavizta’ studies (in FR but easily translatable):* https://boavizta.org/en/blog/empreinte-de-la-fabrication-d-un-serveur * https://boavizta.org/blog/les-reductions-d-emissions-de-co2-promises-par-les-cloud-providers-sont-elles-realistes

And its API & tools: https://boavizta.org/toolsRISE Research Institutes of SwedenThe article that Gael mentioned that is not an article but a podcast :

• Environment Variables episode discussing the report assessing 7.2 million data centers world-wide

Öko-Institut
Fraunhofer-GesellschaftCEDaCI project
"PCRs under development" - Electronic devices, components and services
GitHubBlauer EngelCloud scanner (project in Boavizta) GitLab CI : evaluation of impactCICD tool (related to the SDIA)FinOps : public cloud management discipline
SDIA and its softawere
David Mytton’s blog Gauthier Roussilhe, researcher in France
Françoise Berthoud and her article Le numérique, espoir pour la transition écologique ? 🇫🇷
Jean Baptiste Fressoz’s video on "transitions énergétiques" Books :

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times Futures from Frontiers of Climate Science by Paul BehrensTowards the Energy of the Future, written by KTH, the University in Stockholm

GeSI
GSMATranscript
Gael: You're listening to Green IO , the podcast for responsible technologists, making our digital world greener, one byte at a time. I'm your host Gael Duez, and I invite you to meet a wide range of guests working in the tech industry to help you better understand and make sense of its sustainability issues, and find inspiration to positively impact our digital world.

If you like the podcast, please give it five stars and a nice review on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite platform to spread the word to the millions of people working in the digital sector and now enjoy the show.

Hello everyone. In this episode, we go to both France to meet Benoît and Sweden from where we welcome Stanislava to talk about sustainability in the data centers industry. When I first met Benoît in Paris at a cafe having a nice lunch under a cool summer day. I know it's cliche, but it's true. He told me a sentence, which has stuck in my mind since now on. Does anyone actually read the figures in these reports?

And he did so because A) I was actually guilty at that time of overconsuming reports on Green IT, field, which I had just discovered, and not paying attention enough to the data and the methodology underlying them. And B), I told myself, whoa, this guy knows what he talks about. And indeed, Benoît having cofounded, both Hubblo and the NGO , after almost a decade working as a Cloud and SysAdmin engineer, knows what he talks about.

It's actually pretty easy to double check because everything he produces is open data and open source, two values he cherishes. But we'll come back to this point later on. Stan was introduced to me thanks to Chris Adams, the director of the Green Web Foundation, when we were discussing life cycle assessment. His word, "she is one of the most knowledgeable on this topic".

Which makes total sense knowing that after her Master of Science in Industrial Ecology, she joined the Research Institute of Sweden to study, well, LCA applied to data centers. She has now moved toward an expert lifecycle position at IVL, but stays close to the data center field via her involvement in the SDIA, the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance, among other things.

Welcome, Stani and Benoît. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.

Stanislava: Hi Gael. Thanks for having us.

Benoit: Hi.

Gael: So before jumping into the nitty gritty of data centers environmental impact, my first question is always about your personal journey in the sustainability area. So Stani, how did you become interested in sustainability and in the sustainability of our digital sector in the first place?

Stanislava: So yeah, thank you for asking. I think one of the most powerful experiences that actually led me to join sustainability field was an exposition that I went to with my high school. And I remember hearing about what issues we're facing and how possibly people in 50 years or so would have to ration water because there would not be enough clean water anymore.

And I remember that being very scary and very strange to think of, and potentially that was too powerful to do something about at that time. So I sort of let it be and I started studying international business instead. But as I was going through all the courses on accounting and finance and marketing, I thought there was something missing to that and I thought there had to be something more.

So that's why I actually selected to follow an elective on sustainable business. And at some point I started to think to myself, yes, this is very interesting. This is how things should go. But at the same time, how do I know that what the companies are saying is actually true? How can I verify that they actually are sustainable and it's not just some claims?

So that then led me to the masters that you've already mentioned in the beginning, industrial ecology, where I learned how to quantify this sort of business behavior and impact. And after a few years of working as a consultant in IE in Industrial Ecology, I joined RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, and that's how I got introduced to the data center industry.

It was maybe a bit of a coincidence and a happy accident because I was not very involved in that before, but I had worked in technology so there was an interest, and after that I've realized that there is so much, it's such a huge heterogeneous industry, and so much can be done regarding sustainability on so many different levels, and I'm happy to be still involved.

Gael: So that's funny because it all started with water, and actually I believe water is a topic we will discuss regarding sustainability in the data center industry. And what about you Benoît, how did you come involved in sustainability and all this work you've done in green IT ?

Benoit: I can't remember about a very specific event that drove me there. I think I've worked in IT like many, many other people, not really realizing what was behind in terms of impacts, because I didn't realize at first that our modern society's had such an impact on the environment and that it was really a problem for the future.

So I realized that piece by piece very progressively and I changed many things in my personal life so I could feel aligned with what we do for the future. And so I started working on my own thing, actually, I was working on cloud infrastructures at that time, and I felt, okay, if I have to start somewhere, I should start on my own problems, my own impact.

So first, how is it big? How could I evaluate this impact? And my first answer was like, "that seemed like super complicated". So I found work from the area, which is a research lab in France. I found some projects about it, but nothing that I could use directly in my own context. So I don't really know why, but rather than staying in the company, I pretty quickly thought that I had to leave and work on this topic as much as I could. And so I started developing a software for measuring the power consumption of servers, of ID servers. Then I happened to be discussing with people who were building an NGO from scratch.

So I started discussing with them, and then later I realized that there was some demand for the work I've done on on the software. And then I said to myself, "okay, maybe there could be a business here, so I could work on this topic 100% of my time". So I don't have to find a new job in like one year.

And so you have Hubblo, and that's how I came to the topic.

Gael: So synchronizing a bit more what you've already started to do in your personal life with what you can do and the expertise you already had in your professional life.

Benoit: That was the idea.

Gael: Okay. And you know, I spotted very recently a discussion in the climate action tech community about an article that I must admit, I forgot the title, who had quite a lot of debate about the number of data centers worldwide. It was stated that we have already 7.2 millions data centers worldwide and three millions in the US. Some people finding it quite consistent, some people finding it completely crazy. This number. And then it connected me with one of the first topic we discussed with Stani a few months ago actually, which was her ontology.

Let's define properly, what is data center, what is a hyperscaler, what is an enterprise data center, colocation data center, et cetera. And I would love Stani, if you could help us set the stage a bit regarding the data center landscape. What are we talking about? What are the main numbers and how would you actually explain this controversy?

Regarding the number of data centers, and I will not enter into the other controversy about the number of servers because I think it will take half a day to talk about this one.

Stanislava: Well, I'll try to do my best. Indeed. It's very hard to measure and to count how many data centers there are because you can have a data center at your own company, which is a very small closet with a few servers. And technically that counts as a data center. But to sort of distinguish between the main groups of data centers, and of course you can complement what I say.

I would say that you have enterprise data centers, which are the data centers owned by the companies themselves to have their own data.

Then, there are colocation data centers, which are such data centers that external companies own. And then if you have the need to store your data somewhere, but you don't want to do it in-house, you rent some space and then you just populated with your servers and then you store your data there.

And finally you have the so-called hyperscalers, which are the large companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft that own their own data centers, even develop their own servers and technology, rent out parts and are just very big, which is why they're called hyperscalers.

Gael: And so depending the definition, the 7.2 millions could make sense or not. I mean, if we pitch ourselves that a data center being, there's massive facilities that you can see from the sky which belongs to Google or Amazon. Obviously there is not 7.2 millions worldwide, but if you include what you've labeled enterprise data centers and, and colocation data centers, do you believe such a number could be correct?

Stanislava: Yeah, I think it's possible, especially if we think of all the small data centers, one rack or two racks, I can imagine it could be that much.

Gael: Okay, so let's now enter the main topic of our episode today, which is sustainability in data centers. For the sake of clarity, let's put aside cloud for the moment. I mean, obviously everything that we're going to start discussing regarding enterprise data centers or colocation data centers will at some point apply to your cloud service providers.

However, you don't interact directly with metrics or the electricity consumption, et cetera.

But truth is there are still millions of companies interacting one way or the other with data centers and not having migrated to the public cloud or private cloud, whatever. And my question would be, "what can you concretely do when you are in charge of a data center?"

You are head of infrastructure, you're obviously a CTO, CIO. How can you run a greener data center and maybe, I think Stani, once again, you told me once about PUE fatigue, that you were a bit fed up with everything focusing only on PUE. So could you elaborate a bit on what would be your main advices, your main insights on how to green your data center operations?

Stanislava: Sure. So maybe just to mention about this. Tiredness of PUE. I think my main reason for not liking it so much, it's because it's become such a marketing tool and it's very easy to manipulate it in order to get as low of a result as you're after. And at the same time, it's just a ratio. So it doesn't actually tell you how much power you are consuming.

Instead, I've been thinking really how to classify it. You are in this data center industry and what you can do. So I started with the colocation level to think "what are the options there?" Because the main difference is that you oftentimes do not own the servers. So you cannot do anything regarding lots of the equipment, but what you can do is you can ensure that you have a supply of renewable energy.

Ideally, you would be producing it yourself. But if not, then at least you're purchasing it from someone. You could try to motivate your clients, be more efficient. Maybe by providing them data on where the majority of energy consumption takes place in real time so that they can adjust it accordingly. Then of course you can try to reuse waste heat and lots of different applications in industrial symbioses.

You could decrease your water use, build your building sustainably because that is something you have a lot of power over, and reuse as much material as possible, not just in the building, but also in the installations that you do have control over. And then if we go further to the enterprise data center, then of course you have much more possibility to green your data center because then of course, you're even running your own servers.

And you're probably writing your own program, so then you could still follow the previous steps and at the same time, you could purchase equipment that can be used longer, especially when it comes to servers that contain so many rare earth materials that have a huge impact when it comes to just their mining and production.

You could refurbish these servers and then reuse them. What is interesting, I've been hearing how the increase in performance between different generations of servers has decreased. So it's possible to refurbish an older server to an almost same performance as the new generation has, and thus avoid purchasing new.

You could try to motivate your IT team to write efficient code.

And something that also has a huge impact is to understand what data is essential and needs to be immediately backed up in case something happens and therefore it needs redundancy. And on the other hand, what data can just wait for a few hours if there is a power outage? And it does not need this redundancy because what we see a lot right now is that data centers are building twice or three times the redundancy, meaning that they have twice or three times the amount of the equipment that they need just in case there is an outage of power or something other happens, and that is very important in certain cases. Let's say if you are a data center behind a hospital. Then of course, you don't want to lose anything for any time, but if you're just storing email or some pictures, then maybe you can wait for an hour or so before you power everything up again.

When it comes to the hyperscalers, what we already see is that they are trying to even build their own equipment. So I think what they can do on top of all of this is to innovate, make even better equipment and then actually reuse their own equipment. Because what is slightly sad, in my experience is that they oftentimes just donate their own equipment or resell it at some secondary markets.

So I think a point of improvement there would be to actually keep it in house, refurbish it, and then use it themselves.

Gael: Well that's very interesting because you mentioned not only energy consumption, obviously, which is a big part of the environmental impact, but you started to mention minerals, resources at large, water. Are these all the ingredients that come into what is your area of expertise, which is a life cycle assessment or is it something a bit different?

Stanislava: Now, I would say that you expressed it quite correctly. It's all of these bits and pieces and ingredients that all come together and although at the moment there's this obsession with the energy use. Of course, energy use is very important, but I think we shouldn't forget everything else that is involved because at some point those things have a large impact as well.

Gael: Okay, thanks. That makes total sense. And Benoît switching to a very operational mode. You recently told me that via Hubblo, you run a full LCA for a CTO, but you are under NDA. So we will not mention neither the company nor him, but could you describe a bit what was the process, more specifically the process involving hosting, infrastructure, et cetera?

Benoit: Oh, the process works. Usually if we address this topic at the company level, it might take into account the workplace as well. So most of the time we have like a consultancy role where we try to assess the impact of it as a whole in the company. So this is very a manual process. This is based on LCA principles, we try to isolate the hotspots of impact. So the huge parts of the impact before we can zoom on specific parts and try to have a more fine grain approach. When we realized that the IT services is the most important part, which is not always the case. Then we could assess those impacts, not only by, let's say human made LCAs, but also with software that could help us to automate the process and make the evaluation easier, repeatable, help the company to be as autonomous as possible and not depending on us to reproduce the evaluation. The idea being that they could evaluate the progress. Are they going to the right direction or not? And so one of our objectives is to become as useless as possible in this process. So it really depends, but for sure if IT services are a big part of the topic for this company, then we could help to automate the inventory of the machines, which is very, very often a pain point.

Because in theory, all companies have a great CMDB that's up to date with all the informations about all the hardware involved in the service. In practice, that's almost never the case except a few companies that are very, very cautious about that, that put a lot of efforts in this area.

Then you have the questions of "what are the impacts of this service?" And Stani mentioned it. When we are in IT, we think a lot about energy. We think a lot about electricity, but that's just a part of the equation. And to illustrate a bit this point based on what Stani said she mentioned like, lifetime of the machines, refresh cycles.

That's something we see often, like companies who say, "It's okay, we can reduce our energy consumption just by buying new servers that are less energy consuming for the same workload as the compared to the previous generation of machines". If you just look at energy consumption at final energy consumption, that approach might work maybe.

It depends but possible. But as soon as you try to evaluate and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions then this is much more complicated. Not to say that most of the time it doesn't work for very simple reasons: most of the time the greenhouse gas emissions due to the manufacturing of the new machines just jeopardize your attempt to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions on the long run because manufacturing has a huge part. And the impact of usage may be not that important, if you look at the manufacturing part. So this is especially true in countries where you are lucky to have a low carbon intensity regarding electricity that you consume. Of course, each phase will be much more important, countries where the carbon electricity is higher. These kind of questions and also how we assess the other impacts, the other operating impacts; and Stani mentioned minerals and metals. That's one of them.

Gael: Going back to the carbon emitted during the manufacturing phase of the equipments, I believe it is called embedded carbon. Where do you get the information?

Benoit: Yeah, there's a whole topic there. For a long time, it has been that you, you had only one choice, which was do you have access to a database where you have impact, factors so constant that you could apply in your calculations to estimate this part of the impact? This is still the case, but I feel like the field is evolving.

Piece by piece, because before you were forced to pay license fees to get those data. That was not the best scenario to democratize impact evaluation and involving companies to take action. So that's one of the topic we worked on in Boavizta. And the first attempt we made was to aggregate all the manufacturing impact data we could get from the manufacturers.

So it takes the form of an open database now. Basically we have some scripts scoring the manufacturer's webpages to get the right PDF files, that's as simple as that. We aggregate the data in the database that you can query. So that's interesting and it gives you some insights about like- let's say- orders of magnitude of the impact of manufacturing a server or a laptop or a screen and so on.

But the thing is that you can't really use that database for evaluation. Because from one project to another, you take 24 inch screen in manufacturer A and 24 inch screen in manufacturer B. The methodologies to evaluate the impact are most of the time not the same.

So it could be almost the same product. You could have different impacts and sometimes the differences are huge. So it's not a good basis, I guess, for evaluation. So we work on on another project, which is an API, where we try to have an approach where you are less dependent on databases.

And how we do that: it's based on scientific papers mostly from Öko-Institut and Fraunhofer Institute in Germany where you can have the impact of one semiconductor, the smallest units in terms of manufacturing IT components. Because it's about what's inside the component, you can then calculate what's the impact of the component, and then if you can calculate the impact of several components, you can calculate the impact of a machine and so on.

That's an open source database as well. That's open source APIs. So how do you calculate? At some point you need data. At least, what is a bit changing now is that you kind of have- it's not perfect yet- but you kind of have access to data without being a consultancy company that has a lot of money to put in acquiring those data.

Gael: But are you telling me that the only source of open source, open data? Actually the only provider of open data when it comes to embedded carbon is now Boa Vista with the IPI.

Benoit: No, I wouldn't say that because I don't necessarily know all the initiatives on the topic. I discussed a bit with people from the CEDaCI project or who I think have a lot of interesting data as well I didn't see how the data is publicized, but that's an example.

And I think there are other projects on the run. So no, the idea is not to say, "hey that's the only way to get open access data and free license". But to say that it's one of the huge topic, at least, we encourage other organizations to provide data.

We encourage manufacturers to open more data. Because in the beginning , that's a bit silly, that you have to build up that kind of project on your own. If you have proper regulation, you would have manufacturers providing data on methodologies that we could understand or that we could verify in some way.

And then we would be super happy and it would be way easier to evaluate the impact of ICT because we would have data from the ground up. So of course it's not the manufacturer itself who does the evaluation. It's a company specialized in that topic. But it's a company that because it is working with the manufacturer has direct access to all the proxy metrics and insights. It needs to make a proper evaluation, which is much harder when you try to do it afterwards. You have to work with aggregated data that you don't know the source.

Gael: Kind of retro engineering, the carbon footprint of an equipment once it has been built.

Benoit: Yeah, that's a bit about that.

Gael: Okay. And that being said, Benoît I have one last question because there are two things that you say that were really music to my ears. The first one being a bit selfish is when you mention that you want to be as useless as possible as soon as possible when you work with a company. And I was like, yeah that's exactly what I say to my clients when I do consulting with them: "I want you to make me redundant as much as possible, though". It's more on the green IT strategy or digital sustainability strategy. But that's something that I was like: you sometimes look at me and say, ";why?", and I'm very happy that you got the same pitch because I really believe that this is what a good consultant should be.

Looking at it, become redundant as soon as possible. But that being said, sorry. It was another topic that I really loved is "the case for automation". And you mentioned that you try to automate measure as much as possible. Could you drop some names or give us an example of how you do that?

Benoit: Yeah. What we try to do with Boavizsta API, you can find it on GitHub is great to evaluate the impact of manufacturing, especially of the servers. But it could be some other context as well. And on top of that, we build several tools. So there is a tool called Bow Agents, which proposes to scan the hardware of a machine.

You ask the right questions to the API and it aggregates the manufacturing impact of this machine as a monitoring metric. So you can get that in your monitoring tools as you use day-to-day basis. I mean, every company running IT services, they have monitoring.

This agent is also connected to another tool which you blow tool this time, but is as always, it's open source Apache to license, which is a scaffold. I think I mentioned this in the beginning of the discussion. It's about measuring the power, energy consumption of servers, the agent, because it's connected to both the API for manufacturing and scaffold for the usage phase it can aggregate the impact numbers of the machine on almost the full life cycle because we still lack good methodologies and data for the end of life, for example. That's something that's missing. On top of that, there is also other project, there's a project in Boavizta called Cloud scanner that will scan your AWS account for all the EC2 instances and give you an evaluation of the impact including manufacturing, so use and manufacturing. This is also based on the API. So that's really an ecosystem. That's a toolbox. And depending on your context, depending if you are on-premise machines, on cloud services or something else. You could select one tool or another, or several of them. We are also working on continuous integration chains for development team. So you can have in your GitLab CI evaluation of impact for the products you are developing from one release to another. You seem to have reduced the potential impact of your application when it'll be in production or if you have made things worse.

So that's an example. That's the kind of thing we have.

Gael: It relates to run the more efficient code that Stani mentioned at the very beginning of the episode. This CICD tool, is it the one related to the SDIA?

Benoit: absolutely. That's the project we are building with the S D I A. Boavizta in SDIA talks a lot to each other because we really like what they do and I think they like what we do. And so we work on this topic together. I know people that Stani knows, but we discovered that thanks to your podcast.

Gael: This is why I love running this podcast. And Stani do you have maybe a success story or just an example of how using this tool has helped developers or I don't know, an agile team or whatever to reduce their footprint?

Stanislava: Unfortunately. I do not really have any success stories because I think it's pretty small scale so far. But definitely there is a growing interest in knowing the impact of computing and doing something about it. It's just that we're at a pretty early stage, I would say. Gael, could I mention something?

I started thinking of this water when Benoît was talking, but then I didn't wanna jump in . So when it comes to the water usage and the WUE water usage effectiveness that Benoît has touched upon. I think one of the problems in the ratio itself is that it doesn't tell you how much water is consumed in total.

And then similarly - and this is also linked to the LCA methodology - is that even if you knew how much water they consume in total. It's very hard to link it to the location, the region where this happens in all these assessments, because maybe using a huge quantity of water in one country would not be such a problem because they have an abundance of water.

While using it somewhere with little water available could be rather critical. So that's another problem that we face.

Gael: Localization is key. Let's save the last part of the discussion to talk about cloud, and I could be a bit the devil advocate here or a bit provocative saying, "yeah, but why don't we move everything into the cloud?" Because if I read Google, Amazon, or Microsoft newspaper, detailing the very same environmental impact that the two of you mentioned during this episode, it seems to be way more efficient to mutualize everything in big public cloud or hybrid cloud or whatever, rather than running data centers on-premise or even colocation data center. Is it something that you agree with or not?

Stanislava: Well, if I can start, I would say I don't really agree with it because at the end of the day, a cloud is not really a cloud in the sky. It's actually located somewhere physically. So you can't just move everything to the cloud because still it needs to be built somewhere and it needs to be operated somewhere.

What I have read from one of these hyperscalers was that they achieve around 90% emission reduction by moving to cloud. But then when you look into that further, it's because they're comparing this with some average data center or low efficiencies and pretty bad environmental impact.

I think it's not really that a cloud is so good, it's just that they have made the data centers that operate this cloud more efficient. You could stay on a physical data center elsewhere, not on the cloud, and just improve your metrics and still have the same impact then as this great cloud.

Benoit: To jump on this one, I kind of agree with Stani and we wrote blog posts on the Boavizta blog, especially on the papers that hyperscalers are showing off regarding the potential of impact reduction when you move your workload from an on-premise data center to the cloud. And yeah, the numbers are calculated on very advantageous scenarios.

But then there are several viables in this equation, the cloud in theory and sometimes in practice, can have good parts good sides:

if you mutualize resources for more services as you mentioned,

thanks to the APIs -and the thing that everything is an API in the cloud-, you can use resources exactly when you need.

That's something that could be done in a non-premise data center, but it's sometimes harder because you need, you need more R&D and more workforce to build tools that make you control the resources as finally as it's made in the cloud. This advocates for the cloud because you could often see on-premise data centers having several tents or hundreds of servers running 24 /7 because they're waiting for the Black Friday.

That's something that you shouldn't have in the cloud because you have all the tools necessary to just consume those resources when you need them, when the traffic goes higher. But that's the technical parts. On the other side, moving the workload from on-premise to the cloud, most of the time it doesn't happen in one night.

So you have kind of a double run. Your service still runs in the on-premise data centers until it's fully satisfying in the cloud. So you have two services sometimes. If it lasts long you could just double your impact. So not really what you were looking for in the first place. But let's say "okay, it's not an issue anymore, we are super effective in moving the workloads in the cloud". Thing is that there is a very different approach from consuming resources in non-premise data centers to consuming them in the cloud. In non-premise data centers, you have order new machines, if you want to deploy any projects. In the cloud, you just have to click or make an API call.

But that's super fast, pretty easy. I've already been in companies where when we looked at the bills at the end of the months, you had clusters of data management that were accounting for 15 K for the months, and it was just a dev environment that was forgotten.

So this hardly happens in a non premise data center because deploying resources is much harder. So you remember about it. That's the full story of FinOps for sure. But in terms of environmental impacts, it has some importance as well. Today, I guess we can do some evaluations of service on the cloud.

That happens. We do it, but we do it on a fixed picture. It's like TODAY the impact of the service is THIS . But it's very hard to estimate and to show projections on: "okay but now that you are in the cloud, your service will inflate, it'll consume more and more resources because people working in your company will have access to those resources very easily, and it'll open the door for many projects".

Some of them would be very useful, but maybe you would also have new projects just because you can do them. So yeah, that's a full question. That's, in my opinion, goes way beyond the only evaluation about impacting the cloud and what's the difference between a cloud provider and let's say a more classic hosting scenery.

Gael: So once again, a multi-criteria approach is needed to answer properly the question. There is no like simple and straightforward answer.

Benoit: Yeah, multi-criteria so that you don't shift impacts from one area to another. That's one thing, but it's also about consequential approach and consequential analysis and not just analyzing the today's picture of the impact. And that's maybe the hardest part. I think, maybe even harder than having a proper multi-criteria approach.

This dynamic view of the impact and the relation between company's activity and what the impact will be in the future.

Stanislava: If I may add I think what is also very important with these studies and impact and multi-criteria assessments and so on is to be very transparent because we have seen lots of new reports or new marketing strategies being published, but they almost never mention what their assumptions are.

And of course the results are gonna be very different if you assume that you are consuming only green energy and you are very efficient. In comparison to if you maybe looked at the slightly more pessimistic scenario.

Gael: Thank you so much, Stani. Because actually, I realized that the way we were discussing transparency issues, both regarding the access to open data, but also the access to what methodology has been used, et cetera. I actually wanted to ask you this question and also thanks a lot for bringing this topic before we close the podcast. And could you maybe provide just one example of an assumption that if you change it, we'll change dramatically the result, something that you've noticed in your life as a researcher.

Stanislava: Well, for instance, just selecting the source of energy would have a very big impact. Even if it was green energy, it could have different impact if it was in different countries. Or for instance, if we look at the colocation data centers, and it's quite popular to be examining the impact of the building.

You know, you just take a flow of concrete in these different databases and if you know nothing about it, there are so many different flows to choose from, which represent different manufacturing practices, different standard of concrete. Maybe you have some that is more durable or not, and the difference in results can be huge.

They can be tenfold, if not even higher. That's why it's very important to be able to rather easily find these main assumptions, how their study was built, just to understand what the results actually mean and if they're applicable to you or not, and if you would reproduce the same study, if you would get the same results or not.

Gael: Tenfold. That was the kind of order of magnitude that I wanted to know and to make sure that I got it right. That huge impact where regarding your methodology and the assumptions underlying it. Okay, so thanks a lot, both of you. You shared already tons of insights, a lot of references.

I believe this is gonna be one of the top five, if not top three episode when it comes to the length of the episode notes and all the references that will be put in it. Still, do you have two last references, thought leaders something that you want to share with the listeners to know a bit better, to understand, a bit better about the data center sustainability issues or potential solutions, or even in a broader way on the sustainability topic.

Stanislava: Maybe in a broader way I would suggest reading, since I really like reading books there are two that I can recommend.

The first one is called The Best of Times, the Worst of Times Futures from Frontiers of Climate Science by Paul Behrens. And what I specifically like about it is that it looks at different topics from both the optimistic and pessimistic perspective and it gives you lots of references.

And the second one . As someone who really likes to understand how things work, there has been a book written by KTH, the University in Stockholm, called Towards the Energy of the Future, and it tries to explain sort of what the challenges are, what is needed in a pretty low level so that anyone can read it and understand.

Benoit: Maybe so not specifically on the cloud but on the impacts of IT and its role, reshaping our societies for a world that stabilizes at 1.5 degrees or less. I mentioned the work of Gauthier Roussilhe, a researcher in France, the report he made on challenging the assumptions of positive impact of ICT on the environment.

Especially there are two reports:

one from GeSI, the other from GSMA. So it's interesting to see that there are very well written papers, peer reviewed papers of amazing quality that nobody knows about. But papers from companies who have a clear and evidence interests in showing one side of the story has echoes on top of the government.

I think it's a real key thing to understand.

Gael: Thanks a lot. That was a lot. I think you might even be a direct challenge to the episode with Chris Adams, where we had, I don't know, 25 references. I think it was a full episode dedicated to, what shall I read? What shall I learn about the digital sustainability topics? But the good news as you mentioned, Benoît, is that we have more and more literature.

The topic is getting traction and hopefully the scientific based papers will get more traction rather than low quality- scientifically speaking communication papers. I want to thank both of you. We covered a lot actually. I think we could have spent another hour deep diving on, you know, codes, green coding, how you do an ACA really like hands-on approach, et cetera.

But that will be a course, rather than a podcast episode. Thanks a lot both of you .That was awesome to have you on the show.

Stanislava: Thank you too.

Benoit: Thank you for having us.

Gael: And that's it. Thank you for listening to Green IO. Make sure to subscribe to the mailing list to stay up to date on your episodes. If you enjoyed this one, feel free to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who could benefit from it. As a nonprofit podcast, we rely on you to spread the word.

Last, but not the least. If you know someone who would make a great guest, please send them my way so that we can make our digital word greener one byte at a time.Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.

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Did you know that 81% of energy will be consumed before you turn your laptop on for the first time ? 🤯

Gaël Duez travels to New Mexico, USA and Dublin to meet Katie Singer - acclaimed author of “A silent electronic spring” - and Gerry Mc Govern - well-known author of “World Wide Waste” - for an episode about the dark truth of the data tsunami and its catastrophic environmental effects. 🌍

Join us for a mind-blowing episode where we explore the dire need for sustainable data practices, and how we can take action to build a better future for our planet.

Together, we discussed :

✅ The high energy consumption involved in the production, consumption, and disposal of digital devices and data✅ The relationship between efficiency in technology and its negative impact on the environment✅ The importance of reducing waste as the primary strategy for mitigating the environmental impact of digital technology

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

Learn more about our guests and connectOur first guest, Katie Singer lives in New Mexico, USA, and she has researched and written about technology's impacts on nature for more than 25 years. She spoke about the Internet's footprint at the United Nations' 2018 Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation ; and, in 2019, on a panel with the climatologist Dr. James Hansen. Her reports explore the ecological impacts and fire hazards of solar PVs, industrial wind, battery storage and e-vehicles. Her most recent book is An Electronic Silent Spring.Our second guess, Gerry Mc Govern is based in Dublin, Ireland, is the founder and CEO of Customer Carewords, and developed the Top Tasks customer experience management model after 15 years of research. His clients include Microsoft, Cisco, NetApp, Toyota, IBM, and multiple governments. Gerry is also a highly-regarded speaker and author, with expertise in digital customer experience and design. His latest, World Wide Waste, is about how digital is killing the planet, and what to do about it. The Irish Times has described Gerry as one of five visionaries who have had a major impact on the development of the Web. * Katie’s LinkedIn * Gerry's LinkedIn

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Katie and Gerry’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode* Katie’s book : An Electronic Silent Spring: Facing the Dangers and Creating Safe Limits * Katie’s website with the reports * Gerry’s book : World Wide Waste * Article 2 of the Antenna Law gives SUBTEL : prohibits the installation of cellular sites near “public or private schools, nurseries, kindergartens, hospitals, clinics, urban premises with high voltage towers, nursing homes, or other sensitive areas of protections so defined” * “Data storage & dark data” by Tom Jackson & Ian R. Hodgkinson both from Loughborough University who put a light on the cost of storage * List of substance in a smartphone (from Katie’s website) * Greenwashing law in France * Log off movement in the US * Digital Collage * The Big Semiconductor Water Problem * Melvin Vopson : Gerry’s reference to this physicist who estimate the physical weight of data * W. Stanley Jevons, “The Coal Question,” 1865 : https://energyhistory.yale.edu/library-item/w-stanley-jevons-coal-question-1865 * Ifixit.com (mentioned by Katie) * “Complicit,” a documentary by Heather White and Lynn Zhang, about the effects of benzene exposure to smartphone assembly workers: https://www.complicitfilm.org/ * "This is HCD" podcast by Gerry Scullion

Transcript
Gael: Hello everyone for this episode. I have the pleasure to welcome Katie Singer and Gerry Mc Govern to talk about the unsustainable data growth and all the environmental impacts that comes with it. Kati Singer lives in New Mexico, USA. She has researched and written about technologies on nature for more than 25 years.She spoke about the internet footprint at the United Nations 2018 Forum and Science. That's a long time before this topic became trendy. In 2019, she spoke on the panel with the climatology Dr. James Hansen, about the very same topic, so pretty consistent. Her reports explore the ecological impacts and fire hazard of solar photovoltaic, industrial wind, battery storage and e-vehicules. Her more recent book is An Electronic Silence Spring. Yes. Kind of the mirror of the silent Spring written, how long was it? Like 40 years ago? A very interesting book to read, and her websites include www.OurWeb.tech and www.ElectronicSilentSpring.com. Gerry is based in Dublin Island and he holds the MMEITGIOP Worldwide title with six victories.And if you don't know what this title is, it's a very important title to every listeners to the Green IO podcast because this is the most mentioned experts in the Green IO podcast, MMEITGIOP. And that being said that's absolutely true that Gerry has been mentioned, contacted minimum six times by August.So that is to say how much his book worldwide Waste had an impact on the digital sustainability community. So I'm truly delighted to have him with Katie today with us. But Gerry has done other things as well. He's been working on the Web content and data issues since 1994. He's a highly regarded speaker.He has spoken on such issues around 40 countries. He has written other books as well, and maybe the most known one is Top Task because Gerry has developed a top task methodology, a research method to understand what truly matters to customers. And I believe he has worked for many, maybe 500 companies, but we could name Toyota, Cisco, Microsoft, the Word health organization governments, US, UK, Dutch, Canadian, you name it.And maybe something that we truly share, at least many listeners. We truly share that the Irish Times has described him as one of the five visionaries who have had a major impact on the development of the Web. And I have to admit that I believe so after reading Worldwide Waste. So welcome to both of you.I'm delighted to have two book writers who had such a massive impact on our industry, as you did. Welcome to the show. Very happy to have you here tonight for me, today for Gerry, and this morning for Katie.Gerry: It's great to be here, Gael and great to be here with, uh, Katie as well.Katie: Thank you. Thank you for having both of us.Gael: First of all, the two questions I love to ask to my guest is, what did I miss in your bio and how did you become interested in digital sustainability in the first place? So maybe Katie, if you want to share your view on it.Katie: Sure. In 1997, I learned about the Telecommunications Act, which passed the US Congress in 1996 and Section 7 0 4 states that no health or environmental concern may interfere with the placement of a cellular antenna. This law passed internationally. As far as I know, most countries have a similar law. And so that means that if a corporation wants to install a cell tower in your neighborhood, if you say, well, we're concerned about our health, or we're concerned about the environmental impact of the antenna, that will not help you.That's not part of the discussion. You're not allowed to have that there, and I was shocked when I learned that law. So I started learning more about telecommunications and what we're doing, and here I am!Gael: Yes, absolutely. A fair point. I've never seen the issue of this law with such an angle, but that's very interesting. Like nature, starting with human health is not part of the discussion. A pretty potent argument. And what about you, Gerry?Gerry: Top task is something I've spent most of my career doing, and it's about helping organizations focus on what's important particularly in relation to data and content. And I noticed that with practically every organization I worked with, that somewhere in the region of 90% of the data was always poor quality or useless.There were a few tasks that were really important in an environment, and then there was huge quantities of stuff that had very little use and very little importance. And that it slowly began to get me thinking about why do we create so much data waste and why do we store so much data waste?So that was the seeds of the journey. But I suppose the, the, the most powerful trigger was hearing Greta Turnberg saying, you know,"we are in a crisis. Act like you're in a crisis.";Gael: And you did, you did write worldwide Waste. Was it the next logical step ?.Gerry: That was the next slide. Yeah. I was kind of thinking, you know, semi coming to retirement or I didn't need to work quite as hard as I had in the past or stuff like that. I was looking to try and do something maybe a bit more socially conscious. But I didn't think, I thought, you know, "oh, digital, it's green and, you know, it's, don't print this, you know, send an email".The whole language of digital has always been somehow immaterial, you know, the cloud, et cetera. And then the more I researched it, the more I discovered that digital tells a huge, enormous lie to the world that it is an incredibly energy consuming, incredibly wasteful and incredibly toxic.Gael: Absolutely, and maybe that leads me to the first question because you've already mentioned several impacts and that just goes beneath the "delete your email stuff." So maybe to Katie, because of your very broad view on environmental issues, both from digital but also electronic equipment, et cetera. If our goal is to find substantial ways to limit data growth and reduce Digitalizations ecological impact, what do we need to know about the internet so that we are all on the same page for the forthcoming discussion?Katie: Yes, I'm taking in this big question.Gael: Yeah, that's a big one. Sorry.Katie: It's the question we need. I have focused on learning about three places where the internet guzzles energy, water, extractions and generates toxins and worker hazards and fire hazards. I break things down into three issues. One is manufacturing, one is with access networks, and the third is with data centers.I've learned that AI is another major guzzler, and honestly, I'm just learning about that and I'm really interested to hear what Gerry says about that and how we're creating data that's essentially useless, and that is another major guzzler of what we're taking from the earth in order to have this conversation, for example.So if I go back to the three things that I have focused on, and I start with manufacturing, if you take a laptop, And you look at its cradle to grave energy use, 81% will be consumed before the end user turns the laptop on for the first time. The remaining 19% of lifetime energy use is divided between operating the laptop and discarding it.Discarding or recycling are also energy intensive processes. So manufacturing anything is an enormous energy guzzler. We're taking water and oars from the earth. In order to do this, we're manufacturing lots of chemicals and the vast majority of toxic waste happens during those processes before the end user turns it on for the first time.That's manufacturing. Then with access networks, they're also major energy guzzlers, and as we keep building out new access networks, we're not necessarily getting rid of the other ones. So for example, we've still got 4G going while we're building out 5G and making plans for 6 G. All of the access networks also need manufacturing, and they have batteries and cables and they need lots of energy to manufacture and to operate.And then 5G, for one example, can be fantastic within a factory where robots can communicate with each other as they're building something. Manufacturing something, but we don't need 5G as a public network. We can use what we've already got with 4G, but we're not thinking in those terms. We're not looking to keep using what we have in the public network.Okay, now let me go to data centers. Data centers are, they can be so large that you can see them from outer space, from floor to ceiling. They're covered with servers, with computers, and 40% of their energy cost goes to air conditioning because the computers need to keep cool. And of course, the cooling systems also need water.Those are three things we absolutely need in order to do this podcast. My focus has been on helping people like me, and I am really, I was not designed for technology . But I can, I can help people like me to see what we are asking of the earth in order to do our daily lives. One of the things that I've laid out is: I've counted about 125 substances in one smartphone, and most computers have at least that many substances involved.I've listed them and my dream is that every user will research the supply chain of one substance. Once that happens, once people begin to learn the true costs of what it takes to use computers and access networks, I think our use changes. Our relationship to technology changes. We realize what we're asking in order to do these activities.Gael: So three areas, end user equipment, access network, and data centers. It was beautifully said, I could have listened to someone finishing the facilitation of a digital collage workshop, with you know, the ecological rucksac for manufacturing, et cetera, et cetera. The ecological rucksac I mean, I would say the landscape of environmental impact having been set up by Katie.Gerry, could you name the primary areas of data traffic and where it's increasing and why? Yeah, why do we see such massive data growth, around the world?Gerry: Well, to some degree it's a bit like the chicken and the egg. We create the tools, the data centers, the computers that allow us to create data. And then we create that data with those tools and we fill those data centers and part of data growth has been driven by basically cheap processing and cheap storage, which we are beginning to come to limits in relation to that.Specific data growth at the moment would be very much dominated by video. About 80% of internet traffic is video. And then we have new generations of formats. We are going from 2K to 4K to 8K, you know a four minute video in eight k could be like 2.4, 2.5 gigabytes in comparison to maybe, you know, a hundred megabytes or 70 megabytes for the same video in a standard format that we would be used to watching on YouTube.So we've got the formats. So-called becoming richer, even though we can't see the difference. I mean the human eye cannot see the difference above 2K if it's watching something on a smartphone or on a laptop. But the weight impact is huge. So we've moved more and more to visual communication and visual entertainment.And that is having a really massive impact. But, data is exploding everywhere. We're sending something like 400 billion. Emails every, every day. So, you know, we send the same amount of letters every year. Everything digital is exploding. But videos are a particular driver. But then we already have the Internet of things and all these automated systems.If we get things like self-driving cars, they will be creating gigabytes of data or a second telling the system where they are. They'll have hundreds and hundreds of sensors. So all of these devices that we're building the internet of things or self-driving or artificial intelligence are slightly, it feeds off the data, but it also creates a lot of data as well.So we've got an absolute tsunami of data that the vast majority of organizations I've dealt with have, they don't even know half of the data that they have that it even exists. And the other half of data they've essentially given up on any rigorous way to manage it. Data has gone outta control and you could kind of hide that reasonably, well historically by saying, you know, by just storing it in these big data centers, but there's only a limit that you can, you know, you can fill crap data into data landfills.There's even limits to the amount of crap that we can create without resulting consequences.Gael: I believe that the latest study, I mean you mentioned in your book something like 80% or 90% of the data that was not used at all after being stored. We didn't learn from the past. I mean, at the beginning, data storage was cheap. That was kind of a free lunch. Now we can see some effect that this data grows has on organization and still, we are still mainly storing data that we will not use.So why ? That's a big question actually.Gerry: Because it's easy, because the people who run or chief information Officers or whatever they don't see it as their responsibility. They're responsible for keeping the equipment up and running. So the vast majority of IT managers are chief information officers. We do not see data quality as their responsibility.And in other environments where they're in marketing or there's this culture of, you know, "all data is potentially useful". So let's keep as much as we can, cause you never know sometime in the future it might be useful and it's easier and it's cheaper. I mean, you don't need very skilled people to store data.So you can have less expensive employees if they don't have to think. They just have to store stuff to actually decide what's important requires skill, intelligence, and in many instances, real wisdom and long term experience. Organizations like to fire most of those people because they're too expensive.I mean, the whole movement of the Web was: "let's get rid of the editor". You know, we don't need editors anymore and let's just publish everything. So we've had this culture that it's cheap. We store everything. You don't have to think about these. And there's always technology. The latest one is artificial intelligence.You know, that's going to figure it all out for us, which it is, absolutely not because if you bring AI to a dump and you feed it in a dump, you get garbage AI. And that's what we are getting and will get because it's the old computer saying garbage in, garbage out. Essentially we are feeding AI and garbage.We are feeding AI with prejudice. We are feeding AI and bias. We are feeding AI and all sorts of dodgy data. And in fact, we don't even know what data we are feeding AI because as you say, I don't like using the term dark data, but the data that the organization doesn't even know exists. Well, this is the data that they're feeding AI. They don't even know what data they're feeding AI in the process. AI is going to become an increasingly dangerous aspect in society for multiple reasons. One of them is that the humans who should be controlling it in some way have essentially given up on the idea of professionally managing data. So data is out of control because it's too expensive to do it properly.Gael: We say data growth is an issue because we tend to store too much and at some point we might reach some limits, whether it's environmental limits or even physical limits, but it, am I correct that the issue for you is not that much about data storage, but that reaching some limits, but data storage, unsustainable data grows in this crazy amount of data being stored, being an issue for humanity, for the way its organization works for the way the human brain works.Am I correct?Gerry: We need quality data. I mean, it can help us make good decisions. If only 1% of your data is quality and 99% of it is poor quality, it reduces your ability to discover and process and analyze that quality data. So there's an old saying, what do you get when you cross a fox?With a chicken you get a fox, cause the fox eats the chicken. And if you imagine the chicken being the quality data and the fox being the crap data for a moment, and you know, this idea that it's okay that we're producing tons and tons of waste. We are just going to come up with clever and clever ways to store this waste.It's an incredibly cynical view of the world and also efficiency has never, ever, ever, ever led to energy reduction. Efficiency has only ever, ever led to energy explosion. So this, these smart techies claiming that they're somehow making things better with their efficient solutions. Every single time they make things five or six or 10 times worse because they just encourage.Bad habits and they just say, you don't have to worry about the waste. But it all builds up because as clever as they are, there's still 70 million servers out there right this moment storing this crap. And each one of those servers caused between one and two tons of co2 to manufacture.And Katie, you know, is an incredible resource for all the physical impacts of all this stuff. The tech industry is always jammed. Tomorrow they create this enormous mess and then they're always telling us about how they've got something in the lab that's gonna solve this mess.And then when it creates a five times bigger mess, they say, “oh, we've got this new technology that's going to solve this mess”. We wouldn't have a climate crisis, we wouldn't have a biodiversity crisis if we didn't have a driving advance in technology.Katie: Efficiency increases energy use. It increases extractions, it increases water use, it increases toxic waste. We learned this in 1862 when a British economist named William Jevons published the Coal Question, and he realized when we had trains and we had factories that were making, making cast iron pots and denim jeans, things that people were needing that they used to make in their own cottages.And then when we mass produce them, we could deliver them far and wide. It was much less expensive for people to buy a pair of pants than to make the fabric. When you do that, when you lower the cost of something, then many more people can buy that product.And you've got this whole infrastructure, like the trains, like the factories, like the fabric makers you know, where are you getting the cotton? All that stuff comes in, in mass quantities. And so as things become less expensive for the consumer, they will buy more. And that means more factories, more energy for the trains, more energy for building the trains and the train tracks you just keep generating more.The same principle applies with computers, and I'm, you know, calling a smartphone a computer. It's a luxury portal for accessing the internet. Same with an iWatch. As things get smaller and less expensive, it just means more extractions, more water use, more toxic waste more infrastructure.And then sure, everyone can download more and more videos, but you see how we're just perpetuating increased use. I also have a question for Gerry. When you said that we're going now to video, that's my understanding is it's more highly defined, but the human eye can't tell the difference. Why are we doing that?I guess this is also an efficiency question. I don't know if it's an efficiency question actually, but why, why are we doing that? Why are we making videos with such high definition if the human eye can't tell the difference?Gerry: Well, a couple of reasons, Katie. One is just marketing to have a new fancy feature that your neighbor doesn't have, and a reason to pretend that you're better than your neighbor. Another is the essential pact between software and hardware. Software says: "Make bigger hardware and we'll make bigger software then", then they'll have to buy newer versions of your hardware and then they'll have to buy newer versions of our software and we'll all make a lot of money together.The bigger the weight of software and data, the more it means that you cannot use the old hardware, so you have top grade. So it's part of the planned obsolescence model. Most features that are released are irrelevant, not useful, and not important. But you know, it's how we sell more stuff.But it's the software, hardware industry part. And, you know, everyone's in it broadly as well. The TV industry, you know, 8K, it's a new fake feature to sell in the process. You know, that's an unfortunate world. We're in enough of creating fake features to sell new products in the planned obsolescence model.Gael: That's a very systemic blend that we are into. I think we've got a pretty clear picture of all the impacts now and how everything relates to each other. My question now to both of you actually, and that will be three questions, is what can we do, and especially what can I do as an individual?What can I do if I run or if I have some kind of management capacity in an organization? And what should governments do about it?Katie: So for individuals, I really started seeing the world in a different way when I learned how transistors are manufactured. And then I got the idea of this list, which Gael I can send so you can post a link to my website where people can see this list of substances in one smartphone. If every user traces the supply chain of one substance, then we'll begin to have informed users.And once that happens, I think we can make more informed decisions. I also gave myself the goal of reducing my overall consumption by 3% per month. I was with 3% cause I thought, okay, I can do this. So I stopped using a dryer for drying clothes and I got a laundry line in, I think in some places in the world, this is completely obvious, but I'm a US American and I needed to get a laundry line.I started finding ways where I can reduce my consumption. And then I got a new website. And so , I canceled my reduction by getting a new website. I'm seeing this, that it's not easy, there's no quick fix, but I'm in the conversation and that's valuable to me. As for organizations and also individuals, I've said for a while, don't upgrade for at least four years.So every time you buy new, it's like what Gerry was saying. We wanna stick with keeping older equipment in good repair as long as possible. Ifixit.com is a wonderful organization that has free manuals explaining how to repair goods. That's ifixit.com and certainly organizations have clout there cause they're buying computers in big numbers.And so if they delay buying new, that's great. Also when an organization buys something in large numbers, they can insist to the manufacturer that they wanna see fair trade. They want to see that the people all along the supply chains have been fairly paid and fairly treated. That's another way that organizations can influence what's going on.Another idea is how we introduce computers to children. I used to encourage people to not let children use any kind of electronic device until they have mastered reading, writing, and math on paper. Now, a lot of babies are using screens before they have speech, and what that does is make them not know how to do basic activities like communicating without an electronic interface.And that, of course, sets us up as a society for people not knowing how to function without an electronic interface. So looking systemically, you can see how we're just creating this tremendous dependence on digitalization, on computers, on screens, and we're doing it without awareness of what we're asking from the earth, how it's affecting our social health, our mental health, our physical health.So really what we need to change, what we need to look at is our thinking.Gael: Yeah, I really, really love your angle of attack cause usually when I ask about what the government should do, it's, “oh, we should, you know, have some kind of legislation or put new lows in place, new regulations, whatever, et cetera”; and you've got a very refreshing approach, which is: but let's start with the basics.Children. If we build a new generation of humans, highly dependent on machines and especially tech machines, IT machines, then we are doomed . I really love your answer. Can I ask Gerry the same three questions? And, please, Gerry, when it comes to the organization factor, I've got some kind of two sub-questions.How would you relate what an organization should do to manage its data growths with everything you've done with the top tasks framework? That's my number one question. And sub question number two would be the current movement around data governance DM book, et cetera, do you think it can help or not ?Gerry: Okay, no problem. From a personal point of view, I think. We need to increase the data free times during the day and everything Katie said there, I agree a hundred percent and particularly in relation to children. But, you know, reduce the amount of times we're either creating data and consuming data, just be quiet for a while as well, and go for a walk without your phone. You know what? Extraordinary thing, you know, nature is beautiful. We are so extraordinarily lucky to be born at this moment in time on this extraordinary, amazing planet that is a million times better than the best virtual reality that will ever be created.You know, this reality is amazing and we should recognize it a lot more. And all we need is our eyes and our ears and skin to feel this extraordinary reality that we can actually enjoy. So we should do that. Then when we're at the point of creating, either taking a photo again, pausing and saying, you know, is it wise or is it the right time to actually do it?You know, waiting for the right moment to take the photo rather than, you know, taking 50 photos and hoping that one of them will be the right moment. Because then the right moment gets smothered with the 49 photos, cause you're not gonna look at overdose photos most of the time. But another issue is that after you've created something, that's always the best time to delete. What the best time is ? To not create in the first place to make that decision. No, I don't need to take this off already or don't need to send this email or whatever in the process. But if you have created something I talked to a professional photographer once and he said after every shoot, he always allocates about 30 minutes to review the shots he has taken cause he can immediately delete, delete, delete, delete, knows immediately cause you're fresh at just after that creation process. Then if you wait until the next day or you wait until the next week, it all often becomes too burdensome and then it becomes part of the 25,000 photos that you have and you're never going to go back to it.So the moment after creation is a great time for actual review and deletion.Gael: I have to take his advice into consideration and make it a reality. I'm terrible at that. And once you were saying it and I was like, "oh my God, actually I never do that," and then I've got like 1000 pictures on my smartphone and I wait for the digital cleanup day to clean them all. But that's a very valuable piece of insight, I feel super guilty now.Gerry: Well, these are things I've been discovering in a habit developed in Zuni in the last couple of years is that every time I look for something in a folder, I now look for something to delete. I nearly always find something to delete. So rather than making it this overwhelming activity, which most of us give up on," oh, I've got too much stuff, I'll never be able to do it". Do a little on a day-to-day basis when you're looking for something, look for something to delete in the process.So there's lots of good individual habits at an organizational level, I think we need to seriously look at getting in control of our websites, our intranets and other data lakes and, and data environments. And actually bringing in proper data management. Most internal environments, they don't even have professional search people.They don't even have people responsible for search design and search maintenance and search evolution. And then they wonder why we have terrible data environments internally. You got to invest in people. Professional people are more important than the latest technology. It's the combination of skilled people and good technology that gives us great results, the best technology in the world without proper skills.So invest in people who used to call editors 20 or 30 years ago, you know, we still need them. We need them more than ever. Invest in people who have information architecture skills. There was more focus in information architecture in 2000 than there is in this year. You know, that's extraordinary.I mean, I find in organizations they cared more about structure and metadata back in 2000 and they care cause they've essentially given up. They've said, "oh, there's too much stuff, we couldn't even begin to organize it well, you gotta get control of your data". And if you have to store stuff for long term reasons, really consider the type of storage that you're going to use.Tape storage is about 3000 times more energy efficient and less polluting than hard drive or cloud-based storage because tape is obviously much more energy efficient. It's not constantly calling energy, but also tape will last about 30 years or longer. Whereas hard drives you even, you're going to be changing them every five or seven years, and even at the time of hard drive, sSD drives are twice as polluting as HTD drives. Look at the type of systems and devices that you're using to store your data because you can make decisions that will have a hugely positive impact on data. Everybody talks every day about how critical data is and data is managed worse than rubbish is managed in a dump in 99 out of a hundred organizations.Finally the government, I think unfortunately I'm going to go for legislation. I think we will have to have a data tax. I think we will have to tax data because unless you put some constraints and some punishments for the creation of waste we will constantly create more and more waste and create stress.I think governments need to create data taxes and connect them with what Katie said. I think we have to legislate for a longer life. We have to legislate for modular designs. We have to make it illegal for Apple to sell AirPods that cannot be repaired or recycled and thousands of other companies.So we have to make legislation that deals with waste because waste is the biggest problem and threat to life on this planet, whether it's waste data or whether it's toxic waste in the pros. So we need a data tax. We need to mandate that smartphones last a minimum of 10 years and that laptops last a minimum of 20 years.I think without that sort of legislation the tech companies are not going to change because they're making too much money out of selling new devices every two or three years.Gael: Okay. Katie, you mentioned that we need a new way of thinking and I like to close the podcast with this question: are you optimistic about the trend that you see today? So, do you believe that people, more and more people are embracing this new way of thinking, welcoming bold ideas like data attacks or huge warranty period, or more serious fire hazard regulation or not? What is your opinion on it? What is the trend that you've noticed?Katie: In the last week, I've learned about two things. One from you, you told me about the ADEME law in France where if a corporation wants to call their product carbon neutral, they must prove it. That is a fantastic law and I hope that it gets a lot of attention so that more countries can adopt laws like that so that we don't just believe the marketing and we really look from cradle to grave at the impacts of every product.I also have learned about a young US American woman who started the log off movement, she was totally addicted to social media for three years, and her self-image went really badly. She got an eating disorder, all of this stuff because she couldn't get off of her social media. And now she and other teenagers are saying, we don't want this.We want a healthy relationship with technology. So I think many people are coming to a place of realizing they don't want this totally consuming relationship with technology. So as more people have problems with their relationship with their computer, I think people will begin to create healthy relationships I don't know how that will translate at the government level, at the organizational level, but as individuals say, "okay, this is too much, this is more than I can handle", then perhaps we'll get to a place where it does translate more for governments and businesses.Gael: What about you, Gerry? Are you optimistic?Gerry: In some ways, I find it hard to be optimistic, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop and not make an effort here. What I would say is that if anyone is listening to this and agrees with these sorts of things. I'd just say it's not enough.You need to become an evangelist. It's still a tiny movement. It is way far from being anything close to a minority, let alone a minor majority of the population. I think we're still in fractional parts, of percentages of the overall population. So I think we need to become evangelists.We need to talk to our brothers and our sisters, our mothers and our fathers, our friends and our neighbors, our work colleagues. We need to join a movement or start a movement. This is a crisis. You know, I didn't think it was four or five years ago.I was quite smug about it. But the more I've researched, the more I've talked to this, this is a crisis. There is a real chance that we could lose this beautiful environment. This unique little bubble that humans and animals and plants can live within. There's a real risk that it won't be there for our children or certainly our grandchildren.So, you know, even if that's a small risk, we'd want to protect against it, wouldn't we? And it's not enough just for us individually to agree we need to become part of a movement or start a movement. We need to evangelize. So please, please do something about it. If you join a group, join a movement, join a community.Gael: Being mindful of time, I would love to close the podcast. But before I've got one final question for you, which is, and you've already shared a lot of references and materials that we will put in the show notes. But if you had to pick one or two qualitative content that you would love to share with the audience to better understand what is at stake when it comes to data growth or the overall environmental footprint of our digital world, what would it be?What would you like us to share with the people reading the show notes?Gerry: Well, I'd definitely say, you know, if you wanna know the physical impact of digital technology. Look up the work that Gael has done over the years. I mean there's few people who have done better deeper work on that physical impact. There's a very interesting guy, a physicist I've come across called Melvin Vopson, who has done a lot of work on the impact of the growth of information.And he has a theory about that information has a weight, information and data has a weight that is independent of the format that it is stored on. If that is true, the implications of that are absolutely enormous as well. So data focus, understanding Melvin Vopson, is a very interesting person in the information theory space.Katie: Gerry, can you say more? What does that mean? That information has a weight independent of the format. Can you translate that for me?Gerry: He's a physicist. And he has a theory that if you had USB stake and the USB stake held a hundred gigabytes, let's say of data, and that if you weighed that USB stick empty, and then you weighed it when you had placed the hundred gigabytes of data on it, that it would actually be heavier.You would need a quantum machine to actually weigh it. But that literally, a hundred gigabytes has an independent weight. And he said that at the moment, all the data in the world that we're storing, which I think is probably, between 10 and 20 zetabytes that were actually storing at the moment would be the weight of bacteria.It's a fractional bacteria as a fractional weight. But he said that with the way we are creating data and the quantity and the speed that we are creating data. Within 250 to 500 years, data, if his theories are right, would go from the weight of an ameba to the weight of half of the mass of the earth, whether data has a weight or not, it gives you a sense of the extraordinarily pace that growth data is growing at, and that it is already out of control.Gael: What about you, Katie? Would you have some resources you want to share with the listeners?Katie: Sure. I'll just share my website, our Web dot tech, and then go to the reports. I've got almost 50 reports about everything from solar photovoltaic and industrial wind turbines and electric vehicles about how each of these things have ecological impacts :fire hazards, worker hazards. I can also really recommend asianometry.com and he has a fantastic piece called the Semiconductor Water Problem. That's a short video. Gael: Thanks a lot Katie, that sounds very interesting, especially the water consumption problem, the semiconductor industry. It has been put a bit under the spotlight, the recent years in Taiwan, where they had to basically choose between rice fields and the semiconductor factories. And I use it a lot when I facilitate workshops or in conferences.Katie: And in the United States, we are now building three fabs in Arizona, which is the desert. So the tax incentives will be very good for these corporations, but no one knows where the water will come from, and yet we've built three fabs in this state. It's, as Gerry said, we're doing things without thinking, without evaluation.Gael: So let's try to evaluate a bit more what we do. And for that we need good data. We need data with a good quality, with a manageable size. And I think it could be the closing word of this episode. That was an intense discussion. I must admit that a lot of the concepts or ideas that you brought, I'm half familiar with, so it was very enlightening to see different approaches not just focusing on the energy consumption and let's decarbonize energy and everything will be back to normal because there will be no back to normal if we follow what you've just explained to us today. So thanks a lot, both of you, for all the insights you shared, all the references and the discussion you had between the two of you as well.That's delightful to hear two guests speaking to each other and interacting. So thanks a lot. It was great to have you on the show today.Katie: Well, thank you. I'm still taking in all the things that Gerry said. It's great.Gerry: No, same here. It's been a great conversation and thanks for organizing it Gael and thanks for the Important work you're doing, you're really making a difference.Gael: Hopefully, you know, it has been a year now that I launched the podcast. We've reached 4,500 downloads, which is not that much Gerry I know because you didn't mention your podcast. But I'm a big fan of the World Wide Waste track on "This is HCD" podcast and actually I salute the other Gerry that will be in the show in some months actually in 2023, that's for sure to talk about sustainable design.But yes, I wasn't sure that this kind of media was needed in our community. And so far the feedback has been good. So I hope now that I will be able to use Green IO as a tool to reach people that are less aware, that might be environmentally aware for sure, but not necessarily connected with their daily job.So we'll see. 2023 is a year for you where we'd like to grow, but in a positive way because we want to grow awareness, not data.Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.

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In this episode, we went across the world for Digital Cleanup Day. Our first guest, Ingrid Nielsen is based in Tallinn, Estonia and she has been working with Let's Do It World NGO for the last years in different capacities, as the head of Global marketing and communication, running initiatives regarding digital waste and other projects. “Let’s do it world” is the mother NGO of both World Cleanup Day - 50 millions participants worldwide and counting- and its digital offspring which is the Digital Cleanup day. Our second guest, Oliver Vergeynst is based in Brussels, Belgium and he is the Director of the Belgian Institute for Sustainable IT since 2020. Together with the French and the Swiss institutes, they spearhead a lot of the research on Digital Sustainability while grouping both academics and professionals. We dive deep into the thought process behind digital cleanup day, how to get buy-in for digital cleanup, how best to do digital cleanup, and who are the targets of this ambitious project. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

Learn more about our guest and connect: * Ingrid’s LinkedIn * Olivier's LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green I/O website

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.
Ingrid and Olivier’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* Aston university article on data storage crisis * The Digital Collage workshop * Institute for Sustainable IT Belgium * World Cleanup Day * Digital Cleanup Day * ADEME’s Guide for Sustainable Communication 🇫🇷 * IFOP study Le rapport des Français à la consommation et les conséquences psychologiques 🇫🇷 * Marie Kondo * Niklas Sundberg’s Sustainable IT Playbook for Technology Leaders * Gerry McGovern’s World Wide Waste * Mike Berners-Lee’s The Carbon Footprint of Everything * Outrage and Optimism Podcast

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In this episode, Gaël Duez stayed home in France to discuss gender equity in IT and building sustainability teams in large companies. His guests Lucille Vannier is one of the strongest voices in the French IT sector for gender equality. She is also the Strategy Deputy Director of the Sustainable IT Institute, which is the academic body spearheading most of the research in France on Digital Sustainability.

She provides serious advice for anybody who wants to follow her lead in advocating for a sustainable and equitable future in the IT space, with lots of resources to check out too! 🤓❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!Learn more about our guest and connect: * Lucile's LinkedIn * Gaël's LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green I/O website

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

Lucile’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode:Mentioned in the Episode* Designing for Sustainability by Tim Frick * Sonarqube * AFNOR * CIGREF + (the network of big French business and public administrations wishing to progress in digital technology) * ADN Ouest * CSR Groupe BPCE * The Digital Collage * Mooc Inria * The Social Dilemma

PodcastsIn English * “Green Momentum” by Natixis, BPCE Group * I recommend “Time for frugality in a digital era” with my colleagues Philippe Derouette and Marie Joron and published in November 2021 * Time for frugality in a digital era - Asset & Wealth - Management and Corporate & Investment Banking (groupebpce.com) (14 min)

In French* “Techologie” by Richard Hanna(in French)

Trying to link technology and ecology when everything opposes themhttps://techologie.net “L'Octet Vert” by Tristan Nitot (in French)Talk about Climate, digital and invigorate !https://www.standblog.org “Déclics ou des claques ?” by Groupe ISIASustainable digital Idea box.https://podcast.ausha.co/declic-ou-des-claques/To learn the fundamentals:* In English + The Digital Collage / The Digital Fresco (la Fresque du numérique) + Sustainable IT MOOC by INR - Institut du Numérique Responsable (Institute of Sustainable IT - https://www.isit-academy.org) - › Awareness MOOC (30min) - › The whole MOOC NR (4:30) * In French + Serious Escape Game about Sustainable IT by The Wokies (1 hour) + INRIA’s MOOC (4 or 5h)

Tools* INR’s tools in english (https://isit-europe.org): + Myimpact: A calculator that allows us to simply calculate our professional digital impact, to shed light on the impacts linked to our overconsumption of digital technology. + Sustainable IT Services Design Handbook: More than 500 recommendations divided into 8 families of a digital service design project to acquire methods to develop digital services in a responsible way, by responding to the People, Planet, Prosperity challenges. + Directory of sustainable IT experts to facilitate the search for qualified profiles able to support the structuring and development of the sustainable IT approach of organisations

Replay* In English: + “The social dilemma”, Jeff Orlowski, September 2020: a documentary investigation about favorite social media and search platforms. It shows how social media is designed, regulated and used, and the individual and collective consequences of our growing dependence on social media. * In French + Conference “Transition environnementale dans le numérique : Pourquoi ? Comment ?” with Jean-Marc Jancovivi during CFE-CGC Orange Seminar in Octobre 2022 + Conference “Le numérique : menace ou espoir pour l’environnement ?” with Françoise Berthoud - EcoInfo CNRS in November 2018

Studies* In English + Summary of impact of ICT studies by Lancaster University: “The real climate and transformative impact of ICT: A critique of estimates, trends, and regulations”, 2021 + Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie, Université de Toulouse, CNRS, CNES, UPS : “Estimate of the carbon footprint of astronomical research infrastructures”, March 2022 + Academic report: “On Global Electricity Usage of Communication Technology: Trends to 2030”, April 2015 + Synthesis Report of the Sixth Assessment Report, IPCC, 2021-2022 * In French + The Shift Project "Pour une sobriété numérique", October 2018 + The Shift Project “Impact environnemntal du numérique : tendances à 5 ans et gouvernance de la 5G”, March 2021 + Collectif Green IT "Empreinte environnementale du numérique mondial", September 2019 + France Stratégie “La consommation de métaux du numérique”, June 2020 + Sénat report about control and influence: Prendre en main notre destin numérique : l'urgence de la formation (senat.fr), June 2018

Books* In English + “1984” - Georges Orwell, 1949 + “The Limits to Growth” - Fonella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Joregen Randers, William W. Behrens, 1972 + “The political economy of degrowth" - Timothée Parrique, 2019 * In French + “Les besoins artificiels. Comment sortir du consumérisme”- Razmig Keucheyan, Ed. La Découverte, 2019 + "La société de déconsommation, la révolution du vivre mieux en consommant moins" - Cécile Désaunay, Ed. Gallimard, 2021 + “Vers un numérique responsable. Repensons notre dépendance aux technologies digitales”- Vincent Courboulay, Ed. Domaine du possible, 2021 + “L’enfer numérique. Voyage au bout d’un Like”- Guillaume Pitron, Ed. Les liens qui libèrent, 2021 + “La fabrique du crétin digital”- Michel Desmurget, Ed. Seuil, 2019 + “Impacts écologiques des technologies de l’Information et de la Communication” - Groupe ÉcoInfo, Ed. edp sciences, coll. QuinteSciences, 2012 + “Peut-on croire aux TIC vertes ? ” - Fabrice Flipo, François Deltour, Michelle Dobré et Marion Michot, Ed. Presses des Mines, Coll. Développement durable, 2012

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In this episode, Gaël Duez went to Argentina (or did he?) to discuss digital agencies. Guests Vineeta Greenwood and Gavin Shinfield share a passion for communicating sustainability in ways that their clients can connect to. Veterans of the B-Corp movement, they also prize collaboration and honesty, two keys to their success, and indeed our collective success in reaching our sustainability goals. Gaël invites them to play a short game that leads to long and meaningful answers … stay tuned 🤓❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!Learn more about our guest and connect: * Vineeta's LinkedIn * Gavin's LinkedIn * Gaël's LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green I/O website

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

Gavin and Vineeta’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* Wholegrain Ethical Screening Policy 🔎 * About B Corp Certification ✅ * What is Ruby on Rails? 🛑 🔛🛤 * Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood 📗 * BIMA Sustainability Council 🍃 * Wholegrain Digital’s Efficiency by Design 🍥 * Rethink Single-Use Content | Brilliant Noise 🔂 * Good Agencies Summit 🗻 * Reflections on Running a Sustainable Digital Agency | Branch Magazine 🕊 * Carbon Offsets: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) 2️⃣ 🌒 * Climeworks Direct Air Capture 🥅 * Hannah Smith, Sustainable Digital Tech Consultant 🍏 * Oxymoron by Tom Greenwood ⌨️ * The Handbook of Sustainable Design of Digital Services | ISIT 📓 * HTTP Archive Sustainability Report 🏛 * The why of website optimisation | Fershad Irani 🕸 * Sustainable Web Design dot Org 👨‍🎨 * Digital Decluttering Toolkit 🧰

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In this episode, we went to both Oslo and Paris. Elin Hauge and Heloise Nonne never met before but still they have a lot in common. Same huge experience in AI and Data management … and more important - the very reason you will enjoy having them on the show - same despise for buzzwords and lazy short-cutting thinking. A candid discussion where you can expect metaverse buzz being slashed and rule of three providing more answers than deep learning 😮❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!

Learn more about our guest and connect: * Elin's LinkedIn * Heloise's LinkedIn * Gaël's LinkedIn * Gaël's website * Green I/O website

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Elin's and Heloise’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode:* Hugging Face’s code carbon tool https://huggingface.co/bigscience/tr1-13B-codecarbon * Green AI by Roy Schwartz, Jesse Dodge, Noah A. Smith, Oren Etzioni “Communications of the ACM”, December 2020: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/12/248800-green-ai/fulltext * “Data storage & dark data” recent article by Tom Jackson & Ian R. Hodgkinson both from Loughborough University: put a light on the cost of storage : https://theconversation.com/dark-data-is-killing-the-planet-we-need-digital-decarbonisation-190423 * "Carbontracker: Tracking and Predicting the Carbon Footprint of Training Deep Learning Models" by Lasse F. Wolff Anthony, Benjamin Kanding, Raghavendra Selvan arXiv Crnell UNiversity July 2020 https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.03051 * Snowcrash the book where the Metaverse was coined (not by Mr Zuckerberg at all…) * Codecarbon.io * Green I/O mid-season wrap-up article * Gerry McGovern's book World Wide Waste * The Data For Good's website and its tool Code Carbon (sources on GitHub)

Transcript (IA generated soon to be fine tuned)[00:00:00] Gaël: Hello, everyone. In this episode, I have the pleasure to welcome Elin and Heloïse is known. Elin lives in Oslo, in Héloïse, in Paris than never met before, but still have a lot in common. Same studies in math, physics, in computer science, same huge experience in AI and data management, and more important, the very reason you will enjoy having them on the show.

Same despise for buzz words in lazy shot cutting thinking. And of course, both are extremely mindful of environmental issues. However, they went by a different path during the career, which make their vision both complimentary and refreshing. Elin forged her own path as a respected AI strategist, a professional speaker, and a board member.

After leading teams in the insurance sector, IT consulting, and many more, always helping deploy data-driven approaches. Without the hype, Héloïse has carved out a own carry pass from the trenches after a PhD in quantum physics, excuse me, sir, she did several jobs in data science, eventually becoming the director of the Data and AI factory at the SNCF, the French Railway Company, which operates 15,000 trains per day and generates just a bit of data.

Hello Héloïse. Hello Elin. Nice to have you on the show today.

[00:01:14] Héloïse: Hello girl.first of all, What did I miss in your bio? Did I forget to mention anything about you?

yes, there is some kind of a change in my career that's coming now because I will quit sncf by the end of the month and start diploma in International Affairs. The idea is to leverage my knowledge of data, data analysis to work on geopolitics of energy and maybe some, relation with defense, in Europe, and supply chain.

[00:01:51] Héloïse: How, how can we supply, energy in a separate way in the future? So actually, I have no idea how my future job will be. So the idea is to take a step back, think a bit of what I want to do and what, I want to, how I can leverage my past career to, my new one.

[00:02:12] Gaël: But that's awesome. Super interesting. In a breaking news on the Green I/O podcast. Whoa. I'm honored. And please, recruiters don't jump on her on LinkedIn. She's not for hire. Huh? So leave her alone. And what about you, Elin?

[00:02:26] Elin: Well, I think you forgot to mention that I have actually also studied organic farming, and I have worked in the agricultural industry as a farmer and I've also set up, a company within organic, food production and distribution.

[00:02:42] Gaël: Oh, that's, that's awesome. And how come that you get interested into this, topic or this sector? Actually,

[00:02:49] Elin: Oh, well that's kind of an a very non-professional reason because, I was married to a farmer and so I realized that if I'm going to be part of running this farm, I need to understand what this game is about. So unfortunately, or unfortunately or whatever, we're not married anymore. but I still have my interest in organic farming and in food in general,

[00:03:17] Gaël: So something very positive you took away from your relationship?

[00:03:21] Elin: something at least.

[00:03:25] Gaël: Okay, awesome. And maybe, that, that could be connected to my next question, which is how did you become interested in the sustainability?

[00:03:31] Elin: Well, I think it very much started with the organic farming and really being a student and having to learn about the soil, for example, and how plants grow and how to have a livestock with a healthy. But then working in the technology industry for several years after that, I'm not sure I really thought that much more about sustainability until about a year ago.

I was hired to speak at an event for leaders in the electrical grid industry in Oslo, and before it was my turn on stage, they did a cahoot session. One of the questions. What is the most important action that your company can take towards achieving the UN sustainability goals? And the main answer was digitalization of products and services.

And I was listening to this crowd and I was thinking about my own talk that I was going to do a few minutes later, and it struck me that there is a huge mismatch. And that was when I really started to, to re-engineer my approach to AI and the Metaverse and other data driven technologies.

[00:04:53] Gaël: Yeah, that's the very reason of this show as well, and that definitely topics that we will discuss a bit later. And, what about you, Héloïse?

[00:05:01] Héloïse: Well, for me it was, quite a long process and very slow. cuz I, I remember when I was, a teenager having conversation with my sister about environment and ecology and we were already very concerned. it's a somehow, after this I thought I was having, a sustainable behavior, down, out the lights, not having a car, for instance, and being careful.

But, progressively I realized that it was really not enough, on the individual side already. So, Started to really check on every behavior I had. it was in like three years ago, being really, really mindful of everything I would do or not do. And then progressively, it shifted to the behavior in my company.

What impact do I have, individually in my job and collectively, in my company, what, what impact my company has. And I, yeah, I grew more and more concerned about the urge to act and to, multiply the action to, to really increase, not just increase, actually change the system, change how we work, and when I realized that the, carbon impact of the digital just overshoots the impacts of the entire, air traffic worldwide, then it truly was,I think a turning point, where I grew more and more concerned about what I was doing. Because when you talk about the cloud, you. Everyone thinks it's kind of, not real and have no notion of an impact.

And I was at that time working on that. I was watching TV also individually. And, you know, it's funny, I, I remember my, my father was, an engineer, in the industry for a long time. So he was,a service. So building, bricks and, tails, tiles. And he said at the end of his career, now I'm going, I'm going to try to do something good.

Just, just joking because I have been polishing my whole career with,building in this industry because this industry pollutes a lot. It uses a lot of gas to cook, bricks and everything. So he was kind of joking. So he said, now I'm trying to do something very cultic because I've been polluting my old my whole career.

And I, at some point that I realized, okay, now we are the new kind of polluting industry. And that was really,yeah, turning points. And I realized that in my team, people were concerned, but not really conscious. That's, that was a problem, but really willing to act and, progressively I started to think, that was more important,to, to take that into account as one of the first criteria in making decision to, to start a project or not to take that into account, be being really mindful of, the potential impact , on the environment.

[00:08:26] Gaël: So what we are gonna try to do today is that our listeners will not have to wait retirement time to start having an impact, and talking, about the impact of the digital industry and more specifically, data science and data in general, which are, an area where both of you are experts. I, I have to mention a discussion I had very recently with, pit market Itz. We were discussing about sustainable design, but he mentioned this number that I've didn't hear about before, that when Open AI, released their latest voice recognition system, actually voice recognition net. they gave the number of 680,000 training hours to complete it and to train it.

And obviously , the computer network they use was not drawing 70 wards, like my desktop. So it's a fair statement to say that this model training, this model has used a lot of energy. So it seems that data science can impact the planet, but how much does it actually do? S i I believe you, you've got some figures and some information on it.

[00:09:34] Elin: Yes. In general, it's a bit hard to find robust numbers here, right? Because first of all, it's difficult to find those numbers or create those numbers. And then secondly, the big suppliers are not really interested in making these numbers known either. But we do know that g T. Which has about 175 billion parameters would require as much electricity as about 130 Northern European households for a year.

So I think for the society to really understand the impact that these. Training rounds have, we need to find the equivalence in understandable terms. Kilowatt hours is a bit tricky to understand unless you do the calculations down to what you spend yourself as an individual or on your house.

But when we can compare it to the equivalent of households, it becomes much more understandable and one training. Equal to 130 households for a year. That is a lot.

[00:10:51] Gaël: indeed.

[00:10:52] Elin: then we can, of course, argue that that G PT three is maybe the world's largest neural network, and obviously will require much more energy to power the training rounds than what we maybe would consider normal models in a like a normal business and just an average business in the European market, but still with a bit of a complexity, we could easily get to levels of maybe 10, 20, 30 households for a year in power consumption equivalent. And again, maybe that is not so much if you think about one or two or three of these, and we can say, well, that's okay, but at the same time, we know that the digitalization of businesses and societies all over the world and in Europe has really barely started. There's so much more to do. And then the flip side of that is that when you have all those data and you have all those digital processes, then you need to use those data for something useful, which means that you will apply machine learning algorithms.

To at least a huge part of this, to make sense of this data and to use them for automated decision making. But in doing that, we are actually then requiring all this power consumption for the training, and then it's not just a one off, it becomes the expected average attitude. Right.

[00:12:30] Gaël: That's quite a lot when you know that the electricity consumption of the entire digital sector is, roughly the same size of, India. So the third largest in the world, electricity consumption, knowing that it might grow even further, that's, that's a bit scary. ELO is, is it something that you studied, in your previous job as well?

[00:12:50] Héloïse: Actually not at all. for different reasons. The main reason is that, at, in the industry or in many large companies, whose business is not, build on , images or videos. So companies not like Facebook, Google, or, I don't, Microsoft. The amount of data, is by several other magnitude lower than what they are dealing with for, for instance.

Yeah. And what makes,deep learning, very heavy in terms of energy conception and, um, Carbon emission is , the size of, the data sets that they are, using to be, to be trained. And my, my job, at Sncf is very related to the maintenance of infrastructure or during stock or just measuring the mobility , in train or more generally.

Mobility. And the amount of data we, we deal with is a lot lower. for instance, the platform that we, the data platform that we manage doesn't store all the data of every data set of sncf, of course, but a lot of it's operational data. We have four something like 400 terabytes of data in all. . So it's not a lot and it's not, homogeneous data.

So when we train a model, it's actually working on a very, very small part of, it's something like 300 megabytes or maybe , 100 gigabytes at the most. So actually the training time of our model is not really, the, the part that has the most impact, in terms of energy or carbon emission. It's more how we store the data.

So actually we focused a lot more on data management than on really, the, the impact of our algorithm because we are not a lot, we're not doing a lot with, videos and, images. And when people contact me, with use cases using videos. I'm always a bit,mitigated to go further because of course it would be interesting. my team would really , enjoy doing deep learning on, I don't know, videos from trains, but actually I'm not sure. Sometimes there is a simpler and cheaper solution before that we can address before going to deep learning and, and everything. So we actually have not looked so much into the impact of ai, algorithm directly.

[00:15:41] Gaël: That is very interesting because what you say is the issue, at least at Sncf, but in many companies are not that much data science, but rather data management. And I think we need to go back to this point a bit later, actually, quite soon later. If I can just pose it for a moment and just go back to data science, electricity consumption when it happens.

And I understood that it does not happen in every, company. , maybe Elin, what are the, ,the measures that you can take to reduce it? I don't know. Did did you, do you push for using code carbon I/O or,you know, the hering face,code carbon because it's funny that they've got the same name, but they're two different, stuff.

what do you do? Is it, is it about measuring, is it about being wise and, and not using the same models? What would you advise.

[00:16:30] Elin: So if you look to like the developer communities, they have for several years, maybe decades, worked on efficient coding, how to run the code. As efficiently as possible, as fast as possible. So there is already a culture among developers to engineer their code in an efficient way, and we need that same awareness and attitude amongst data scientists and data engineer.

just to put them in the same bucket for this purpose, as well. So I think it starts with awareness because I think at least many of the data scientists I know they haven't really thought about this. And when they just got a really cool problem, they would just dive into the problem and retrain and redo and explore more data and try again and play around with it and not really focus on what would be the efficient engineering of the modeling. and so that's something that I think is kind of a, a very easy. Stage one. And I've spent a bit of time looking at the green software engineering principles backed by, for example, Accenture and Aard. And I think those basic principles really make a lot of sense. And we don't really, really need to make this complicated, but just add a little bit of a common sense into how we approach development and how we develop model.

And all the work with the data and the maths and the code that is required to make this operate, in a good way in everyday business.

[00:18:11] Gaël: And, I had a very interesting conversation with Few Alvez de Costa, the, one of the co-founder of Data For Good, he told me that basically, What is still required for data scientists is kind of to switch the approach for being model centric to data centric. So you don't start with, wow, cool.

I want to use G PT three because I want to use G PT three, but I check the data set and after that I pick the most accurate model. So do you think that this switch of mindset from model centric, I want to try the latest and shiniest model to being data centric and I will just. Pick whatever most efficient tool I have regarding the data set I need to manipulate.

Connecting to what Héloïse just said about that, most of the time you don't have enough data actually to do, deep learning or whatever. do you think that is something that just raising awareness will be enough?

no, it's not enough, but it's an important first step, and this reminds me of my forecasting professor at a Warwick Business School like 20 years ago, and she kept hammering in. Make it simple. Make it simple. Make it simple. Do not overfit. And I think within the AI space, it's, it's fun, you know, for the data scientists and I really understand them why we do the same.

[00:19:33] Elin: I really dive into the complexities and as you say, the shiny new toys and play around with the really, really cool stuff. However, If we look at the development of ai, like the early stages, they were, scientific. It was about science, it was about academia research. And then over the last maybe decade, it's been more about engineering, at least in everyday business.

And we still have the science and more academic approaches like GPT-3, but in everyday. Like Héloïse is also pointing out it's more about engineering or how do we actually apply these tools to our everyday business to solve a business problem or an operational problem. And I think moving ahead, we will again transition into a design perspective of how we apply AI or machine learning to be more pragmatic, in business and society.

and then we need to have a, like the approach you mentioned, which tool do we need to solve our problem? We might not need the coolest, fanciest screwdriver. With a diamond tip and a coverage, shaft, right? But we need the tool, the screwdriver that solves the problem we have right there, right then, and that is about choosing the right design for the problem to be solved.

[00:21:03] Gaël: And what about you, Héloïse? Was it also your mantra? Make it simple. And did you have some requirement from your teams to use, a shiny screwdriver with a diamond on top of it?

[00:21:15] Héloïse: Well, maybe, there was some, yeah, of course I understand this. this will, to try the new tools, but actually, um,I can be quite harsh as a manager and, sometimes when someone says, oh yeah, but we're not doing deep learning, and it's, I thought we would do more machine learning and everything.

I say, Okay. this is just a tool. The goal is to solve a problem that's, related to an operational problem. So if you came to my team to, to do the deep learning, you are wrong. Go to, the academia, go, to ask Google or Facebook. Here we are solving maintenance problem and it can be a rule of thumb.

And if the rule of thumb is solving the problem, we will just do that, just that maybe with data, of course, and that's why we are necessary. But if a simple mean or median solves a problem for,a correct price, then we'll stop. . and I think, I agree with Elin. It's, it's not enough for the data scientist to, actually, it's not enough to go to a model centric, mindset, to a data centric mindset.

I think they have to go all the way to the use case centric mindset. A lot of companies made, this mistake in the past years, it's okay because it's, it was the beginning, but they were just pouring all the possible data and their data lake and then people were asking data saying this quite, what can you do with this data?

And a lot of energy was lost in trying to do something, from the data instead of wondering, okay, what's. Are my goal? Should I reduce costs? Should I increase performance? what should I reduce? I dunno, my critical, breakdowns in this type of, of motor, for instance. If you start with this, then you wonder, okay, this is my problem.

Which data do I have, in my position? Should I get more or not? And what can I do with what I already have? And then that's, I think, the mistake. Many data scientists think, they think their job is to use algorithm. I think their job is to look at the problem and to make a connection with the data they have at, their disposal.

And then make the connection with a model, an approach, a technical approach that can solve the problem. And their job is to make the connection be between these two, business problem, the data and the algorithm. And their mistake is to think that their specialty is on the algorithm and to work a lot on that.

I think it's wrong because in most company, the technical mastering of algorithm is not there because we mostly use libraries that are so fine tuned by experts that we cannot do better. We cannot improve what's already well packaged in the library. So tuning the code is not, the job of a data scientist or a data engineer inside a company. It's the job of academic experts, job of people who are releasing these libraries but not the people using them.

And I think most data scientists and data engineer and data architect should focus on their core competence to make the connection between operational use of something that's on the market, but they are not going to modify. They're just going to use that them and moreover, I think that data centers should, in, in the recent years, data specialists were specialized on the technology, and I'm convinced that in the future they're going to specialize on specific, business areas.

[00:25:35] Gaël: We will have data scientists specialize in energy, specialize in maintenance, specialize in mobility, specialize in marketing, and I think there are going to, there is going to be a more specialization, but towards the business side and not towards the technical side. a very refreshing perspective.

[00:25:53] Héloïse: yeah, and so, so focusing on the model is, I think, the wrong idea for most people, except for the few percent of expert who are going to work at Google, Facebook

And if I can go back on your question, what could we do to reduce the impact of, AI and data science from a company? Very operational point of view. I think there are, several levers that we can, we can, use first as a company, we can, put pressure on suppliers.

We are trying to put more pressure on how they engage, what, what kind of, promise they can really do on, improving the environmental impact of their platforms and the service that they, they provide. Because I think Microsoft, Amazon and Google are more competent to address this problem. Then the companies who are buying the services, but if their, their clients are putting pressure on them, they're going to address it more efficiently or more seriously.

So that's the first lever. and. Actually there are going to be a lot more efficient that what I can do in improving , their algorithm and the way they store data. And if they know their clients have concerns about this, they're going to change. But you talked about this in, in, in previous podcasts.

And the second thing I concur with, Elin, people writing, code should be aware they have to, be more competent in writing correct code. Actually it should be more emphasized. That's writing more, efficient code means, less costs for, your, IT systems and production.

Actually, we, that's what we have been working on, improving codes and improving architecture choice for some projects we divided by five or six, the cost of the project, the cost of the application, the yearly cost. And this actually, I think is the only way to convince, your clients to invest a little bit more money.

When you're ,building the app, is when you can actually explain that if they spend 10% more budget, they will reduce by 40% cost in production. And that I, I think it's the only way to convince. because just the carbon impact, okay, they will think it's nice, but in the end, most companies, they have budget.

And this is the main constraint. So actually, if you link the carbon impact, would the, Euro or dollar impact, then you win. Otherwise you won't, you won't go very far. and I think developers should have this in mind and they should actually, see this as a competence they can leverage on the market, to be hired and to have a good income.

Because if they can prove they can reduce costs and carbon, , then it's fine. otherwise, there are not going to be that much interest in that because it's not very sexy to improve your codes instead of, just training the, the nicest algorithm, and, the newest, library, that Google just released.

[00:29:21] Gaël: And Héloïse, when you say you divided by four or five, the cost of some codes that you wrote, could you be a bit more specific and give an example of what did you do? Was it like some kind of a small data smart model, like Martin on Andre route, they like to advocate? Or , how did you manage?

[00:29:38] Héloïse: The first thing is to actually question, the use of, IT resources you have. It's, it's very stupid. But, there, there were machines that were not used all the time. And when we just, tuned a little more, a little bit more at what time they were used, how long they were, up and running, that's the most significant gain you, you can have.

[00:30:04] Gaël: So greenops

[00:30:05] Héloïse: , Actually clean, the number of resources you have, because some of them are up and running and not really being used. This happens, very often, I think in large organization because, of . A governance problem because the teams are large. There are people who just start a machine and, they don't say, or it's not very clear to other people what they do.

So actually, this machine is weapon running and we're not sure some, maybe this team is doing something with it and just, just to be sure we will let it up and running. And actually, you, you, you can, you can reduce the cost and your impacts just by cleaning regularly and having a better governance on how you use it.

Resources. but I'm sure that's not going to be new to most people in, in companies because, okay. So it's obvious. The, the second thing is architecture choice. And this leads me to a third way to improve it's actually the competence of people you hire. Actually, the, the number of people,in France, or it's the same for in every country.

The, the market is so tense that finding people to develop is very hard. And there are companies, who, who actually sell, the service where they sell competence with people, but with teams of 20 people that they're going to put inside the company to make a project. But there is a very large turnover and a very large, a very important pressure ,from the buyers to lower the prices because it's, it's very, very expensive and lowering the prices, for hiring people have two effects. a large turnover. And companies who are sEling services with competencies are going to. Actually choose younger people, so less expert and the choices, the technical choices that are made by these teams, and the turnover, the lack of the commutation. In the end, we have, applications which are not, efficient at all.

[00:32:27] Héloïse: And for instance, architecture choices. Just by changing, the type of database that were chosen divided by two, the cost of the project at the end because it was not the appropriate choice because the people who made the choices were not senior enough, were not expert enough, and they, chose the first thing they knew.

and it worked. So if it just worked okay, this database is, is the right choice and it's okay. But in the end, when you fine tune, it's very costly because you need experts, and you need to invest time and money, but in the end, you reduce a lot of the impact. So there is a very important problem, and I don't have the solution, in the balance between the number of people you need, but then you're going to have non-expert people and the problem you solve.

So you need experts and balance between the two is really not, not easy to deal with, especially for companies who, whose business is not it. So they have to hire, they have to rely on suppliers, but sometimes the suppliers just don't really supply you with real expertise. And for this, all those technical choice, of, type of database you use, the type of, which language you're going to use, there are many mistakes that have an impact in the end on the cost and, what the money, cost and , environmental cost. And the last thing is just tuning the, the code. But I, I would say it's the last 10% that you can gain on your, your impact.

[00:34:05] Gaël: however, Elin and Héloïse. if you indulge me, I'd like to play a bit the devil advocates with the first, comment that you made, Elza, cuz you said.

That what we can do is mostly to put pressure on our provider and to that, if you take for instance, AWS, they very la copy pasted what they already, said about the security. That the, the, the statement is basically, we are in charge of sustainability of the cloud as they are in charge of the security of the cloud.

But you are in charge of sustainability in the cloud. Actually it connects pretty well with what you, what you previously say ELO is when you say that for most companies, it's not really training, models but more the data cleaning the data collection, the data preparation in storing all this data that has the, the biggest environmental footprint. And that is definitely sustainability in the cloud, not sustainability of the cloud. So you think it's, there is a bit of a discrepancy here, saying that it's mostly on providers while still having a lot to do when it comes to data management. Like real data management, like collecting, cleaning, storing,

[00:35:21] Héloïse: I think you have to do as a company, you have to do both. really are in charge of how you collect data and how you store it and how long you store it. and for what purpose? So actually have to address these questions and answer them, but you can in addition, put pressure on your provider so that actually they, they proof, to you as a client that they're doing something.

I mean, SNCF, axa, edf, or I dunno, large companies, in France or in in Europe or in the US individually don't have, the power to actually put pressure on Microsoft, or Amazon. But if there are a number of these companies actually asking, and actually in the contract that we are writing with these providers, we, we can add this requirements to provide proof of, of, efforts on the environmental impact of their data center. And this is what is done. It's already in the contract. It's already a criteria, that providers have to answer for when they're actually answering a call for information or , on large projects. And actually, I think you have to do both.

[00:36:42] Gaël: so it's actually three main, ways of actions. The first one being put pressure on your providers. The second one in B. accurate and astute or be wise about what you collect and how much you need to clean it and store it. And the third one is what you developed with,a better use of, software engineering, green Ops, et cetera, that you bundled around, run cleaner, operations.

Would you add something to that? Is it something that you've already noticed that more and more customers, they put some pressure on big providers, or not yet?

[00:37:16] Elin: Well, absolutely. As Héloïse points out, there is very often a clause in the contract stating that there's, well, something around the carbon footprint. But, I think. being Norwegian, we are very aware of the need to transition to renewables, and although we are one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world, the electricity we produce in this country is also 90 4% hydropower. and then what we use is a slightly different answer because we're part of the European market, but let's just stick to the production right now which means that Norway is a very interesting country for the data center providers such as also the Netherlands because of they have wind power. ;But switching from fossil to renewable energy to power the data center only solves a part of the problem.

And we need to keep in mind that all these large platform provider. One of their main KPIs is consumption of cloud services. So whichever way you turn this around, there is use of electricity that to the main extent of the income of these companies decides whether they're going, whether super margin or just the margin, right?

So they always have an incentive to provide as much consumption of services as possible, and I worked in the consulting industry for quite a few years now, and I've heard them saying, for so many years, well just collect all the data. and there has been like this, this belief, this truth, that just collect all the data. Whether you use them or not, or whether you need 'em or not, doesn't really matter.

Just collect them. But that is part of the problem, right? Because the amount of data we collect every day is just exponentially growing, and it will continue to exponentially grow because of the transition to digital services and product. So we really need to change this mindset around whether we collect data or not, for which purposes, and how do we actually handle the data we do collect because we know that.

a lot of the data collected are never used again or maybe just used once. And there are different numbers around how much data is never used, and it varies from what, 50% to almost 90% of the data collected never used again. It's really hard to find the real number, but the point is that a very large share of the data we collect are never used.

And if we are going to use them, there's a huge job in making them usable.

[00:40:05] Gaël: So the cleaning part adds even more cost to the planet than just, just collecting this, huge amount of wasteful data .

[00:40:13] Elin: Yeah.

[00:40:13] Gaël: I think you were referring to both Tom Jackson & Ian R. Hodgkinson,article. The recent one on the Doug data where they started stated that like 50% of the data, was Doug Data and the other numbers come from Jerry Mc Govern.

[00:40:26] Elin: Yes, the world wide waste. Mm.

[00:40:29] Gaël: It's still a huge consensus that it's above 50%. So that's a lot, definitely.

[00:40:34] Héloïse: The good news is actually storing data costs more and more money. And, and one of the reason why I had no difficulties to actually start,a service, in my team, we have a new service in finops. is actually, it costs so much more than before. . like a few years ago, companies thought, okay, the cloud, everything is almost free because it's very cheap.

And they started to pour more and more data in their data, like, and now they realize that actually it costs a lot. And the fine tuning of, how much data we collect, how much we store, and how long is, is starting right now because it's cost, it costs too much for most companies. so, so I, I think it's actually good news because back to reality, people start to ruin eyes.

They have to be more careful, on what they store. And GDPR has a, a good, impact on that because European companies have to be careful about what they store and, and. Should actually prove there is a purpose that's, legitimate. And I think, I think it's a good thing. the darker side is when we talk about data stored by most companies, it's actually something like five or 10% of the global data that's stored because most of the data stored in clouds and infrastructure comes from videos. And that's, that's actually trusted by large, companies such as Netflix and Facebook and Google , and, and, the more data is stored, the more money they do. So actually the constraint is really not the same. when you, when you talk about some sectors in the industry and, and other sectors. So the solution is not the same. And I think, when, when we talk about the amount of data that is stored worldwide, if we really want to address the real impact, we have to address, the streaming industry and, internet companies and what we can do at our level in the industry such as CS and cf.

We have 400 terabyte of data and all. So we are improving that. We are fine tuning, but it's, it's like a drop of, of water in the ocean. It's important to address this drop of water, but the ocean is, Elsewhere.

[00:43:06] Gaël: But this drop still cost you money? Because I had another opinion stated by a, an engineer director who told me recently that he really struggled to motivate his engineers because, you know, eventually you drop everything on a S3 bucket, on AWS and even the cost of creating a data pipeline that will at some point store this rather on glacier, et cetera, didn't worth the money.

[00:43:30] Héloïse: It's a question of, comparison, between,what's the cost now and what it was a few years back. To give you an example, the storing cost, in, in the platform that we manage, I don't have the number exactly, in my mind, but it went from, I don't know, 20,000 euros, a few years back to 400,000 today, something like that.

So it, it multiplied by, a factor 20. So of course, if we reduce that by, I don't know, a half, it's as much money that we can invest on, on new projects or on new, new ideas. So anyway, it's useful to address this and to reduce cost, even if it's not really, really expensive. 400, thousand euros is nothing compared to the global IT budget of A large company like Sncf,

[00:44:27] Gaël: the trend is, the trend is warism, so it's better to pay attention to the trend now rather than, you know, it multiplied by 10 every year. And at some point it starts to really weight on the IT budget that that's your message.

[00:44:39] Héloïse: Yeah, exactly.

[00:44:40] Gaël: And, You know, actually, I, I would love to bounce back on what you said about we need to separate like the streaming industry with other industries.

Now that both El and you Héloïse, you're very keen on talking about real use case for real word people. believe that there is a question of who can truly leverage its data and, and which kind of data is truly used in company.

And el recently , you made this statement that the metaverse is on, you know, is a buzzword. Everyone talks about it , but most companies they still struggle with, their digital transformation.

Would you mind to elaborate a bit with this? Like, very simple but very hard question I, I believe to answer, which is who can truly leverage its data?

[00:45:24] Elin: Huh. that is a really good question. Uh, I think, well, just to start my reasoning off with the vision of the meta.

[00:45:34] Gaël: Hmm.

[00:45:34] Elin: Metaverse.

[00:45:36] Gaël: Please shoot

[00:45:37] Elin: Yeah. Well, mark Zuckerberg has been given the dubious honor of having coined a term, but he didn't. Right. It was in Neil Stevenson's book, snow Crash, 30 years ago.

That's where Metaverse appeared the first time, and now Mark Zuckerberg. Introduced the term again, and then media has to some extent revolved around him for the discussion about what the metaverse is. Reality is that meta is only like a secondary role player in this whole metaverse landscape. I'm not even sure we should call it a metaverse reality is. Virtual reality, augmented reality are technologies that have been on the rise for several years, and really startspotentially creating value for people, solving maybe some new needs, some old needs.

A lot of, uh, different use cases that we might discuss in the context of are these actually relevant or needed for our future? But let's just stick to the technology landscape for now So there are so many players in this landscape and so many commercial interests. And I think this really confusesa lot of leaders and decision makers.

They think that this metaverse thing is something Zuckerberg came up with. So we don't need to care. But that's not the ,situation and I think we just need to look at our kids. They do gaming for fun, and when they're gaming, they also meet their friends and they chat about life when they're gaming and they get more friends that they never meet, but they meet 'em online,and then they also have their avatars and they buy stuff for their avatars. Currency that is somehow based on blockchain or other tokens. And then we have a whole new economy that our 10, 11, 12, 14 year olds grow up with. And that is changing the landscape a few years ahead. And if you think about which use cases do we not, For this virtual reality plus landscape, and I started making a list and I had to scrap the list and go back to which use cases do I not see in this landscape.

That was much easier. I came up with four. First thing is that you need to clean yourself with water that's very physical, so you actually need to do it in the physical world. Then you need to empty your intestines, so you really need to go to the restroom every now and then. You also need to do that in the physical world.

Then you need to eat basically because your food or your body needs physical food. Every now and then you. Eat digital pizzas. And then the fourth thing is recreation. I'm not even talking about sex because the sex industry is probably one of the industries that are going to make most money on this. So we're not talking about that.

We're basically talking about the reproduction of the human species, those four use cases, all other use cases. I think we can somehow, at least parts of a scenario that is in the digital space. And then coming back to Elise's comment about streaming now, about a year ago, a vice president of Intel said in media that to fuel the metaverse, we would have to multiply the power consumption with about a thousand. So a factor thousand. On consumption. Now that is a lot, that is images, video, and language.

[00:49:25] Gaël: But do you believe that most companies and businesses. They will have to start to deal with this huge amount of data, like videos, 3d, et cetera, because the message, I mean, Héloïse's message, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Héloïse was also that it's not the case for the vast majority of businesses today. And we tend to see the word via the lens of, Facebook or Google. But even, even at the, you told me that you didn't have enough data for some maintenance, prediction algorithm, because incident are such a rare event. Fortunately for that, that the amount of data is not enough.

So , if I got it right, both of you, it's like today, businesses, they don't deal with such a big amount of data, but in the future, because of the metaverse that might happen, that actually pretty much all of them, they will have to deal with a massive amount of data. Or am I getting something wrong here?

[00:50:19] Elin: Well, I would add that there is a very huge spread, so very industrial companies like. Luis talked about, they don't have necessarily that much data and they will still need quite a few years to maybe catch up. if they ever will. on the other hand, we have media companies, for example, or insurance companies and banks that have a lot of data.

So there is a huge variety. And I think what is really important isrefuse to discuss these challenging sides because parts of the market doesn't have the challenge.

We still need to talk about both the very real perspective of how can companies, get more data like industry like health and med tech they struggle with access to data like ocean technologies where we really need to understand more about the oceans, about, uh, utilities and energy production. but then on the other hand, we have the extreme cases where they have a lot of data and they use it for very advanced purposes, and we need to be able to think.

Both those thoughts at the same time, and not all leaders need to do that, but I still think they need to understand that their perspective of the world is not the full perspective of the world.

[00:51:47] Gaël: Hmm and other equipped today, there's business leaders.

[00:51:51] Elin: No, .that, was a simple answer.

[00:51:53] Gaël: a straight answer.

[00:51:56] Héloïse: Nope.

[00:51:57] Gaël: come on

[00:51:58] Héloïse: Actually, I don't even un understand what Metaverse is, and I have no idea. Even if we, we had a unlimited amount of energy , and, I dunno, supplying of, everything, I have no idea what a company, an insurance company, a train company, a plane company, what would they do in this, this thing?

and I agree with that in, I think people are not equipped to think about the future,technology such as metaverse for most people, it's just a buzz word, related to the entertainment industry. And I, I don't see something I outside entertainment,

[00:52:41] Elin: if I may add, I think it's easier to think of. As virtual reality plus., and then you could probably easily see use cases, for example, in industryrelated to, training of engineers or technicians in the field and inspection of digital twins, even if you are not on site. I think those two would be maybe two of the first examples, and they're not really metaverse. until they are in next generation of an internet where these data flow across entities and across providers. And maybe that's why I say we should perhaps scrap the term metaverse and talk about it as a more next level of internet and how we use data because it is really about a more immersive way of using data where virtual reality and augmented reality plays a significant role.

[00:53:39] Héloïse: Yes, I understand. So, so actually metaverse would be to digital twin and virtual reality. What AI is to machine learning and robotics. It's, it's just a higher, word to just. group everything into the same concept.

[00:53:58] Elin: Well, I think you can look at it as. internet on steroids where you are not just looking at it and getting feedback, but you become a part of it because you feel like you are part of what happens. Because, for example, you use virtual reality goggles or you have some kind of sensors that are connected to this internet, but the kind of the next generation of.

[00:54:26] Héloïse: but on on that aspect, I think there is a kind of fantasy about what companies can acquire, as technology, new technologies because there is a problem of cost can. , for instance, internet of Things, we, we can, say I think it's a kind of mature technology with sensors is something that we can produce, worldwide they are everywhere.

A bit too much actually. And even with Internet of things, I was surprised because,, when I started at ncf, seven years ago, they started,to use Internet of things and the, they had the idea that they would have deployed hundreds of thousands of sensors on the network.

But actually a few years after that, it's only a few tens of thousands and probably not more. Why? Because it's too expensive to deploy hundreds of thousands of centers on, a network that's, about , 30,000 kilometers wide. It's too expensive in comparisons to what actually, they bring because okay, we can improve, efficiency, measuring for instance, temperature of the rail is important to avoid, problems in, in the summer.

but actually we cannot, it's too expensive to put a temperature sensor. Every kilometer on the network. So actually, even the technology is available, it's, it's not, possible to use it, for this purpose. So I have doubts that, even if, steroids, I don't know, digital twins of steroids, could work because actually it would be too expensive for what it's actually brings. and there is this question of what's the risk if I don't invest in. Maybe it costs, a lot less. I have more failures, but it's okay. because you don't always want to have the best product, because, it's too expensive.

[00:56:42] Elin: Well, I think you're absolutely right, and this is wherewe need a dose of pragmatism into this whole metaverse discussion. Also because if you look at the hardware cost. Having to invest in better hardware, better screens, monitors, gaming machines, better service, not just in the data centers, but on each and every desk.

That is Also, a huge environmental cost,

[00:57:12] Elin: is very often not talked about, but it is very.

[00:57:16] Héloïse: Yeah, and the cost of energy is also something that will come into the picture very, very quickly.

[00:57:24] Gaël: Sorry about that my dear listeners, I don't know where I will cut any of this discussion. I'm enjoying it just too much. I try to keep my episodes below, one hour, But in this case, that's gonna be very difficult, but still being mindful of time and I believe it is highly connected to what you said.

I'd like to ask you one last question about this discussion around Metaverse AI in general, et cetera, and once again. I know I quoted it quite a lot, but I really enjoy, the exchange I had with him with c e me that the massive topic, which is completely overlooked in which there is no research today, is the indirect impact of ai.

Like over technology, digitalization and acceleration of usages thanks to AI are taking an unsustainable toll on the planet. Actually, when you say this sentence, I immediately connected it to this why question that I often asked to my guest, which is, do we really use AI and do we really use data science for the right stuff are we really using data science for stuff that makes a difference or are we increasing the speed thanks to AI or internet on steroids? To quote you Helen,into the very wrong direction,

[00:58:36] Elin: Good question. I think we should just look at AI as a rather advanced tool, but still a tool. but then on a personal level, I'm a medical physicist by education. And well, we basically started. Medical imaging technologies, I see some very obvious use cases, for machine learning in for example, interpreting x-rays And MRIs. and I see some very obvious use cases in food production and in understanding and saving our oceans and also in how we use energy.

And then I see some use cases, for example, in retail where I think, well, the world doesn't actually need this. This is a waste. And I think I would like to just close off with Jerry McGowan's perspective. We need to reduce our consumption. and it doesn't really help to use AI to speed up consumption.

[00:59:34] Gaël: That's one, one of my favorite authors that you quoted in the very soon, future guest in the show, Héloïse You might have some different views on it or not.

[00:59:44] Héloïse: Well, yes. I concur with, with Elin. I think that there is a huge bias on AI in its use because, the people talking,more about AI in the medias or, people who are very, present, in the medias. So, and mosque for instance, is message too much first about what he's doing.

Facebook, Google. It makes us forget that actually agree. AI is just a tool. So the question is not, do we use AI for the right thing? The question, you ask is more is this company business something useful or not?

And that's what I'm wondering about, metaverse or even streaming is, is it okay to have people, sitting in their apartments watching, tv shows for hours? I mean, I do that. Like I, I also watch TV shows, but at some points we have to wonder. AI is just a tool behind businesses. So is it useful to watch TV for so long?

is it useful to, to use trains to use planes? And, and if we ask this question, then the question of, the use of AI is answered as well, because if AI is improving efficiency, reducing cost of those businesses, then it's, and if those businesses are, are thought as useful then AI uses useful.

but it's just a tool actually, , we, we don't ask whether or not having a computer is useful. It, it depends on what you use it for. I mean, I've said many times that we don't have a lot of data at cncf, that we don't use lot of, deep learning because we don't have a lot of, videos and images, but I. Used AI for use cases, that are really useful. because I don't know, I have some use cases where machine learning, just helps technicians and engineers, This is useful, but it's not something you will talk on the media because it's simple

[01:01:59] Elin: I think, what Louise just said, that many of these use cases, they are not going to create headlines. They're not going to get a lot of tabloid attention, but they're still very useful for our society for some reason, and those are the use cases we really need to work more with and solve and make the world a better place. It is about the problems to be solved.

[01:02:23] Gaël: Absolutely. And are you optimistic about our paths, both of you? Will we manage to reach a more sustainable word and actually to increase the digital sustainability in our word

[01:02:35] Héloïse: Well being pessimistic is used less so I am not pessimistic, but sometimes,

I feel a bit, discouraged by, our behavior, the choice of, companies and the choice of individuals. And one of the reasons why I, I wanted to take a step back and I am quitting my job is, I, I think there is, a lot to do in,explaining where is actually the real problem to. today we are talking in Europe a lot about, reducing our energy consumption. And when I hear people, politics and, companies saying, okay, you have to turn off light. No, no, no. That, that, that is not enough. I'm sorry, but turning off the lights, it is useful, but it's 5% of the afford we have to do.

The problem is that people don't have the elders of manager in mind so that the afford is sometimes not towards, the correct direction. It's, it's towards a direction that actually, um, makes, her line. but not on the 80% of, gain we have to focus on. , and I think, I'm, I'm optimistic if a lot of people start yeah, wondering what problem should be solved in a cold, rational way of thinking and not emotional way of thinking.

[01:04:07] Gaël: And what about you, Ellin? Will rationality save us?

[01:04:10] Elin: it could have if humans were ever able to become rational, Some can, and we all become too rational, we become psychopaths. So well, if we look at the development of the human brain, I'm not so, um, optimistic really about our ability to be rational. maybe we can hope that the majority of humans will actually do what they can to make the right choices to make the world a better place. Right now, maybe I'm a bit more pessimistic than Luis.because I think that right now we are not really proving our ability to, make those choices. But, I hope.

[01:04:55] Héloïse: Yeah, I'm optimistic because I think when you actually take the time to explain, people understand and they make the right choices. And actually this podcast is one of the examples I, I've always heard from people saying, okay, if you are a scientist, if you are an expert, keep in mind that you have to explain , this complex concept in three minutes.

That's the, that's what people always say in medias. You only have three minutes to convince people of your thesis, but this is wrong. Otherwise, uh, podcast, lasting one hour, two hours, three hours, we have no audience. But it's not the case. People actually want to take the time to understand. And I think, if experts spend more time on medias and spend a lot of energy explaining concept, taking the time.

Then people will listen and make the right choices. and I think that's what we should do now is maybe, um,work less on everyday life efficiency and work on,communication a bit more so that people individually and collectively in companies or institutions , will make the right choices.

And I'm more optimistic because people actually start to listen a lot. the question is the content of what, what's being said on the media should change and become more rational. I think it's possible.

[01:06:25] Elin: So, that's why people like you and me, um, we have work to do.

[01:06:29] Héloïse: exactly.

[01:06:31] Gaël: And congratulations to the listener who spent, one hour with us trying to understand and deep dive on these topics. that was great to have both of you on the show. I really enjoyed the discussion. I told you, my listeners, that it would be very refreshing with different points of view and a lot of good connection.

I will as usual put, all the, the references, in the show notes. any final word, Elin or Héloïse, that you want to share before we close the podcast?

[01:06:57] Elin: Well, no, I think, first of all, I just want to say thank you for inviting, and Louise, it was a pleasure to meet you, if I can put it that way. And of course, for listeners, I'll be happy for people to reach out and share their opinions, or questions as well.

[01:07:12] Héloïse: And well, same. Really thank you girl for this time together. It was, nice. And I would say, well, if I have a final word,it would be, forget about, over technology of,usages. actually in many cases, the simple, solution is the best, because it's faster to implement.

It's simpler to maintain and it costs a lot less. Of course, my team of data scientists are not very happy when I say that, but in the end, they understand and they agree with that. If it works, and if it does the job, then we have to focus on that and okay, it won't make the hand lines, but it will make the business work more efficiently and in the end, that's what we want to do.

[01:08:08] Gaël: And I believe that will be the closing word. Don't rush for over personalization. Go for the simplest solution. Thanks a lot to both of you. That was a very cool interview.

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In this episode, we go to both Denver and Montpellier to meet Cameron Casher, Clean Tech Strategist at ThoughWorks, and Benjamin Davy, Sustainability Director at Teads. Being both hands-on engineers 👨‍💻 and well-known voices in Cloud Sustainability 🌱, they were the perfect match to assess the Sustainability dashboards provided by AWS, GCP and Azure as well as pro and con of Cloud Carbon Footprint, the open-source tool. Which one can truly help responsible technologists to assess 📏 their GHG emissions ?

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In this episode, we go to London and meet David Mytton the co-founder and CEO of Console and also an academic doing his PhD on sustainable computing in Oxford University 🎓. All David’s work follow a consistent thread that could be described as “Effective Sustainability requires reliable and transparent information”. Under this angle, we discussed the environmental impact of datacenters and why the estimates vary so much, the accuracy of carbon footprint calculators for websites as well as the choice of language and CI/CD when we aim to develop greener code 👩‍💻.

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In our April’s episode, we went to Berlin and meet Chris Adams, an "environmentally focussed tech generalist" as he likes to describe himself. From the early days of Rail Europe to the Green Web Foundation of which he is the executive director, Chris has always been passionate about environmental topics. In the Digital Sustainability field, Chris is such an old-timer that we decided to split our interview in two parts! In this second part, we discussed Digital Sustainability in general, past trends as well as expected developments. Chris also shared with us a mountain of references and people to follow in order to learn more about how to green the Web and beyond.

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For this episode we went to South England, near Exmoor national park, to meet Hannah Smith aka hanopcan. She is one of the most vocal sustainability advocates in the WordPress community as as in many others from Climate Action Tech to the Green Web Foundation. She will blow your mind with her pragmatic and efficient approach and will help you make almost 40% of all the words websites greener.

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In our May’s episode, we went to Berlin and meet Chris Adams, an "environmentally focussed tech generalist" as he likes to describe himself. From the early days of Rail Europe to the Green Web Foundation of which he is the executive director, Chris has always been passionate about environmental topics. In the Digital Sustainability field, Chris is such an old-timer that we decided to split our interview in two parts! In this first part, after taking the time to know Chris a bit better and how he burnt 20M$ in VC, we discussed at length about Green Hosting and Cloud Sustainability. And we deep dived in a step by step approach to green ops greatly helped by the questions coming from the Tech community following Green I/O. A warm thank you to them.

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In this episode, we went to Paris and met Elisabeth Mouchy. In 2013, Elisabeth co-founded Delighted, the Spotify for art in San Francisco. Now, she is now Product Director at Meetic, the multi-awarded dating service. She is super open to provide feedback and insights on Digital Sustainability, a topic she has helped ramp-up at Meetic. We will see how to make sustainable the move toward greener product management. And the way Meetic has tackled painpoints ranging from "Where do I start" to "How to avoid the end-of-the-world versus end-of-the-month dilemna?". This episode has benefited from the support of a dozen of digital product experts across Europe. A warm thank you to them.

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For the second episode of Green I/O, I met Sandra Sydow. She is a natural-born European: borned French, having studied in Sweden, worked in Germany where she married and now living in the UK for almost 10 years. Sandra has an impeccable track record at PHD as a Managing Partner where she thrived making complicated things easy to understand in digital marketing and working for global brands like Airbus, HP or Expedia. 2 years ago, she decided to dedicate her communication and pedagogical skills to fight climate change. She co-founded the climate pitch and became a Board member at the Digital Collage. In this  episode, we did not deep dive into a specific area like Green Hosting or Green AI but we focused on the most important asset in any Digital Tech company: humans! And the challenges we face when it comes to raising awareness about the increasing ecological footprint of our digital world. And transform it into concrete actions.

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For the first episode of Green I/O, I interviewed Fershad Irani a web performance expert and restless advocate for a low carbon web in his newsletter "Optimized". He helps environmentally conscious companies ensure their websites are fast, optimised for performance, and have a low carbon impact. Based in Taipei after graduating in Sydney, Fershad also contributes to open-source projects like OpenSpaceData and is an active member of the climateaction.tech community, where I discovered his work. He has recently launched 'Are my third parties green?' a much-needed tool to give some visibility to the sustainability of third-party requests on the web.

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A 1 minute intro to this brand new podcast talking about Sustainability, Green IT and overall our path toward a greener digital world! Why it has been created? For whom? What to expect every month? How do we monetize? Quick answer: we don't ;) Green I/O is a non-profit podcast!