Green IO

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.
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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 [email protected] 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
Intro 00:00
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 Duez 00:25
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 Price 03:55
Thank you.

Aiste Rugeviciute 03:56
Hi, thanks for having us.

Gael Duez 03:59
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 Rugeviciute 04:12
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 Price 04:57
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 Rugeviciute 05:57
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 Price 06:48
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 Duez 07:31
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 Price 08:02
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 Rugeviciute 12:05
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 Duez 14:09
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 Price 14:25
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 Duez 16:26
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 Rugeviciute 17:12
I would very much hope so.

Aiste Rugeviciute 17:17
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 Duez 19:55
By B Corp, you mean the label that some companies get.

Aiste Rugeviciute 20:00
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 Duez 20:48
Thanks for the clarification. And let's go back to what you were saying previously.

Aiste Rugeviciute 20:55
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 Price 22:42
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 Rugeviciute 23:52
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 Duez 25:29
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 Price 25:58
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 Rugeviciute 30:05
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 Duez 30:54
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 Rugeviciute 31:32
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 Duez 37:45
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 Price 39:48
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 Rugeviciute 43:35
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 Price 45:11
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 Duez 46:20
And is it also a question of accepting proxy metrics instead of final metrics?

Aiste Rugeviciute 46:27
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 Duez 48:30
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 Price 51:03
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 Rugeviciute 54:40
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 Price 58:39
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 Duez 59:13
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 Rugeviciute 59:45
Thank you.

Rob Price 59:46
Great. Thanks.

Gael Duez 59:49
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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Roxanne 1:01:20
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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 London South Bank University, 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 [email protected] 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

Transcript
Intro 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 London South Bank University 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.

Outro 54:42
Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it via email, 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 five stars on Spotify or Apple Podcasts because of course you already did it, didnt you?

It's time for you to grab a book or enjoy a good article. And guess what? You can find many ideas in the latest edition of the Green IO monthly newsletter. And don't forget to book your ticket for the next Green IO conference in London on September 19. Good news for your holiday budget. You can still 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 back in six weeks to help you, fellow responsible technologists build a queener digital world.

Roxanne 55:40
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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.
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Trista and Paul's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

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• 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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• Owen’s LinkedIn
• Gaël's website 
• Green IO website 
  
  

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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 Intro 00:00With 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 Duez 00:24Hello 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 Akue 02:41Happy to be here. Thanks for the invitation, Gael.
Owen Rogers 02:44Thanks for the intro, Gael.
Gael Duez 02:48So 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 Akue 03:16Yeah. 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 Duez 03:59It 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 Akue 04:19Yeah, 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 Duez 05:05I 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 Akue 05:31But, 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 Duez 06:15And what about you, Owen? What were the goals when you started this sustainably journey at .eco?
Owen Rogers 06:23So 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 Duez 09:23But just for clarification, Owen, your goal was to reduce by 4% in two years.
Owen Rogers 09:29Within 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 Duez 11:09Fair 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 Akue 11:23Yeah, 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 Duez 12:32Right. 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 Akue 13:00So 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 Duez 14:18That'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 Akue 15:13The 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 Duez 18:13And 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 Akue 19:05Yes, 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 Duez 19:21And just for the sake of understanding this e-commerce platform that you've chosen, was the sustainability criteria taken into consideration?
Ludi Akue 19:33I 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 Duez 19:54And 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 Rogers 20:10So, 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 Duez 23:10Did 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 Akue 23:22We 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 Duez 24:48But 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 Rogers 25:14So 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 Duez 26:33And 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 Rogers 27:23Well, 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 Duez 31:35Ludi, 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 Akue 32:56Not 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 Rogers 34:24For 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 Duez 35:14And 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 Rogers 35:50Well, 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 Duez 37:30And 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 Akue 38:11My 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 Duez 40:42If 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 Akue 41:33Yeah, you are correct. You need to shift left on sustainability.
Gael Duez 41:39When 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 Rogers 42:13We'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 Duez 42:45Would you be able to share this KPI? Not the numbers, but what they are?
Owen Rogers 42:50Well, 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 Duez 43:29So 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 Akue 44:10Yeah, 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 Duez 45:41And how did you manage to get some positive arbitrage towards sustainability.
Ludi Akue 45:47We 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 Duez 46:22I'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 Akue 46:55What 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 Duez 47:08Can I borrow your statement that sustainability is no longer an option? To make it the title of the episode?
Ludi Akue 47:18With great pleasure.
Gael Duez 47:21And 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 Rogers 47:35I 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 Duez 49:43So 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 Akue 50:10Yeah, 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 Duez 51:16Yeah, 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 Rogers 52:08I'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 Duez 53:11So 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 Akue 53:51Thank you, Gael.
Owen Rogers 53:52Thank you and thank you both. Thank you, Ludi. Great to meet you.
Ludi Akue 53:55Yeah, great to meet you too.
Gael Duez 53:59Thank 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!
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📣 Green IO London is 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 [email protected] 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 Intro 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
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. Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletters, 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. Early bird tickets are available until June 18, but 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 one bite at a time.
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 📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

🤔 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


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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 [email protected] 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 Intro 00:00

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

Gael Duez 00:20

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 Kalliola 02:28

Thanks for having us. It's a pleasure.

Satu Heikinheimo 02:30

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

Gael Duez 02:36

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 Heikinheimo 03:06

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 Duez 04:40

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

Satu Heikinheimo 04:47

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 Duez 05:32

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

Gael Duez 05:41

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

Janne Kalliola 05:50
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 Duez 08:08

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 Kalliola 08:33

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 Duez 09:54
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 Kalliola 10:50

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 Heikinheimo 14:26

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 Duez 15:24

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 Kalliola 16:01

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 Duez 17:16
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 Heikinheimo 17:33

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 Duez 17:58

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 Heikinheimo 19:17

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 Kalliola 21:33

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 Duez 22:48

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 Heikinheimo 23:02

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 Kalliola 24:23

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

Satu Heikinheimo 24:30

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 Kalliola 24:47

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 Duez 26:45

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 Heikinheimo 27:59

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 Kalliola 30:42

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 Heikinheimo 34:20

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 Kalliola 34:59
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 Heikinheimo 35:12

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 Duez 35:59
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 Kalliola 36:52
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 Heikinheimo 38:53
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 Duez 39:52

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 Heikinheimo 42:16
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 Duez 43:31

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

Satu Heikinheimo 43:38

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 Kalliola 44:44

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 Heikinheimo 46:48
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 Duez 47:58

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 Kalliola 48:13

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 Heikinheimo 49:09

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 Duez 51:15

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 Heikinheimo 51:41

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

Janne Kalliola 51:45

Yes, thanks for having us. It was a true pleasure.
Outro 51:49

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. 

In our next episode, we will talk about Amazon web service, AWS and low carbon cloud operations with a renowned expert, Adrian Cockroft, the former VP Amazon Sustainability architecture and a leading force in the Green Software Foundation initiative to achieve a common reporting standard across all cloud providers. 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 19. Early bird tickets are available until June 18, but 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 one byte at a time.
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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, and🤝 the Influence of big tech companies through lobbying
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• Max’s LinkedIn
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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 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
The 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. 
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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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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 00:00

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. 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 02:44

Thank 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 02:55

You'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 04:08

Yeah. Also while being pregnant.

Gaël Duez 04:13

I mentioned it, but I didn't want to bring it up yet another time in the discussion.

Sara Bergman 04:18

Yeah. 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 06:49

Are you going to use the generating AI to do your emails? I'm surprised.

Sara Bergman 06:54

They 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 07:04

Yeah, 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 08:00

Yeah, 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 09:30

That 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 10:04

So, 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 11:53

Regarding 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 12:05

It 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 12:50

I didn't know about federated learning. Could you share an example? Did you have some ideas and illustrations in your mind?

Sara Bergman 12:58

So 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 13:28

And do they provide an order of magnitude? Is it like 5 times, 50 times, 1 million times less carbon intensive?

Sara Bergman 13:37

Yeah, 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 13:57

You 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 14:46

Two 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 14:59

Okay, 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 15:34

Yeah, 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 18:36

And 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 19:13

Would 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 19:43

And 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 21:22

I 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 23:53

Yeah, 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 24:34

Oh, that's interesting. I don't know.

Gaël Duez 24:36

But 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 24:55

Yeah, 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 26:15

And 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 27:07

Yes, 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 28:27

I'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 28:59

Yeah, 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 29:35

We'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 30:19

Agreed? 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 30:44

Let'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 33:34

Absolutely. 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 35:34

Yeah, 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 36:16

I 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 37:31

Thanks 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 37:58

Yeah. 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 38:57

Yeah, 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 41:09

Thank 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.
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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 [email protected] 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!
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📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] 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 00:21
Hello 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 03:54
Hi guys, thanks for having me. So it's my pleasure to be on your podcast.
Gaël Duez 03:59
So 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 04:53
Sure. 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 05:33
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Singapore is a very massive IT hub in Southeast Asia, is that correct?
PS Lee 05:42
Yes. 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 06:59
You mean that for two years and a half it was not permitted to build new data center facilities in Singapore.
PS Lee 07:07
That's right.
Gaël Duez 07:08
And just to make sure I understood well it's already 7% of electricity consumption and it could triple with the current trend.
PS Lee 07:17
Yes 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 07:35
So 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 08:19
Yeah 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 12:42
If 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 12:56
Yes. These are the exact four points that.
Gaël Duez 12:59
I 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 13:33
Yeah. 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 14:47
I 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 15:13
So 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 17:10
What about the infrastructure? I mean, you need a connection cable. Are they already there? Do you plan to construct more?
PS Lee 17:16
Yes, 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 18:05
And 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 18:32
So 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 20:41
And 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 21:40
I 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 23:40
Because 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 24:14
I 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 25:58
Just 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 26:59
So 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 32:49
I'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 33:32
One 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 35:27
It'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 35:37
I 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 37:13
The 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 38:07
So 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 40:20
And 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 41:02
Not 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 42:36
Now 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 44:30
I 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 47:48
However, 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 48:15
It'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 50:05
So 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 50:32
Sure. 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 51:42
Yeah, 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 52:16
Sure. Thanks for having me.
Gaël Duez 52:19
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