Green IO

What if you could get sued if your website is not low-carbon enough? What if you would be barred from many call for tenders if your digital services don’t hit minimum sustainability requirements? 

Science-fiction? 
This is what people said on 5 May 1999 when the first version ever of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines was released by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). 20 years later, these pitfalls are day-to-day concerns for many digital companies and digital service providers. 
On August 31st this year, the W3C released its first ever Sustainability Guidelines (draft version). Ines Akrape and Lukas Mastalerz, two of its core contributors, share insider insights in this episode on how it will impact the way of working for millions of web developers, designers, ops and data folks. And why we will certainly not wait 20 years for this to happen…
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Learn more about our guest and connect: 

• Ines' LinkedIn
• Lukasz' LinkedIn
• Gaël's LinkedIn 
• Gaël's website 
• Green IO website 
• Green IO newsletter 
  
  

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Ines's and Lukasz’ sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

• The W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) 1.0
• The Digital Collage workshop to better understand Digital Sustainability issues
• The Sustainable Web Manifesto
• Green IO Episode 19 with Sandy Dähnert
• Green IO Episode 9 with Tim Frick
• Green IO Episode 8 with Anne Faubry
• Climate Arc
• Fershad Irani and his project aremythirdpartiesgreen
• ReSpec
• New York Climate Week
• GRI standards
• 
  

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

• In 2024, since the release of the WSG, people working in Web Dev have experienced something, noticed something, et cetera. 
• In 2026, since the release of WSG version,  X (you pick the number) people working in Web Dev have done …. ?. 
• in 2030, since the release of WSG (version xx !), people working in Web Dev have accomplished …. ?

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


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How do you decarbonize your operations when most of the action takes part outside of your organization? 🕵️This is the issue SaaS companies face with IT sustainability. 🌱In the latest Green IO episode I (Gaël Duez) sat down with Tereze Gaile to get insights from Salesforce’s approach. Tereze is the lead author of the “Sustainability Guide for Salesforce Technology”. We also partnered in this episode with Niklas Sundberg, author of “Sustainable IT Playbook for Technology Leaders” and a pillar of sustainableit.org to take a step back on Salesforce’s feedback and get a broader context.
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Learn more about our guest and connect: 

• Niklas' LinkedIn
• Tereze’s LinkedIn
• Gaël's LinkedIn 
• Gaël's website 
• Green IO website 
• Green IO newsletter 
  
  

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Niklas’ and Tereze's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

• Sustainability Guide for Salesforce Technology 
• Niklas Sunberg’ book Sustainable IT Playbook for Technology Leaders 
• EU CSRD legislation
• Sustainableit.org 
• Boavitza
• ClimateAction.Tech
• Science Based Targets initiative
• Green software foundation
• Dr. Melvin Vopson 'The environmental weight of data'
• Environmental Variables podcast
• CIO CO2 in Sweden
• Harvard’s course Enabling a Sustainable Digital Transformation 
• Sustainable Business Network’s course on Leadership in Sustainable Business
• Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s GitHub repository
  
  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:04:39] Tereze: Exactly. 

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

And what about you, Niklas? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:50:10] Niklas: Thank you so much. Very happy to be here and I had a really great discussion today.


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Our regular Green IO host Gaël Duez meets Harriet Kingaby and Mathieu Jahnich to get the low-down on greenwashing, and, more importantly, how to avoid it.Mathieu Jahnich is a consultant and researcher, and also a lecturer at Sciences Po, Paris, where he teaches responsible communication & marketing on several Masters programs. Harriet Kingaby is a strategic communications expert who focuses on responsible marketing and communications at the intersection of advertising, human rights and climate change.Together they cover multiple questions: How do you define greenwashing? How can companies effectively talk about their CSR actions and their move towards sustainability without falling into the trap of greenwashing? ...With concrete examples of best practice, and real-life case scenarios, Harriet and Mathieu also touch on the legal landscape, and the current and forthcoming changes that all businesses must be aware of.Don’t want to fall into the greenwashing trap? Listen in to find out more.
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• Harriet's LinkedIn
• Mathieu’s LinkedIn
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📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Harriet’s and Mathieu's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

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

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

[37,17] Harriet
So I'm not a legal expert, I'll start by saying that. But I think to understand this space, you do have to understand a little bit of the legal background. So, forgive me, the legal experts out there, I am a comms person trying to explain it simply. So, what we've got is this rapidly changing landscape. The EU has released essentially a roadmap, a directive that's showing the direction of travel. And this kind of direction of travel is essentially one that means that there's going to be stronger and more precise kinds of regulations around greenwashing. And the way that they [the EU] have done it means that they've set a direction of travel, which is concentrating on things like vague and misleading terms. You talked about the 'carbon neutral' one there, which I would absolutely challenge anyone to define what carbon neutral really means and tell me what methodology there is for getting there. And of course, those kinds of vague terms, that's exactly what they're designed to do and that's exactly why they're misleading and confusing. So, those kinds of terms will not be allowed. Individual countries will need to adapt this direction of travel to their countries and to their own legal systems.
[38,58] Harriet
So obviously we will have different interpretations and different enforcement across Europe. But organizations do really need to be looking at this space and listening to the communications that are coming out from the EU. And we're all waiting for them to firm up. In the UK, what we are seeing is actually the ASA and the CMA [Competition & Markets Authority, UK] are starting to actually define where they're going, through using these kinds of landmark rulings. There have been several recently that are setting a precedent for where we think they're going. And I used the HSBC example before, of organizations signaling that they are cracking down on organizations who are spotlighting particular green things issues whilst ignoring the rest of the product lifecycle or the usage lifecycle, for example. And there was a recent ruling around Shell, which I think everyone in my climate social circle was very happy to see, where again, they're signaling that this kind of greenwashing from fossil fuel companies just isn't going to be allowed. They're talking about much stronger fines and much stronger enforcement around that. So, it is a really big business risk for organizations.
[40,03] Harriet
But what we know today is that it's going to look different across different markets. The US, with the political developments in the US, where the Republicans have majority control of the House, I don't think we're seeing an appetite for leadership there, frankly. We've got many organizations that work in the mis- and dis-information space, and who are being asked to provide huge amounts of documents to the US political system. So, I still see Europe as leading in this space, with close markets such as the UK keeping a very keen eye on what's happening and probably copying and using some of that. And I see markets like the [United] States being laggards.
[40,54] Gaël
Mathieu, would you like to comment on this one?

[40,57] Mathieu
My question now, regarding this hardening of the regulatory framework in France, in Europe and abroad, is, it's a good thing to have new rules and hard law tackling climate change. But the issue is what resources will be available to enforce the law, both financial and human resources. And for instance, in France, the neutrality claim is now strictly framed, but I can still see those claims in packaging, for bottled water, for example. And I don't know whether the directorate in charge of protecting the consumers are willing to fight against that, and to make the law be applied. So that's a question for me. At the European level, they are talking about having claims and labels to be checked by an independent and accredited verifier, and I don't know how this will be done. You have a very big number of companies that are communicating about their engagements, etc., and does that mean that every single claim will have to be checked by an independent party, and which one, and how much will this cost? So that's a very important sign that is sent by the European Union, that greenwashing is not an option, and that it's a drawback to the fight against climate change and against transition. So, it's important to fight it. But I'm waiting to see the final text and how it will be applied and followed by all the authorities.
[42,55] Gaël
Quick comment on this, because A), you're right, you need to have some resources to check and the willingness to check. I mean, I've discovered very recently that less than 10% of the French companies that are now legally required by law to disclose their carbon emissions have been fined, because the Ministry of Economy is still in 'educational mode'. I'm sure that a lot of the other French taxpayers will enjoy knowing that they can be in 'educational mode' because most of the time they're not with us. But that's me being maybe too populist. So sorry about that. But I was really upset when I saw that. The second stuff [B] is like if you don't provide resources, I mean, this controlling body, if you've got 20 civil servants to deal with a million claims per year, obviously that's also a very efficient way for nothing to happen. But do you also have some ideas about the level of the fine? Because GDPR, for instance, really changed the game because for the very first time we were talking about real money. Not real money for Facebook or Google, because 4% is still small potatoes for them, but for a lot of big tech companies, getting a huge fine, which is a percentage of your revenues, that's something very serious. That's a very tangible risk. Do you know something about the potential fines on green-washing?
[44,25] Mathieu
We had examples from the recent past. In Italy, for example, Eni was fined €5 million because of misleading claims. And in the Netherlands last year, H&M and Decathlon had to pay €400,000 and €500,000 (respectively) to NGOs, to avoid being sued by the authority in charge of protecting consumers. So that can be huge amounts. And that's another interesting point regarding the regulation, that NGOs will be more and more entitled to sue big companies.
[45,13] Gaël
Yes, that's a very positive message, at least for the B2C sector and the B2B company which has some kind of public visibility because then the B2B sector is not really the one that the NGO will go after because they also need some publicity to keep the ball rolling. But still, that is a very positive signal indeed. Okay, so I learned a lot during this episode, and actually I learned very tangible stuff that I think I will apply with some of my clients and partners. So thanks a lot for that. Maybe one final question to both of you, Harriet and Mathieu. You shared a lot of resources and we will put them in the show notes (I've already mentioned that). But do you want to add one or two podcasts, books, articles, thought-leaders that you believe people should follow when it comes to greenwashing? And I would say on a more positive note, responsible communication?
[46,17] Harriet
Sure. This is such a rapidly developing area for anyone that is on the Greenwashing front. ACT is hosted within an organization called Media Bounty. It's an ethical ad organization. We are doing a series of thought leadership pieces about navigating Greenwash. So go to Media Bounty's website and there's an event coming up in London on the 29th this month. As well for anyone that's based there. I do think that it is really worth following the rulings of some of these bodies. So going to the ASA's websites and looking at rulings around greenwash. I think looking at organizations, if you're kind of working in advertising and comms and you want to look at ways of doing things well, there's a community of people called Clean Creatives sorry, Creatives for Climate, who have a network. And it's a network of practitioners who are sharing good practice, sharing bad practice, and looking at how they can support each other. So I think if you're working in this space and you want to be connected to a community, I would definitely go to Creators for Climate and have a look at what's on there.
[47,40] Mathieu
I would like to point out a really good newsletter dedicated to the fight against greenwashing. The name is 'The Crisps' and it's a newsletter made by Lavinia Muth and Tanita Hecking. And these are two women working in the marketing and communication sector, especially in the apparel industry, and they are sending one newsletter per month and two per month if you buy the pro-format of the newsletter. And that's really good 'crispy' content, very good content regarding Greenwashing,
[48,24] Gaël
Thanks Mathieu and Harriett for joining Green IO and sharing all those new references on top of the others (references). I hope that you will keep on carrying the torch of responsible communication as high as possible. And I do hope that Green IO will help you in carrying it a bit higher after the release of the episode. Thanks a lot.
[48,44] Harriet
Oh, thanks so much Gael. And thanks for everyone for listening. It's been great.
[48,48] Mathieu
Thank you. Bye.


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Transcript
Gaël:
Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time.
Our digital world has a tremendous impact on the environment, and its trend makes it even more unsustainable than almost any other industry. To address these issues, we need everyone on deck within the Tech industry and beyond. It’s a challenge compared to other sectors. Take the worldwide road freight for instance, it accounts for roughly 4% of all GHG emissions like digital tech but not all companies operate a truck on their own and not everyone has a small delivery van in their garage. 
Here's where Green IO comes in. I started my journey as a podcaster a year and a half ago, with a fulfilling 1st season. Together,  you and  I had the pleasure to meet more than 30 guests across 22 episodes. Looking forward to our second season, we’ve sharpened the show’s identity, honing it to 3 key principles. 

1. First:“Embracing diversity” 

With their diversity of gender, of countries, of lines of work, our guests allow us to see the world under multiple angles. And this diversity of angles strengthens our systemic thinking muscle which is crucial to tackle the ongoing environmental crises. Plus, it allows us to be ready to welcome thought provoking conversations like the one I had with Anne Curie - an acclaimed O’Reilly author on Green Software about the futility of code optimisation!

Anne:
"Write code that is absolutely good for the language that you're writing in. Because compilers do a fantastic job at optimizing your code for you. Don't second guess your compiler."
 
Gaël:
2. The 2nd principle is a bias for action & problem solving
Each episode will focus more and more on a precise problem to solve. This is why I enjoy inviting doers like Drew Engelson - Starbucks’ head of engineering.

Drew:
“ So I thought, you know, how do I go create my own metrics and, you know, ultimately said, okay, well I'll look at our cost that's directly correlated to the number of resources I'm using or our compute hours and for various services and built like a mapping between those metrics I have easy access to from our cloud dashboards. Apply some algorithm to it and, and come up with a number. Right? And I did that and we created, you know, a chart over time. And in addition to that also thought about building a recommendation engine.”
Gaël:
3. The 3rd and last principle is “Building bridges”
In his podcast “The Great Simplification” Nate Hagan stated that we need more diplomats within the sustainability field to enable people with strong identities (climate change, biodiversity, climate justice, global south, etc.) to discuss with each other and achieve common understanding. I’ve always pictured myself as a bridge builder with a constructive stance. This state of mind is also what I’m looking for with our guests. As illustrated in the 1st episode of season 2 by Harriet Kingaby who remains constructive even when facing greenwashing mistakes!

Harriet:
" What we often see driving greenwashing is not necessarily organizations sitting down and saying 'How can we mislead consumers' (though we definitely see that). Often you might see an overexcited marketing team who were really proud of something that the organization has done, who actually, (I think, with the best will in the world), spotlight it, ignoring the other stuff that the organization does."

Gaël:
Focusing on building common understanding allows us to be optimistic, and I remain - like Christiana Figueres - a stubborn optimist. This is also what I’m looking for with guest like Sandy Dänhert talking about sustainable design.

Sandy:
"This is what it can look like. It's not boring, it's not outdated, it's not just minimalist. It can be minimalistic if it fits the brand - and that's cool as well - but it doesn't have to. It can be vibrant and colorful."

Gaël:
And following these three key principles, we will target 2 complementary goals in this 2nd season: 

1. Training our systemic muscles, and
2. Sharpening our green skills

• To train our systemic muscles, we must be curious. We will explore various environmental topics like carbon accounting, electronic waste, impact business model, anthropological studies, greenwashing, and new legal frameworks, to name a few.
• We will also sharpen our green skills. How we - as responsible technologists - we can reduce the environmental footprint of our activities. We will get the latest tools and hands-on insights on focused topics such as impact measurement, Greener Data science and data engineering, Sustainable Design, Sustainable Product Management, Green Software development, Sustainable Cloud operations, etc.
  
  

We will have episodes that touch on both goals, and some that focus on just one. But all the while we will achieve our main goal, to make our digital world greener, one byte at a time.

Green IO Season Two starts next Tuesday September 5th. I’ll see you there.


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

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

Learn more about our guests and connect

• Perrine's LinkedIn
• Tristan’s LinkedIn
• Perrine's podcast Déclics Responsables
• Tristan’s podcast l'Octet Vert
• Gaël's LinkedIn 
• Gaël's website 
• Green IO website 

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:07:02] Gaël: yeah,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:39:41] Perrine: just

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:44:24] Tristan: yeah.

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

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

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

[00:45:37] Perrine: diversity,

[00:45:38] Gaël: diversity once

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Anne's LinkedIn
• Arne’s LinkedIn
• Gaël's LinkedIn 
• Gaël's website 
• Green IO website 

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Anne and Arne’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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Learn more about our guests and connect
Jacqueline Mukarukundo is a passionate advocate for the environment, co-founder of Wastezon, a Rwandan clean tech startup driving a waste-free world. Her zeal in Marketing led Wastezon to emerge as the best E-waste Solution Provider-East Africa in 2019 Build Magazine’s Recycling and Waste Management Awards.

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

• Jacqueline's LinkedIn
• Vanessa’s LinkedIn
• Gaël's LinkedIn 
• Gaël's website 
• Green IO website 

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Jacqueline and Vanessa’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vanessa: Thank you. Thank you for the invitation.

Jacqueline: Thank you for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vanessa: Thanks for the question and thanks for making the comparisons. Indeed it's a lot of data and we do actually compile worldwide data on, well, we start from analyzing production and trade statistics at worldwide level. We do this exercise for all countries in the world that are UN member states.

So basically we analyze the sales of electric and electronic products every year. Then we also analyzed and imports/exports and the domestic production. And these are data that are available to the open public as well because they're published in the UN Comtrade database.

So what we did is to really have a list of all products that are, that can be classified as electric and electronic product and we compile all this information at global level. We make a simple calculation that it seems simple, but then when you run this model for all countries in the world, sorry, then this will of course increase the complexity.

But the simple calculation that we do is imports minus exports, plus domestic production. So basically we account for whatever is sold in the country as such so whatever comes in, minus whatever goes out, plus whatever is produced domestically in terms of electric and electronic products. So that's the simple idea let's say, and then we link it to the lifetime of the products. 

So we made over the years assessments on by linking this average lifetimes to the sells, we would know when this product will become waste. So at the very end, we have a database that goes from 1980 up to the current year. Then we are able to make estimates also over time and we have made estimates up to 2050. 

So that's a bit how we come to those data and hopefully this provides a bit more insights also.

Gael: Oh, he does definitely. And how accurate should we think about there's 53.6 million. Is it like plus or minus 5% or plus or minus 50%?

Vanessa: Well, that's a good question actually. We have tried to assess this over the years, and all in all, we can say that we feel confident with the data that we provide and that we calculate because they're based on real data that are actually reported by countries. So the production and trade statistics are official data from countries.

Of course there is a certain level of uncertainty when it comes also to domestic production because domestic production, it's an indicator that is not easily or readily available at international level, and many countries may not disclose that information or may not be available. So in that sense, indeed there is a certain level of uncertainty. However, the model compensates for potential lack of information at domestic production level, let's say.

So we run many statistical corrections when we are on the model to make sure to really limit the level of uncertainty at the very end, we guess and estimated the level of uncertainties indeed around 5 to maximum 10%. But it would not be more than that in my view.

Gael: Plus or minus 5%. So that, that gives a good idea of what kind of number we should share with the general public and you mentioned trends. Geographically speaking, but also maybe by time of equipments., What are the trends that you've noticed recently?

Vanessa: When we look at the categories of e-waste the trends that we have observed is that of course temperature exchange equipment are growing at high speed. So there has been an increase of 7% compared to 2014, for example, and that's the highest grow rate among the 6 European categories. There is a very big growth on consumption on air conditioners, for example, in the global south that we have noticed in the past years and therefore this is definitely impacting the future e-waste generation for sure. 

When it comes to screens and monitors, for example, the consumption in terms of number of units is increasing and has increased a lot during Covid as well, especially because of the, we guess it's because of the increase usage of those appliances at home from smart work. Therefore we have seen an increase in that sense. However, at the same time, those screens and monitors are becoming lighter and lighter over the years. If we imagine that we transition from the old CRTs to the new technologies and screens that are now very flat and very light, they became much lighter.

So in terms of weight, the screens and monitors is the category that is decreasing over time. But of course they're increasing in terms of number of units. Just to answer your question on the regional aspect and regional differences, we notice a rapid increase in new waste generation in the global south.

Especially Africa has been contributing to the E-waste mountain with a lower speed compared to higher income countries. But African countries are now also showing a very rapid increase in the past years. So that's a trend that maybe makes sense to highlight as well as the Asian situation that of course, being Asia continent that is very populous with many billion people, of course, is the continent that is contributing the most to the global e-waste generation.

Gael: And there is one figure actually that struck me, that we've got this big increase in e-waste, sometimes in weight, sometime in quantities and sometime in both. If I understood you well, especially regarding IT equipment, and then there is this recycling issue. I remember this number that less than 18% of a global e-waste is recycled.

Can you tell us a bit more about it?

Vanessa: Thanks. I think very relevant point to highlight. So the trend that I would like to highlight is that, we have noticed, the global e-waste recycled is growing at lesser of a speed compared to the increase of the speed at which the global waste generation is instead growing. 

The global waste generation is growing a much higher speed compared to the e-waste recycling figure, and that is for several reasons. 

The first and very important one is that, while the global waste generation is modeled, it's our data that are modeled with the model I just explained. The e-waste formally recycled is actually coming from data that we collect and gather directly from countries.

So these are data that are reported by governments around the the world. So the figure reflects what is currently available at national governments. It is also true that many governments, especially in the global south, don't have this figure so don't gather the figure and therefore we do not receive information on the amount of e-waste formally collected.

The reason could be many. The main one is that if there is no legislation in place, there is no formal obligation for governments to report on the e-waste formally collected. There is definitely also not a system in place to monitor the recycling facilities or to survey the recycling facilities.

The second reason is also that, of course, the countries that don't have a legislation would hardly have a well-working e-waste management system because not having any obligation no business is willing to establish in a country. So it's a sort of a loop with no legislations, it is easier or let's say it is more difficult for the US recycling to establish.

 Other way around if no US recycling is happening, it's harder for the governments to regulate the subject for countries with the legislation instead. The recycling rates are still low nevertheless so if we look at Europe as well, where there is a redirective for many years and the e-waste recycling is very well regulated.

But still most of the countries are far from reaching the collection targets.

Gael: And taking a concrete example, Jacqueline, could you t ell us a bit more on the situation in Rwanda when it comes to legal requirements, recycling rate, etc. Is it something that you can talk about?

Jacqueline: Yeah, so responding to that I would say that I don't have like accurate data to support it, but according to the observations and the experience I had, one of the main areas of similarity challenge developing countries are facing it's correction, as Vanessa said : The correction process and the capacity of recycling the issue of investment, but also automation about awareness, the effect of electronic waste.

We may think that normal people or public doesn't have enough awareness of electronic voice, but one thing which was being able to visualize is that : you find that majority of people have electronic devices in their house where they have this specific particular small room in the corner of the house where they drop out, maybe tv, which no longer work, maybe dvd, maybe phones, or like this particular mouse or this model, electronic devices, which are no longer being used.

They keep it in their houses for what? So first of all, they believe that these electronic devices has a value into it. So they're expecting at least to get a low cost amount of money, let's say maybe five US dollars according to the value of it, maybe 10 US dollars, particularly depending to how this holder of electronic devices feel like his electronic devices still has a value.

But one thing which happened back and forth between all the stakeholders involved in electronic waste management industry here in developing country is that you find that some of recycling industries are not willing to compensate the cost value this electronic deficit may still have. 

Also those one who still have it in their houses, they refuse to give it back. And where to some point they feel like "okay, instead of giving to back, I will just send it to the landfill". So by sending to the landfill or at the downside that this increase the impact, the cremate and environment. So there is back and forth change and understanding the law each individual stakeholder must bring on the table. 

 That's why we find so many electronic devices on the dump sites, on landfill everywhere. You find recycling actors saying that they're not capable of finding enough tons of electronics they may probably need, for recycling just because there is misunderstanding the value law this electronic waste has.

 This bring us so much understanding why the cycling blade is still very low in developing countries. Every, if I could remember, probably still below to 20%. So basically that's the situation, how the situation is, and I would support what Vanessa was saying. This is a very huge challenge mainly when it comes to developing countries, even though currently is cross boundaries prohibition for electronic secondhand electronic devices.

But still, it happened illegally on the block market. I think it's a bit chaos, but I say regulatory black market for electronic devices because some countries has already set cross boundaries, prohibition for electronic devices, but still for some reason it tend to be happen in one way or the other.

So that's also increased a huge challenge to how to deal with electronic devices. Yeah.

Gael: I've got a question for both of you, and this is a very basic question. How bad is e-waste? Obviously wasting things is not very good, but why do we focus that much on e-waste? And I've heard a lot of stuff about pollution, blah, blah, blah, et cetera. But I'd like to get your insights for both of you, both experts, regarding e-waste.

Vanessa: E-waste is actually, well bad in my view, when it is not disposed in a proper way. So as Jacqueline also mentioned there are many illegal practices when it comes also to recycling. Many backyard recycling is happening in many countries in the world. And when this happens, without the proper safety standards and procedures it is very likely that the person that is handling the waste gets intoxicated or inhale toxic fumes by burning cables or plastics. The plastics that is usually burned is containing claim retardant substances. Those are the ones that are very toxic for the human being, but also for the environment in general.

From what we have seen, this is a very easy way to get rid of the plastic and get to the available parts. For cables, for example, the plastic casing is incinerated. And then in order to extract the copper this is where e-waste becomes fed and toxic and polluting.

 In the landfills where these illegal practices are happening, we as senior collaborated with WHO in the past monitors and we found out that there is larger impacts that we could not think of before. Even kids are affected or pregnant women are also affected by the toxic substances that are released on the environment by bad waste management practices.

Gael: And Jacqueline, is it something that you've witnessed it or that you can tell us a bit more about this non-proper waste disposal. There is a famous place, which is now closed in Ghana, which is at Agbogbloshie that used to be kind of a nightmare when it comes to a manage waste, electronic waste but, you know, it's just one example. 

I've always wondered if it was something that you could find elsewhere or if it was hopefully for Africa, just a single example of bad waste management.

Jacqueline: So reason why e-waste is a very big issue, we tend to forget the reality of the world we are living. At the moment we are living the world where technology is the future. Everything is being turned into digital transformation is being turned to using ICT tools and all of that.

But we tend to think the lifecycle of these ICT tools we are using in our everyday life, we cannot really forget that we have specific iPhone brands, which are already on market each and every year or every two year. Maybe I would say maybe iPhone 14, iPhone 13. You know, there is always new version of the market and as a human beings and as a customers, we are always ready. We are always ready to consume these electronic devices, new product, new brand at the market. But the reason why we need to emphasize on electronic waste effect and how we can deal with it, it's by this reality of always higher conception rate all over the world of electronic devices and always new technologies which are coming on the table.

That's why we need to stress out a lot on electronic devices until we understand the life cycle system or secure economy of how new conception lead of all the branding new devices and all of that can be able to be treated. That's why manufacturers needs to come in.

I liked Vanessa's research paper, how it was mentioning the lifecycles of electronic devices by mentioning when this could turn out to be e-waste.

So by having all these supportive information and all the stakeholders on board, we can be able to deal with it. I would like really maybe to a repeat mention about the minors we find in electronic waste. Electronic devices have like a gold, silver, copper, and other variable materials into it.

But most of these come from traditional mining, and we all know the effect of traditional mining. So with having urban mining in place, we'll be able to extract this gold and silver, and create recycling process to be reused once again instead of finding them on the dump side or at the landfill. So this is all the involvement of why we need to really deal with electronic devices.

Yeah.

Gael: And that comes at the perfect point in this discussion because what you're saying is actually because of this hyper consumption worldwide, that we've got more and more e-waste and actually e-waste is a good proxy for this hyper consumption of electronic equipments. 

We should pay attention to this indicator and still it has become, and it is become more and more a business to manage with this e-waste, what you call urban mining. I believe this is actually what you've done creating a business around circular economy and the Wastezon entreprise that you've created. So I would love to know a bit more about how you manage. 

Can you basically pitch us what Wastezon does?

Jacqueline: Wastezon is still a startup, I may say. So basically what's Wastezon app, it's like connecting app between consumers or household manufacturers and recyclers who are looking for secondhand electronic devices or electronic waste. Where this app is being able to help with efficient tech empowered traceability services where it's helping them to generate value with value addition benefits to their electronic waste in environmental friendly. Where, as I said earlier, before, it's like a win-win situation where these manufacturers and cyclists need to understand that these people could get a value into their device they still have in their houses. Could be a little one, it's dependent negotiation between two parties who want to exchange these electronic devices. 

 Then I would say that for now we have more than 2000 users who were able to trust us and translate over 400 tons of electronic waste on our platform. This really brought our mind to- and it's sort of- show us that we are actually not even closer to where we are designed to be.

 We always meet, people are saying "oh, I actually have these laptops", "I have phones at home", "I don't have any clue where to send it" but I also, at the end of the day, I know that it still have a value the only issue may be my smartphone have, it's the screen and I know I can repair it, but I don't have time for it.

So for us, we create a chain of value between two parties on Wastezon app to be able to sell between each other. So for the long term vision we have is to create a future of urban mining in electronic waste. Cause we realize that's where we are heading and this is the future and we have to believe it and see how we are heading.

 Talking about urban mining and how it's the long land vision for us is that we have seen how manufacturers are waking up to be part of this journey. I have seen amazing work, Dell and some other, like even Samsung is collecting like batteries. I think has started or it's part of the plan to start next year to start to collect batteries in east african countries, but also in some part of Africa because that is sufficient of our batteries minors to produce new ones. 

So they want to tap in into creating those one they already sent to the market and be able to process it once again. But also in a way of creating sustainability and environmental impact, which is the same thing Dell is doing I think in South America when I was reading the article in South America, in some part of India, I guess.

So this is amazing and shows how manufacturers putting those producer responsibility in their hands. So that's where we want to here to be able to help these manufacturers to trace and know where there is a materials or e-waste where they can trace it and channel it to their recycling site where it's being based.

So that's what we are doing at the moment and we are excited towards the future is holding for us. Yeah.

Gael: So 400 tons is already a very significant achievement, so congratulations. My question would be just to understand, well, the word urban mining, these manufacturers and these recyclers, do they kind of extract the metals by, you know, melting chipboard, et cetera, et cetera? Or do they also manage to extract some spare parts that they will reuse in new equipments on the market?

So is it recycling or is it just extraction of new resources?

Jacqueline: Okay, so explaining what's exactly will be urban mining, how it's work. This kind of the time, which is sort of like a processing, recovering variable materials and other materials from discarded electronic devices and even those which are as in urban waste. 

So it's a form of recycling that's involved extracting and refining variable resources from West Stream that's were previously considered to be of a little or no value. So I give an example like a Samsung. So we have learned that they're going to start for them collecting batteries. This is part of urban mining cause when you find batteries, it has valuable materials inside. But now getting access to it- cause as we know that- to get these variable materials, normally it goes through the traditional mining.

So getting access to these materials, it's tending to be very hard. These materials are re non-renewable, right? So how companies are tapping into it, they're extracting those minerals they need maybe gold, they need copper, they need aluminum, or they need batteries according to what they want to use with it. Battery could be used even to create electricity. There is an amazing innovation happening with regards to how batteries are turning into electricity like in India, in some part of the world. The extraction which happen it's in a way of creating, like creating the value of it, and being reused once again in form of circular processing, circular economy processing. Yeah.

Gael: Yeah, it makes total sense. Is this extraction being done in, I would say good working conditions because both of you mentioned how toxic and dangerous can be waste and especially e-waste management previously. So these urban mining activities, you mentioned also that they're mostly done in the informal sector are workers or freelancers working in urban mining, getting more and more protected, or is it still a bit a Wide Waste I would say?

Jacqueline: I would like to clarify that for Wastezon, you're not recycling industry sort of, so we have this is just a service we do to support recycling household and manufacturers in form of traceability and supply chain of these electronic wastes. But responding to that question, according observation, many countries are setting up policies which need to protect environment, but also people health.

Here in Rwanda, the informal recycling doesn't no longer work because there is very strict, very strict policies for it, in form of protecting people. 

So I don't know how in other countries it's happening but I know that for sure based on the experience I had in Geneva last year when we were looking at the position of e-waste treatment in a developing countries.

Many countries are setting up policies which need to prohibit and protect their people in terms of involving themselves in recycling or instruction of electronic devices. So I would guess that it's getting much better because of the involvement of both sectors, either on government side, but also on the private side, which are like entrepreneurs and yeah.

Gael: Thanks a lot. And Vanessa, is it something that you've noticed also at a broader scale. Jacqueline mentioned the work done in Geneva, for instance. 

Things are getting better when it comes to urban mining?

Vanessa: Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean I see a lot of improvements at global level for sure. At least in Europe, there's a nice and big networks of experts continuously working on improving the accessibility of CRMs. So critical raw materials through recycling and by mining indeed the waste that is a creditor, but across the globe I've seen very nice examples and startups and businesses establishing now in order to improve definitely the recoverability and recyclability of waste. 

So I'm optimistic about that. There's still a big and long path to get to the zero waste target or to the fully circular economy. But still I'm positive about it since I'm seeing very nice examples across the globe.

Gael: And actually, could you elaborate a bit about the potential of switching to a more circular economy? Because we talk a lot about circular economy, but I'm not always sure that everyone has the same definition of it, and especially how much it will help reaching the the ODD and not only the environmental impact that Jacqueline mentioned already several times, and how big traditional mining has a toll on the planet, but all the ODD.

Vanessa: Well, definitely, there are good benefits of adopting circular economy, approaches in the business sector. The way how circular economy is most commonly referred to as let's say the recycling part, right? So really recycling what is already waste and trying to get back the resources into the production chain.

However, circular economy is much more than that, and it starts indeed with sustainable mining and if we talk of mining of new raw materials, ideally is already not a circular economy in a way because that means that we need extra resources to produce new products that we are not able to get back from the recycling at the end of life.

So indeed it starts from the mining or the sourcing of the materials, and then it goes through the production phase and the usage phase. Also the eco-design is a very important aspect of circular economy that in my view, it has been explored very rarely I would say when it comes to electronics so far. The challenges of recyclers are still the same of 10 or 15 years ago, let's say.

So it hasn't become easier to recycle electronics, but it has become rather more difficult nowadays because of the products has become lighter, more compact. There's no more possibility to replace parts of a mobile phone or a laptop. So I believe that when we talk of circular economy, we need to touch upon all aspects of circular economy, not only recycling.

Eco design as a very important role and in addition what Jacqueline was mentioning, the production is also a very big role. Also not really decreasing production levels, but rather sustainable consumption of products is needed in my view to contribute to circular economy.

Gael: So Jacqueline, don't kill me on sight because it might mean the end of your business. 

But if we really wanted to achieve a true circular economy, wouldn't mean to have an obligation for everyone manufacturing something to get it back at some point? 

You know, you manufacture a smartphone, you have to recover it, not your neighbor, not in another country, et cetera.

But basically, if I buy a smartphone, even if I want to get rid of it either because it doesn't work or I want to change, I can go back to a shop or any shop actually and say, boom, "this is a Samsung smartphone, please put it in a box that should be shipped back to Samsung". I know it's a radical proposition, but I would love both of you to comment on it cause that will enable a more radical shift toward they could design.

So what do you think about it? Is it me just being crazy?

Jacqueline: So let me go first. Responding to that question, actually it has a positive, negative side, but I'm looking for positive side. So, first of all, the second hand market for digital equipment can really provide more opportunities for us, refurbishment and repair, repairing of electronics. This has a very core part of our own business at Wastezon.

 That means that there could be an increase in demand of our services actually. People would come back either to be like, "okay, have these devices". So I'd sell it to manufacturers or sell it to manufacturers, or I actually need to refurbish it and repair it on my own and reuse it once again.

 Also secondly, I would say as many people choose to repair or refurbish their electronic devices instead of buying new one. There is also a chance that we could be able to enhance and be able to see environmental impact, as I was always mentioning because of also this new regulation you were saying, which can come in place about repairability of taking back these electronics to the producers on manufacturers cause this is part of the extended producer responsibilities. That's the only way we are seeing the impact could be created. 

And for the negative side, I would say maybe potentially this would decrease demand for on electronic devices. For that it could affect the sales of a new electronic product and in turn, it could also end up impacting the volume of e-waste generated, but also the services we're being able to offer since people are sending it back. But also maybe no longer need this repairing and refurbishment at the same point. But the main important thing here, it's to always understand that the world is involving, and this is not about making money.

The thing here, it's not about making money from waste. We are aiming for the social impact and creating share value benefit among all stakeholders, but most importantly to the world. So that's what we are aiming for. So we always try to stay up to date especially with coming with the technology needed at the market and how to make it easier to both involved people in those household and even those recycling or manufacturers.

So that's how we stay positive into it.

Gael: And what about you, Vanessa, what do you think about my crazy idea?

Vanessa: Thinking more of a global level, this is something we have been discussing also in the context of EPR. No extended producer responsibility multiple times, and this was maybe even the original idea when this extended pro responsibility concept was designed. 

However, looking at the global dynamics and dimensions of the electronic industry, it does not be very easy to set up this system because as you can imagine there are few producers, larger producers in the world that are responsible for the majority of the production of electronics nowadays. But most likely they don't have one representated in each countries in the world.

So this would mean also cross-country shipments. When it comes to cross-country shipments, that is also narrowed down to cross-country, let's say, legislations and agreements on this. So that is a bit of the reason, in my view, why it has been very hard to set up such a system. Ideally, it would be a nice solution for sure.

So I agree with that. In practice, there might be challenges in doing that. But nevertheless the EPR concept somehow embeds this responsibility of producers because yeah, there is a obligation for taking back products. But nowadays, at least in Europe those products that are taken back and sent recycling are just a mix of different brands, they're not brand specific. 

There are some examples though, in the northern of Europe where brands have established their own recycling systems for only their own branded products and have developed technologies on how to optimize recycling for their products. And that may be a good example and it could be in the near future that we will see more than these examples.

Gael: Oh actually Vanessa, that lead me to the final question to both of you. Could you share with us some resource about those initiatives and more generally what you advise us to read or to listen to understand a bit more the e-waste problem, but also some of the solutions that we are trying to put in place worldwide to solve it.

Vanessa: Yeah, sure. In general, when it comes to Unitar definitely you can consult the Unitar website where you will have access to all projects we are working at, and to the results of most major projects. Then I think there you would have a very nice overview of what is the current e-waste situation at global level.

Furthermore, we will, by the end of the year, publish a new version of the Globally Waste Monitor. It'll be at 2023 edition with an update of the data and with additional information, especially on recyclability. There's also websites that I mentioned before that is the globalewaste.org has been developed in partnership with the International Telecommunication Union and ISWA. 

Since we are partnering in a global e-waste statistic partnership. Recently, also United Nations Environmental Program and the Carac Foundation joined forces with us to develop the new globally waste monitor. So maybe that website will also provide updates with regards to data.

Additional sources for those initiatives : well, I guess they're very dynamic and there are many updates every day and we actually are not, at the moment, compiling all those updates. But I suggest to follow main brands, the pages of main electronic brands worldwide and their sustainability area.

 There it will be every now and then available information on recyclability and the efforts that the producers do in terms of improving recyclability.

Gael: And Jacqueline, do you have some materials as well? Documents, websites?

Jacqueline: For me as an entrepreneur I would share obviously our website. It really shows more about our work. But the moment you're revamping, re-editing it to make it more professional, but it has everything and more information about our work and the links to our apps.

It really shows about what you're doing and the impact you're creating. Additionally, I would also share the resources about this amazing article I was reading about urban mining. It has the title code : Urban Mining, the relevance of information, transaction costs and externalities. I found it on the Science Direct website.

It's a very long one, but the thing I liked about it, it's really shows the data cause they corrected data among 2,500 Swiss respondents and they even did experience with 15,000 employees of Swiss institutions where they were trying to understand and estimate the reason why people do not particularly value their retired funds and how many of them are not willing to give it away, just like that.

So it really shows the key output about urban mining and the future out of it. There is also this amazing article, which could be sort of like an example of how many big manufacturers are very keen to come in this journey of being responsible about the resources they're sending to the market and how they are involving in sustainability perspective like there is this also amazing article written by Apple. 

I hope I'm not doing advertise for them in this podcast, but it's a real amazing one. It's really shows how urban mining is the future. Apple was saying how they will use a hundred percent recyclable cobalt in materials by 2025.

 This is the approach they're going to take in terms of in industry reading innovation for their recyclable materials, batteries and even secular bulbs. So this is amazing. Actually there is so many amazing article out of there, which is showing how the involvement of different stakeholders in this journey will be exciting very soon.

And hopefully the issue of e-waste be resolved no later than 2030 as SDG is aiming for.

Gael: Well, thanks so much, Jacqueline, and don't worry. Apple will not give any money to this show so you are free to quote them, to mention them, because I'm not sponsored at all.

And if I was sponsored by Apple, I guess it will drain a bit less money on my personal resources to run this show.

So feel free to mention everyone you want. You've already mentioned Samsung and Dell, so that, that's perfectly fine. Well, Thanks a lot, both of you, because I've learned a lot of things. 

That was an episode I really wanted to offer to the audience because we talk that much about e-waste, but it's such on a superficial level and having two of you in the show explaining the data, but also what it meant concretely, the business impact.

That was great. So once again, thanks a lot for joining and I know that many of us, we will have learned a lot of things listening to both of you. So thanks a lot again.

Jacqueline: Thank you so much. Thank you guys for having us.

Vanessa: Thank you. Thank you both and thank you Gael for the invitation and for the opportunity to talk about this important topic.

Gael: And that's it. Thank you for listening to Green IO. Make sure to subscribe to the mailing list to stay up to date on your episodes. If you enjoyed this one, feel free to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who could benefit from it. As a nonprofit podcast, we rely on you to spread the word.

Last, but not the least. If you know someone who would make a great guest, please send them my way so that we can make our digital word greener one byte at a time.


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What would be the three most harmful website design practices ? What are the actions that you can’t take without the client’s approval ? How could you convince your boss or customers on this sustainable journey ?

That’s what we discuss in this episode on sustainable design !

Join Gaël Duez to meet : Michael Anderson, Frontend Web Developer at Initiva AB & Founder of Sustainable WWW in Sweden and Sandy Dähnert, experienced designer and host of the Green the Web podcast in Germany.

➡️ Sandy and Michael shared their insights on how to face the challenges regarding creating sustainable websites through the lens of Green IT.

✅ Don't miss this episode if you want to learn practical advice on how to create sustainable websites and how to convince your clients of the importance of sustainability in website design.

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

Learn more about our guests and connect
Sandy Dähnert is the founder of Green the Web, and a freelance UX/UI designer with over 10 years of experience. She is also a social and environmental justice activist who advocates for sustainable web design. Sandy works with designers and companies to create ecologically and socially sustainable digital products that have a positive impact on the regeneration of our planet.

Michael Andersen, the founder of Sustainable WWW (World-wide-web) and author of Sustainable Web Design In 20 Lessons, is a problem solver who is passionate about making the internet greener. He has extensive knowledge in both frontend and backend web design and programming, and is committed to incorporating sustainable practices in his work.

• Green the Web's LinkedIn (Sandy)
• Michael’s LinkedIn
• Gaël's LinkedIn 
• Gaël's website 
• Green IO website 

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Sandy and Michael’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode

• Tim Frick’s book "Designing for Sustainability"
• Tom Greenwood book “Sustainable Web Design”
• Green IO episode n°8 “Sustainable Design from the trenches”
• Gerry Mc Govern : World Wide Waste
• Sandy top website example
• Sustainablewww
• Sandy’s Green the web podcast 
• Sandy’s courses
• Michael book “Sustainable Web Design In 20 Lessons”
• Nick Lewis’ repository of lowwcarbon websites
• The Ethical Design Handbook by Trine Falbe, Martin Michael Frederiksen, Kim Andersen
• CAT community
• Sandy’s list of recommended links 
• Atomic habits
• Digital collage
• SUX community

Transcript
Gael: Hello everyone. In this episode, we go to Gutenberg in Sweden to meet Michael Anderson and to Cologne in Germany to meet Sandy Dänhert, and we will speak about sustainable design, but let me start with a confidence. We, and by we, I'm in the tech folks, whether we are developer ops, dev ops, data engineer, etc.

We have it pretty easy when it comes to IT sustainability. Okay. I'll hear you from now screaming from where you are. Are you insane Gael with none of the big cloud providers being fully transparent online, greenhouse gas emissions, the lack of open data and common standards, and the challenge of water and biodiversity where almost everything has to be built and the best practices for green coating not being agreed upon within our industry?

Hello, energy consumption of networks. Oh, I forgot to mention the maze of measurement. Okay, okay. You are right. That's not easy, but still. It's less hard than for product folks, whether you think about product owners, product managers, UX or UI designers, research ops, et cetera. Why? Because most of the time we are aligned with our CFO green ops = finops, and better code usually equals less maintenance and for Web developers better Web performance.

But when you try to implement sustainable design where it all starts and actually where the impact on reducing the environment footprint, either biggest, you are quite often challenged by business. This catchall term refers to sometime sales, marketing, business developers, or guardians of the PNL. Not that they don't care about sustainability.

They do most often quite a lot, but they are focused on the bottom line and fed by -self-proclaimed, per communication, or marketing- gurus with statements like "video is ever seeing, or the messages, the massage, et cetera. In September last year, we had a superb episode with Anne Faubry and Tom Jarrett called Sustainable Design from the Trenches, where they highlighted that this opposition was a myth.

I've been wanting to go back on the front line for a while to see how things have evolved, and I'm happy to do it today with two guests who are tooling designers and developers in digital sustainability. Michael, a seasoned Web developer, is the founder of Sustainablewww, a community actively promoting a more sustainable and environmentally friendly internet with resources, wiki and blog articles.

He has recently published his first book, Sustainable Web Design in 20 Lessons. Sandy is an experienced designer and a fellow podcastor. She has launched last year the Greener Web Podcast and has recently opened comprehensive online courses on Green UX & UI design. On top of it, she's also an active member of the sustainable UX community.

Welcome both of you. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today!

Sandy: Hi. Very happy to be here.

Michael: I'm happy too. It's an honor.

Gael: Same wise. So I'd like to start with my regular question, I would say to both of you, which is : how did you become interested in sustainability in the first place, and most, maybe specifically the sustainability of our digital sector? Sandy, you want to share some thought on it?

Sandy: Of course. Sure. Well, I can definitely remember it very well and I was already in my private sphere: more sustainable in what I wear, what I buy, and how I behave and stuff like that and I was doing a lot of volunteer work and I was freelancing at an agency at that time, and they had a meetup coming up and they said "why don't you want to talk about Sustainable Web design in this meetup?"

And I was like, sure. And I was thinking only about the social aspects of sustainability in Web design and about accessibility and hypocrisy and like the social justice in design and stuff. And I was going deeper into that. And then at some point I found the topic of ecologically sustainable design. I think probably either Tom Greenwood or Tim Frick, one of the first ones that I stumbled up on.

And I was like "What? Why does no one talk about that or very few people talking about it? Why have I never heard of it before?" and it was truly an "Ah!" moment for me, and I went deep, deep, deep into it. It was around Christmas time and usually I take off of work during Christmas and New Year's Eve and stuff like that, but I absolutely took every single minute to try to find more information about the topic for this meetup and loved it since then.

Gael: Well, that's super interesting. A meetup, an invitation to a meetup was a key.

Sandy: Yeah.

Gael: So just, you just have to invite someone and sometimes it triggers a chain reaction, a very positively chain reaction. That's super cool. But what I also like with what you shared is that, opposite to quite a lot of people I've met, and I have to admit, starting with me, you went the other way on the sustainability journey.

I hear a lot of people, the majority of the people I've met, they start with the environmental consciousness. We need to take care of the planet, take care of human or actually all living forms on the planet. At some point you realize that climate justice is very strongly connected with social justice and that all this question of inclusivity or let's take the example of AI for instance, it might drag some resources, but there are so many ethical questions on top of it that sometimes environmental for print of AI is maybe only the tip of the iceberg.

So we're quite a lot to have shared this road, like starting from the environment toward people, ethics, et cetera. And that's very cool to see that you can also take the road the other way around, starting from an ethical point of view, questioning, I would say, and then going all the way toward environmental without obviously losing the ethical acumen.

Sandy: Yeah.

Gael: So that's pretty cool?

Sandy: No, both is very important definitely for me as well. And I don't know, it just came in this way and I didn't know that green design was a thing and that it's possible to actually be more ecologically sustainable in my UX research, your UX and UI design, and I was like immediately in love with that and felt more of a purpose in my job then.

Gael: Than before.

Sandy: Yeah. Yeah.

Gael: And what about you, Michael? Did you experience a "Aha" moment or was it something more continuous?

Michael: It's a little bit, like you were saying, like most most people start out being conscious about the environment and I don't think that I was any exception of that. I grew up in a small city in Denmark. And as a child I was one of those kids, you know, that was always playing outside with my friends.

We were building stuff in a forest, playing street hockey and never really spending time, you know, in front of the TV or using technology at all. Kind of truly playing outside. I think that my deep connection with the nature kind of comes from there, you know, growing up in a small city, playing in nature, using the forest as your playground.

 I think my connection with nature comes from there. One day, I was sitting in Sweden and I was thinking about like, "how do I combine these two big interests of mine?", you know the nature part and the technology part. Because I wanted a way to help the environment in my way. I was unsure if it was gonna be like, feeding programs or going into renewable energy or something.

But the best way that I could do it was to find a way to combine these. And that's when I kind of stumbled into this book by Tom Greenwood, a Sustainable Web design. It has been mentioned quite a few times on all of these different podcasts. I'm sure there is a reason for it because this is the book that got me into it all.

Like I found this connection between the environment and technology and I would say that's how I got started and became interested in sustainability. From there, it was kind of like a ball rolling, like I had to learn everything from the bottom up. So I invented the D plate over and over and found my own ways of creating sustainable Web design.

And then I realized that people should not have the same struggles that I had. So that's why, for example I founded the organization or foundation, sustainable worldwide Web. 

Gael: So you avoid people to face the same hurdles that you experience starting from almost nothing and that's quite cool because both of you are in a very active sharing mode. Actually that's kind of the first question I wanted to ask you. Rather than listing all the do and don't, I would love both of you to share the top three worst examples of design, harmful design for the environment that you've experienced firsthand.

So maybe Sandy, do you want to share you absolute number one?

Sandy: Yeah, sure. I love that question. My absolute favorite, number one. Well, there are so many worst cases, but, well, one that was definitely striking for me was one client of mine- as I'm a freelancer. 

One client of mine came to me with their website and they had so many different kinds of sliders on their website even just on their homepage, they had, I think three different sliders with imagery so they had up to 10 different slides per slider so the ones that you swipe through.

And so many studies show that sliders, no one really looks at them all of the users barely see the first or the second slide of the whole carousel thing and they had up to 10 different slides per slider and then I think it was three or four sliders on one page, and that's so much data waste of course, but it's just even also really bad UX. 

Just wasted space and the first slider was of course, as we had in for a couple of years at the very, very top of the page to set the mood but there was just imagery, like really just images not even a headline, not even an introduction it was just images to kind of set the mood. 

I got it why they did it. But it was just those 10 different slides in this slider, only imagery. No one knew in the first view port what this website is about. And immediately in the first view port, you have so much data waste and no scaled, no compressed imagery and that was kind of a really fun thing to do because I was like, okay, that's gonna be easy to reduce that carbon emission.

Gael: Yeah, obviously. So Michael, she has the slider loathe of card. That's a big one in her hand. So what do you have on yours?

Michael: Oh, it's hard to find a specific example because there are so many of them that I've been working with over the years but I guess one of the bad ones that I've had recently was a customer that decided to completely redesign their website.

I work in a small company and we focus on custom code. We even made our own CMS system and, and all of these things so everything that we build is custom and we have been working with this client for, I think, almost a decade now or at least my coworkers have. 

So all of the different versions from the website has been piling up over the years, you know, with unused code and elements for the CMS and now they chose to completely redesign their website and it had to go so fast because here in May, they're going to launch it on a big event, but, Instead of redesigning the website and choose to clean up what they already had : like for example we could have built new elements for the new design so that we would have like a clean cut between the different versions then instead they decided to mix between the versions and take whatever, you know, came from like older versions of this website. 

So the end product was that we had a completely new design, but now all of a sudden the code base was mixed between versions going almost 10 years back and now we have no idea like which elements are actually being used. 

We have so much unused code in this project and no way to really figure out how to get rid of it.

Gael: So I believe the website was pretty big.

Michael: The website is pretty big and pretty heavy. It's out in three languages. So three big replicas of the same website.

Gael: Okay, so that's a very good one. So that actually is someone who say, well, let's try to have low maintenance website, or actually high maintenance website, multi versioned, blended website. Yeah. Pretty hard to maintain. I guess, pretty heavy to load. So that's a good one. Sandy, you've got a number two that you'd like to share.

Sandy: Yeah, I bet I won't be able to top that one.

Gael: That's a nightmare.

Sandy: Very heavy. But another example that I'm thinking of is, well, there are several websites that I've seen this with and from clients and not clients of mine that have so many animations and interactions. It's already just too much, way too much and you just come onto the website or application and then you scroll through and you know those websites where content like text and imagery and all kinds of other things are coming in from the sides, from left, from right, from up, from down.

Everything seems to be moving and then you have power X effects and then you have other things that are carousels that are auto moving and all kinds of things that are shifting and shaping.

Then I had this client of mine that had exactly that. 

But that's modern and we want to our users to feel like we are up to date and we are cool and all of those things and I was like, "yeah, I know". We want to have this website to be very modern and up to date but definitely try to limit those animations and flying in texts and flying in icons and illustrations. 

Just calm down a little bit because it's so overwhelming, even for people and for users who don't have cognitive challenges, but for the ones who do have, so to go a little bit into accessibility as well. 

It's really tough to visit websites like that and animations and interactions they need a lot of scripts so this website was definitely so heavy and to just toning that down and calming a website helped tremendously for the environment, but also for users who might have challenges with it.

Gael: With positive business impact at the end? Or could you measure something like conversion rate or I don't know what was the business model of this website?

But could you see also some positive business impact with, actually them wanted to be super modern, but maybe the result was the exact opposite because they were chasing away users or potential customers from their website because it was just too visually noisy, I would say.

Sandy: Absolutely. We actually did usability testings as well, so talking with users or potential users and letting them go through the website and sharing what they feel about the website, what they like, what they don't like, how they use it.

Every single participant in this usability test was like, "well, there's just too many things going on and then all of the times, newsletter banners came in as well", and just things were all over the place and all of the users were like, "No, I would definitely close this website immediately" and once we did the redesign, we actually saw that there was much more of users coming to the page, staying on the page, actually going through the website, and then also converting.

Gael: Yeah, so this is really connected with what I say in the introduction that you can align business goals and sustainability goals. Okay, so nightclub website, let's say. 

That's a pretty big one. Michael, Nightclub website. I love this one. Michael, you've got another one to share?

Michael: It's a client that I've been working with for a few years now. Lately we have been focused a lot on optimizing for SEO and that means that I have finally been able to go through the website and optimize in any way possible, you know, like optimize images style. Like everything I could come across.

And at the end of this project, the client chose to switch out the hero element on the front page and put in a enormous, one and a half minute long video that would have to autoplay in the beginning and with no controls. 

So every single user that arrived on this start page was like forced to watch this one and a half minute long video.

They actually first allowed me to take that away again once they realized that it really hit their SEO.

Gael: I can't imagine this by video instead of this by PowerPoint. That's a website test by video. I love this one as well. Let's not talk about the bandwidth it consumes and the loading time I can imagine and Sandy, what about you? Okay, you've got one last shot.

Sandy: Well, we covered quite a bit of the worst cases already. What I often see as well is the topic of storage.

 I do a lot of UX designs for applications, especially Web applications, business applications, stuff like that. There is so many things that get collected, so much data that could gets collected in so many ways.

I've seen websites with three different tracking tools implemented. Lately, there was one business that approached me. They had I think 1000 block articles on their website and they didn't really want to declutter. I was like, but we have to. No one reads block articles from 10 years ago. No one will do that, except if it's like a really brilliant one and then you should keep it but it was not that case. 

 In business applications, I see so many times that data is collected from different kinds of users and stakeholders in the whole system that we can easily reduce.

There's even laws and regulations for that in terms of storing user data when the contract is already ended and things like that you have to delete: the data and you cannot hoard data forever, especially if it's personal user data. But I've seen so many applications that still keep them, and I always say, yeah, we have to get rid of that and it's even legal requirements that we have to do that and there is a lot of data floating around that we can just reduce immediately and that is often forgotten because it's not visible in the front end, but it's very much in the back end. 

But we still have to do that as well in UX design.

Gael: Absolutely. It reminds me so much about the example that Gerry McGovern gave in his book when he worked with the health organization with all these articles. Some of them having wrong information or, you know, not anymore scientifically based information still being on the website because no one was taking care.

No, there were no data steward or no data editor anymore. That connects a lot. But Sandy, I must admit that three different tools to measure traffic. That's a lot. I mean, I've met countless websites with two because "you know, we had a migration, but we still want to rely on the old ones." The migration was two years ago.

Come on, let it go. But you know, all the specific tool that you've got for a campaign and that the campaign is over for one year, and why do you have this single API call for every page on your website that is completely useless? 

 That's pretty cool. But like we could call it this one data tsunami turning 180 or point of view now.

What I'd love now for both of you is to share one true beautiful example of something that you're super proud of. You know, an inspiring story about a design which had true impact on its environmental footprint.

Sandy: All right. One great example would be a design for a brand from the US who does have home and body care products, like shampoo bars and conditional bars and cleaning soap bars and things like that. So very much rooted in zero waste, wasteless production, ethical organic materials in their products and stuff like that.

And then we got into talking through common friends and she wanted to redo her website and redesign it, wanted to have a evaluation from my side. Then I discovered that this website was more than, or weighted more than eight megabytes, just the homepage and all kinds of different, other pages below were very, very heavy as well. So the carbon emissions of this full website was just through the roof, and she was very much dedicated to zero waste and reducing her impact in general. When I came to her and said, well, this is the fact of your website, she was immediately stunned by it and shocked and was like, "well, oh, I didn't know that it has an impact".

As we probably all know, have faced this conversation at one point.

We went into the full redesign of really every single bit. She even has a new technology, a different content management system as well. So we rebuilt everything with also coming in new colors. So it's a little bit less bright, less white for example so we use an off-white in the background to reduce at least a little bit of energy consumption in devices. We use different colors that are more vibrant and darker colors here and there as well. 

We use a lot less data heavy elements, whether that's imagery or videos. If they are introduced or implemented, they have actually a purpose and are there for better usability and finding the best product possible for the user but also really thinking again about the user journeys, because every single click means more data consumption means more carbon emissions.

So really thinking about what are the best ways to guide a user through this website without having to go back and forth. Plus, there are so many cool assets in there that are about green art delivery, so green shipping or donations made with every single purchase. As well as having little communication snippets of if you buy this shampoo bar, you will reduce six plastic bottles, so you will eliminate six plastic bottles that you would have to buy if you don't use this shampoo bar.

Things like that, like those small changes that also educate the user in a very gentle and loving way of, "yes, this is a good step for you as a user", to also contribute to a positive change for the environment. 

All kinds of little bits and pieces we put into this website that I really love caring more about also the ethical and organic parts of the products. It's even has a choice with at least a couple of products to get it with packaging or without packaging. So even reducing more of materials. 

So there's many, many things in there that I actually love and enjoy with this project.

Gael: It seems that consistency was key here, like your client was ready into this sustainable mindset. 

About just a side question about the colors, because I've read a lot of debate about dark mode versus, you know, not that many scientific studies are backing it, but we do have some, but in specific context and the colors, et cetera.

What is your stand on it?

Sandy: Well, I do think that whatever choice we make, even if it's just a small contribution, I would like to consider it. I know there is not enough studies and like really diverse studies about color and its effect on energy and battery life and consumption. But I see a couple of studies and discussions around that reducing the brightness of colors does help for all edited place at least. So for example, I started to use less bright white as background colors and just sing a little bit of more tone down of white does help at least a little bit. 

If I do it in every single website, and especially in business applications that are used for full days every single day of a week for hundreds of employees and just thinking about how can we scale it up it doesn't all have to be in dark mode, especially that's not accessible for every single person out there. 

But just trying to find more ways of implementing colors in a creative way that might use a little bit less brightness of, at least for OLED displays.

Gael: And what about you, Michael? What will be your most inspiring use case that you'd like to share?

Michael: First of all, I would like to say Sandy, that's a very inspiring customer. You been working with there. I wish I had customers like that. 

I would say I'm more like the person who works behind the curtains because most of the clients that I'm working with is not really that interested in the environment yet I can only push them that far.

So most of the stuff that I do behind the curtains where they don't see things. 

But I guess the story I would like to share was was one of our big clients that we have been working with for many years. They finally decided to optimize their website because they were focusing on SEO and that gave me the opportunity to go in and focus on image optimization.

I was, for example, making it so that if they were adding images into like a card list element where the images would have like, somewhat a fixed size. Then on the back end I would automatically resize these images and convert them to WebP so that even though they were uploading images on like two to three megabyte, it would automatically scale down and create like an optimized version.

I was also doing stuff like removing jQuery and going directly into plain JavaScript, and we were moving the whole website to a green host located in Sweden which is known for having more renewable energy. We were simplifying the code base, the CSS like removing code that was duplicated. So for example, in CSS it's very easy to write styling that is overriding each other and goes again and again from element to element. So these were some of the things that we were focusing on. 

We were also optimizing funds and trying in as many places as possible to put in system funds because that would reduce the data that each user would have to load.

And of course, also do stuff like reduce animations and only use them in places where they would actually improve the understanding of what was happening.

Gael: Well, Michael, you are an amazing guest because that was my next question for both of you. 

What can you do on your own without asking the permission to no one?

You know, that kind of a debate of that hear quite a lot between developers or designers version A being: I cannot do that much if not anything because I don't have the support of my cto, cpo, the guilds, or whoever is in charge or defining how I should code and design things in my organization.

Versus option B being: well, you know, sustainability is a bit like security, you code security by design, we should do sustainability by design and there are a lot of things that we can do just implementing good craftmanship without asking the permission to anyone. 

And obviously you listed quite a lot of examples as you say, according you working behind the curtains that things that you've done without needing your customer's approval. 

So thanks a lot because that that was really something that this fine line, depending on the context is really something that I believe is at the core of the thinking of many people wanting to do things in a more sustainable way and send a" do you want to add something?"

What would be like the top actions, the top ideas that someone should implement as a good craftman without asking the permission to anyone, you know, being in steel mode, I would say?

Sandy: Mm-hmm. Well, first of all, I absolutely agree that we can do so many things already without anyone else noticing that is coming to more green design and ecological sustainability. Well, I always find, or what I struggled with most in the very beginning was that I felt like I can only design very minimalist websites now and applications and online shops, and I have to reduce everything and I cannot implement anything that's beautiful and colorful and with images or anything that's nice.

I absolutely found that's not true at all. I can still be very creative as a designer, even with ecologically sustainable design. I always think that I can even be more creative because I stopped from just thinking about this full width image on top of a page, but actually thought in different ways of how can I make this aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly and green.

So probably the first things that I changed without anyone noticing is the use of images of having even the permission slip to not use any images at all if they don't fit the brand or the purpose or the content of using images differently in a more, yeah, just blurring image edges or cutting off image edges and really using them with a purpose and not just for, "Hey, here's everything that I found in the database of this brand".

The second would probably be the use of text and fonts and all of what comes with that and even designing with fonts and designing with text is a really cool way of reducing data if it eliminates other data, heavy components such as videos or images. Plus definitely a cool thing that I love is what we already talked about colors and of trying to find new ways of selecting different kinds of colors that I haven't thought about before, that they actually do have an impact even though it might be smaller than imagery.

But it can still have so those are things that no one realizes that I'm actually doing them. And just being a good UX designer helps a lot as well, because then you think about the user journeys throughout every single website application or online shop and not complicating digital products is a very huge part in graining the Web because every single click counts so really reducing that and just saying, "Hey, we're just doing good". 

UX is very helpful as well.

Gael: Yeah, absolutely. Perfection is rich when there is nothing less to remove, not to add. And, you know, it remind me the statement that you can do beautiful things in a sustainable way. It really reminds me the work, but I guess, you know, Nick Lewis' work on the low carbon repository, this list of "Yeah, I think it's a great initiative because it highlights that you can design beautiful websites, straight to the point, et cetera, in a very environmentally friendly way". I really love his work and I think it's a great source of inspiration like, you know, especially when you talk with a user or even more important a customer or a client. 

And now going the opposite way, what are the actions that you believe you cannot really take without the support of your boss or some kind of support within your organization?

When and where, do you need help as a designer or a Web developer?

Michael: I guess when dealing with the website design that is like some of the major changes that you can do is definitely something you would have to take up with the client first. 

Like what Sandy mentioned, if you get a permission slip to actually remove images from the website or Web page or if you decide to start out with a dark mode design and let the user switch over to a light mode, like all of these implementations is definitely something that I think you would have to run by the client to hear what they think first.

Gael: And how would you convince them or try to convince them?

Michael: I would definitely do it a bit like some Greenwood test: don't focus so much on the environmental side since most companies focus on the bottom line and the SEO. So try to find like a combination between the two. Of course, it's okay to mention for them that you are doing something great for the environment and all of this, but I don't think that it should be the selling point of it.

I can't remember if it was Tom or if it was Gerry McGovern that once said that all of these sustainable implementation shouldn't even have to be mentioned. It should be something that just comes natural to us as Web designers and developers.

Gael: I recall it was Tom, but sorry Gerry if I got this one wrong.

And Sandy, what would be the actions where you truly believe that this cannot be done on your own?

Sandy: A couple of things cannot be done if you are in a very big corporate environment where there is a huge universe of digital products and you really want to shift all of them. Then you just have to talk with colleagues and with business about actually introducing a more data reduced, but also environmentally positive design throughout all of digital products.

So that's about the sheer amount of digital products that there could be in a corporate environment. But also what I usually do or love to do is designing or creating non-human personas, really talking about environmental stakeholders that we effect in a negative way with our digital products, but also can effect in a positive way.

So really thinking about nature, about certain ecosystems, about animals, about oceans, rivers, and all kinds of things that we have an impact on. I can do that for myself just to center myself more into the environmental aspect in my work. But of course if I do that with the client or with the company, and really all centering on environmental stakeholders and non-human personas does help a lot.

And when I do it and people are open to it, it absolutely affects their way of business and how they do business as well, not just design itself for a digital product, but the whole business. So that is, for example, one thing if I want to, in bigger corporate corporations really want to hone in on the user journeys and reducing click pass and therefore energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Then I can do user journey mappings. Of course, if there's huge digital products, I have to do that with the team as well, and I can do it without mentioning.

Ecological sustainability, so it's just a typical UX method. But I can also introduce sustainability within user journey maps and talk about every single step and their ecological impact throughout a user journey.

So yeah, that's of course things that I then have to discuss with the team or with the client or with the company. So those are the bigger things that need to be done. Other things are the hosting provider. I cannot just choose one and say: "you have to take this one". Or talking about tracking tools, as we talked about before, I can of course recommend something, but it's absolutely their choice of then doing so.

 What I often have as a freelancer, I do a couple of projects for a very long time and a couple of years supporting certain projects, but sometimes it's just a one time thing and you set it up. It's a new design, it's a redesign, everything's good and ecologically sustainable. Cool. But then you visit this website or application a year or two later, and then you see that there's new imagery, for example, on a website that is suddenly, again very big and very heavy, and you're like" no".

And then you write an email about, "Hey, can you compress that?" And still think about the workflow of data reduction and stuff. So you don't have everything in your own hands, especially if the daily workflows just are different for the people you are working with. So you have to sometimes remind people to scale and compress and export in the right format and things like that.

Gael: Now you shared a lot about do/ don't depending the context, flying under the radar or on the other hand, convincing your customers in raising awareness. 

I'd like the three of us to take a step back and very simple question, what is the trend? What did you notice this last years in our industry? 

Are you optimistic about a way towards more sustainability as Chris Adams like to say "a fossil free internet by 2030 or not that much?"

Michael: Over the years, I've seen many trends. Well, but honestly, most of them has been for the worst. What I mean is that like we see more and more of these heavy images videos, unused code power, hungry themes and and such on websites and like whenever I personally have talked to people about this, I've heard comments such as, "it doesn't really matter because, you know, the internet is so fast".

So 200 kilobyte image or a two and a half megabyte image, it doesn't really matter.

I have to go in and explain all of these, things like geographical reach, making the websites faster for even people living in places where they have like slow internet connections, all of these things.

I definitely think like as the internet speed becomes faster, the trend is going for the worse. That is what sustainable website is trying to turn around again, so that we can focus on creating lighter and faster websites that are more accessible, has a greater reach to people just like we used to do back when the internet was very slow, everyone had like a 50 K modem, if you remember those.

Everyone was really focusing on building sustainable websites because an image could take minutes to load. And that's kind of like where I believe that we need to go back again. Instead of focusing on building these animation heavy image, heavy video, heavy websites, we need to focus on making it even faster.

But I believe that we can, and we will. We just need to get this information out to more people. We need to get more people on board building these sustainable solutions. And if we can like spread awareness of how much the internet pollutes, then we will open the eyes for more people and change the culture of what is happening right now.

Gael: Okay, I got it. So it's a battle of technological trend versus ecological awareness, I would say. Okay. Fair point. And I do remember the sound of the 60, not 60, sorry, 56 K bottom. But you know, there is less and less people who know what we talk about when we mention them. That's quite funny. And Sandy, how do you foresee the future and what other trends that you've noticed recently?

Sandy: Well, I'm very hopeful. I've seen in the last years that I have had an eye on this bubble, this niche, that there's more and more designers and developers caring for it and actually talking about it. There's much more discussion, and I know we are still at the very beginning of this topic, and I know that there are so many more things to come, especially when we also talk about UX research and information architecture and stuff like that, that I have high hopes that many more cool things are coming along to help us to design in a greener and more sustainable way.

And I love that there's so many more designers and developers joining and talking about it, because if there's more designers talking about it, then actually companies and brands and clients are seeing that it is even a thing. Before there was just too few people talking about it. Now there's more that it actually attracts companies to think about it and then actually saying, "Hey, we need employees who are specialized in it or clients searching for freelancers who have more ecological sustainability in their spectrum of work." 

 There is a cool way of really broadening this horizon on all different levels, on designers and developers levels, but also in companies and for brands. I see definitely an optimistic outlook, but at the same time, I absolutely agree that we have to fight the new generation of very short form video based content as well as artificial intelligence tools.

 We do have to fight for more ecological sustainability even more, because there's so much data, data heaviness out there in different forms now than it has been in 10 years or 20 years ago. But I am very hopeful that we will get that.

Gael: Me too. This is what I get up every morning.

Michael: I just wanna point out to my comment on it, that it was definitely not supposed to be meant as like a dark, pessimistic version. I am definitely optimistic about it. As I see it, so many people around the world right now don't know that data pollutes. And I think that is the problem right now because we see so many people interested and involved in the environment, you know, trying to remove plastic and all of these acts that leads us in the right direction.

But these people, they have been made aware that we have a climate crisis right now, but so many people still don't know that every single kilobyte or megabyte pollutes because of electricity consumptions and devices being built, like all of these things that both Tom and Gerry McGovern talks about.

Well, what I was trying to explain with my comment is that, we need to talk about the problem and make more people aware. Even people outside of Web design and Web development, like even the regular website owner needs to be aware of this because we all have a responsibility in this.

Like the data we pollute is the data that we need to maintain and remove ones, no matter longer valid.

Gael: Yeah, absolutely. You're right. This is what I'm less shy now reaching out to people on social networks or in conference or whatever, saying: "Hey, by the way, are you aware of climate change, sustainability, et cetera, and I'm like, 

"Oh, you're in the tech industry, you are IT folks or designer? Are you aware of the environmental footprint?" No. Boom. You should listen to the podcast. You should read this book. Or you should join a digital collage workshop, you know, to raise awareness, et cetera. I used to be a bit shyer. Like, I don't want to bother them. They must know. They must know. It's so obvious, but the truth ? It's not. So now I'm straightforward. Actually, some people listening to the show for the very first time might have been connected quite recently to me, with me dropping a few lines saying: "Hey, by the way, you know, this is the podcast, maybe can be useful, use it."

If not, no big deal. I'm not here to sell you anything. But yeah, I welcome all the new listeners, obviously. 

Which leads me to the last question about resources. So obviously you folks created quite very useful resources. I'd like both of you to mention them again. 

And on top of that, what would be all the resources that you would advise people to know more about sustainable design, sustainable Web dev or even sustainability in general?

Michael: Yeah, I wrote this book "sustainable Web Design in 20 Lessons". And did it to give people a chance to get into sustainable Web design without having to invent the DPL over and over. After reading some Greenwood books on sustainable Web design, I was like fully into what the problem was, but I was hungry for solutions, things that I could like take to my website directly to make it better. And since I didn't really find, you know, books out there directly attacking this problem, I decided to create my own from these experience that I build up. So, for example, I talk briefly about what sustainable Web design is and what a carbon footprint is.

But it's not the main focus of the book. The main focus is to give the reader practical courses, actions that they can take to their website right away. So I talk for example about green Web posting CDNs and how they add security layers to your website can reduce the carbon footprint.

I talk about page weight budgets and death of content. You know, our responsibility of the data that we create. I talk about accessibility, which is both meant as accessibility in you know, creating websites that are available to people no matter their ability or geographical reach.

I talk about lightweight and minimalistic design, how colors for example can change the energy consumption. So, for example a blue has a shorter wavelength which makes the energy consumption a little bit bigger compared to a green and a red. It doesn't really make a huge difference like it does switching from a gray Web posting to green Web posting.

But after reading the book Atomic Habits, I figured out that if we take just 1% and we improve that again and again and again, we will eventually have the best version of the product. And that's what I'm trying to do with this. I'm finding all of these small things and putting them into lessons that both Web designer, developer, or even like the non-tech savvy website owner can use.

Funny story, right after writing this book, I gave it to my mom. And she is not into technology at all. Like, she's that type of person who ask my dad every time that she needs to do something on her phone or when the TV is tricky to use. And after reading the book, she came to me and she said, now I finally understand what you're doing.

And you actually wrote it in a language that is relatively easy to understand, even for someone like me who's not into technology. And that's what I wanted to do.

Gael: That, that's a very big compliment.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I I was very happy when she said that, because that is exactly what I was trying to do, like create a book that would be easy to consume for everyone, cuz to create a sustainable worldwide Web, we have to include everyone, even the website owners that does not get help from Web designers and Web developers.

Gael: And do you have any other resources, one or two that you'd like to share with the audience?

Michael: Yeah. I actually have three. I will definitely recommend people to read some Greenwood's book sustainable Web Design. It gave me so much knowledge about sustainable Web design and what the problem is. So for everyone who wants to get into it, it's a really, really good starter book. I'll also recommend worldwide Waste from Gerry McGovern.

That gives you really, really good insight into how much everything pollutes. Like just to pick an example, you know, that images pollutes more than words. You normally say that a picture says more than 1000 words, but in reality, when you're dealing with Web design, you can describe things in so greater details just by using words. As I recall it, I remember Gerry McGovern mentioning that about 150,000 words is equal to the size of one image, if I'm not totally wrong.

And that should kind of put things into perspective for you, that sometimes words might be better ways to describe things. The last resource that I want to recommend is the Ethical Designed Handbook by Trine Falbe. That was definitely also a great book for me to read because instead of only focusing on the environment and optimization, you also focus on the user journey.

Like Web websites has to be ethical, honest and focus on the best of users. Instead of focusing only on creating a sale by scarcity or whatever tricks in the book that comes up and is used today.

Gael: Well, thanks a lot, Michael. And yeah, both Tom and Gerry's books are very often mentioned on the show, but it's always a pleasure to put them in the show notes and to have more people sharing and understanding things. Thanks. So thanks a lot for that. Sandy, do you want to add other resources?

Sandy: Yeah, sure. Well, I definitely recommend the ones that Michael said, and usually I also mention this podcast as a resource to check out. Definitely always recommended as well as Michael's book. I was honored to actually happen to read it already. I'm almost through it. It's really cool to read and a lot of amazing and interesting things in there that I can still learn about, especially the technical parts because I'm not a developer. So well done, Michael.

I definitely would recommend my podcast as well. I love doing that, it's also about green and social sustainability.

In, especially UX and UI design. So I'm more into that side of like user research and design rather than development, what you both do brilliantly and I really like the sentence that Michael mentioned earlier about hungry for solutions, which is why I do or share a lot of solutions and things for others to have an easier entrance into the topic of it.

So I do have on my website also linked templates, for example, for non-human personas or for user journey mappings. So it's easier to not just think about, "okay, I could do that, but how could I do that?" But actually just using it for free. So there's templates on my website for things like that. There is even a block as well. 

As you mentioned in the very beginning, I recently, two weeks ago I launched a course about an online course about green UX and UI design for others to have an easier entrance to not just guess and read blog posts through like hundreds of blog posts in a year, and then still not knowing what to actually do in what order and what there can be done in every single design process. 

So in the course it's about user research, environmental stakeholder research, the information architecture, the UI design, as well as the development handoff. So there's all kinds of things throughout a typical design process for a UX and UI designers. 

To step out of the guest work and to actually get into the real work and what I absolutely included as well what can we do as designers ourselves, without anyone noticing, but also what are options for us, especially in greening e-commerce, raising awareness and finding solutions that we need to have business approval with it as well. 

Those are out there for you to check out if anyone is interested in that. Well, I have a full resource recommendation list on my website and the ones Michael mentioned before are on that as well even also the Ethical Design Handbook, I really love that one as well.

I'm very much into communities as I know Gael you're as well. For example, the climate action tech community, the sustainable UX community of feeling like there's actually other people who care about the same things as I do, and to not feel lost or to not feel alone of I'm just one single person that does something about it, but there's actually others and I can actually ask them about feedback or about like, just answers to questions that I have and especially if I or you don't have people around you that are in that mindset already, it helps tremendously. So I'd definitely check communities out as well.

Gael: Thanks a lot, Sandy, for sharing all these resources and especially mentioning the climate action tech community. My little darling, or actually not that little darling community not that little community because several thousands of techies are into this one. 

And once again, a big thank you to both of you. That was great to have you on the show, sharing all those insights, playing the games of the worst cases when it comes to website designs, but also all those very practical tips. 

So thanks a lot for joining and I hope that both your podcast and your book and your courses and all the great materials that you give away will be very successful in that it will help to raise awareness among many, many people around the world.

So thanks a lot.

Sandy: Thank you so much for inviting us. It was really cool. Love it.

Michael: Thank you very much. It has been a wonderful time. 
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✅ Yes, raising awareness and training teams is key. No eco-design is not more expensive. Yes, many side-benefits can be leveraged on the road to sustainability. 

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Learn more about our guests and connect
Drew is the Director of Engineering at Starbucks, responsible for overseeing the engineering teams that manage the Starbucks Rewards and Mobile Order and Pay platforms. With a strong background in software engineering, cloud, devsecops, and architecture, Drew has worked with numerous leading brands such as National Geographic, PBS, Marvel, Gannett/USA TODAY, Zipcar, and The White House.

Drew believes in responsible use of technology and optimizing the digital carbon footprint to achieve planet-positivity.

Dominique is the Director of Operations at OCTO, with an added role as Director of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), where she actively works to drive necessary transformations in the digital industry, tackling rising greenhouse gas emissions and social inequalities. As a long-time advocate and a woman in tech, she puts all her skills and expertise towards causes that are close to her heart. OCTO is one of the best places for her to bring her convictions to life. 

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Drew and Dominique’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode

• Cloud Carbon Footprint
• AWS well-designed architecture framework
• B Corp certification
• Paris climate agreement
• AWS Reinvent
• AWS sustainable dashboard
• RGESN in English (beta version)
• Climate action tech community
• Tom Greenwood's Sustainable Web design book 
• Richard Hanna - Techologie podcast
• MOOC from INRIA : The environmental impact of digital technologies
• L’octet vert - podcast de Tristan Nitot
• Digital Collage

Transcript
Gael: Hello everyone. In this episode we go to Seattle to enjoy, a Latte and Paris to enjoy a coffee. Why a latte? Because we meet Drew Engelson, Starbucks director of engineering, whose teams deliver the Starbucks reward in mobile order and pay platforms. That will be an understatement to say that Drew is a well known voice in tech sustainability.

Having been a vocal advocate for Green IT in many conferences, reinvent not being the least, that will be an understatement also to say that we've been trying to have him on the show for quite a long time- more than a year- to be honest, since we connected via the CAT community. So I'm delighted to have him today.

And why will we enjoy a cafe? Well, because in Paris you can enjoy delicious ones. So we have Dominique Buinier with us today. She's the partner in crime of Meriem Berkane OCTO's CTO, who initially should have joined us but had to cancel for personal reasons. Meriem was kind enough to introduce me to Dominique who has an amazing track record.

And OCTO, a very well non-digital services provider in Paris and beyond. They are the organizers of the USI conferences. OCTO is also among the early advocate of agility in France and sustainability. Since several years without talking too much about it. An interesting choice we will discuss later. Dominique is a software engineer by training who graduated from ENSTA school.

She has held various IT expert position in OCTO and then management once, and she's currently OCTO's Chief Operating Officer and Chief Sustainability Officer. She is the one who led the B Corp certification project successfully. Why having these two great leaders on the show today? Well both have shared the same challenge.

How to successfully deploy an ambitious IT sustainability strategy despite being companies under huge market pressure, from clients for OCTO and from financial markets. for Starbucks. I am eager to share their experience to gain valuable insights on the do and the don't. So welcome both of you. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.

Drew: Thank you for having us, and it's great to meet you, Dominique.

Dominique: Yes. Thank you for having us. Nice to meet you, Drew, too.

Gael: So my first question is the usual one. How did you become interested in sustainability and more specifically in the sustainability of our digital sector in the first place? Dominique, would you share a bit with us your journey?

Dominique: Yes, sure. Well actually it started three years ago when we decided to run for the B Corp certification. At that time we were not measuring anything at OCTO, I mean, on a environmental point of view. So we decided to start to measure our carbon footprint and at that time we chose to do the measurement on the free scopes.

And then it was an emotional shock, I can say, when we got the results because more than 50% of our footprint was related to our core business. That means related to the digital services and the digital products that we design and develop for our clients. Our day-to-day job, the purpose of the company is precisely what was the most bad I would say, on an environmental point of view.

And this carbon footprint was really, really the first time when I got interested in digital sustainability. I would say.

Gael: And before that, were you into the sustainability field?

Dominique: Yeah.

Gael: Drew?

Drew: For me, it started as a very personal journey in my personal life. My family does a lot of things. I tried to be good for the environment. You know, we'd drive electric cars, we were early adopters of that. We had put solar panels on our house. We'd try our best to use as, create as little waste as possible.

But at work, I felt like I wasn't being able to meet that specific or scratch that itch. Starbucks has a sustainability team with a chief sustainability officer, and they do so many things that help Starbucks be a a better organization and a better steward for our planet. And in fact, they have a whole history of sustainability investments going back to 1985 when they started offering the first 10 cent reusable cup discount.

But for me, the work that I was doing in the work my team was doing, felt slightly disconnected from those broader goals. So I spent some time thinking about how can I make it more relevant to me and my team and realized that, and should have been obvious that we built software and we run all of our software in the cloud right now at least for my platform.

And those cloud services consume a lot of energy. So there is definitely a direct correlation to the work that we do and the carbon that is admitted as a result of that. And I thought to myself, well :how do we go about measuring the impact of our software? And that really kind of kicked off the journey, which for me also started about three years where we started trying to figure out how to measure the impact of our software and then see how we can do even better.

Gael: That's interesting to notice that you've started both around three years ago, Dominique, from the B Corp certification. And Drew more on let's line what the sustainability team overall in Starbucks is trying to achieve, how as software engineers we can do our part. So my first question for you, maybe Drew would be, how did you onboard teams?

You had like this kind of personal momentum, I want to align things better between my personal life and what I do at work, but were you the only one? How did you create a momentum?

Drew: Well, it definitely started with within my own teams but first educating myself and working with some of my peers to understand how we're using our cloud resources and where we have opportunities for using fewer resources. Measurement became an initial problem. So before we can actually measure, it was important to come up with some methodology for determining how my team or anyone else's team is doing, are we doing good?

Where do we have opportunities for improvement? So I started with my own team. I started educating, you know, my leads, my managers on ways that we should think about our software. And as engineers and as really, which is our engineering, is our craft, I believe strongly that it's our duty to be the best engineers possible.

And that can't be done while ignoring the environmental impact of the software that we create. So, I did start with me and others who were interested. I've met other groups within Starbucks and people who are as passionate. It really is a sort of a ground up effort, you know, sharing ideas.

Sharing wins, sharing opportunities, sharing stories that we learn from other communities that we're involved with, and that's where it continues to go.

Gael: Well, that's very interesting, especially because you started right from the start with the metrics question, and we will come back to this point later, but Dominique, was it the same grownup approach who took place at OCTO or was it more a top-down decision from CEO or the board or whoever?

Dominique: Yes, it was a top down decision at the very beginning. Actually once we did the carbon footprint and. Then we explained it to the board of the company and the board decided right away to meet the Paris climate agreement and to reduce the carbon footprint. And that was the first decision.

So a very top down decision. And then we showed the same result. I mean the carbon footprint results to different teams and it was voluntary to come to those meetings and we had a lot of people coming. That was really, really interesting. And then we, as a top down decision, we asked the teams to train everyone on IT eco-design. Eco-design was the very first step that was needed for us. At that time, we were pretty much lucky because we had around 10 people very passionate about that and with a very strong expertise. But those 10 people, the previous years that they barely couldn't do anything with their expertise. But then starting with our top down decision, we ask those 10 people to help the different teams to build the necessary trainings and to start to deliver the trainings.

And for us, we had to change almost everything. That means the way we design, the way we develop, the way we do machine learning, the way we choose the cloud providers, how we design architecture, and so on and so on. Just like Drew said, we do craft also, and so we really want to improve ourselves. So I would say that training was our way to onboard teams under sustainability tracks. 

For example, for the last two years when we do have a new hire, they spent one day on sustainable IT within the first month when they joined the company. And at the end of this day, we show them all the trainings that they can have and they can follow as many trainings as they want.

It's kind of open bar green trainings. It's very important for us that if they want to train, if they want to improve themselves, they can do it. So this is one radical thing. I think it's the more radical one because other things, we are still on the process. That means that, for example, the designers, the product owners, we try to have them challenge the roadmaps, the story maps of their clients. Sometimes, they can do that. Sometimes they just don't all allow themselves to do that. So it is really where we want to go, but it's not that easy.

Gael: And what are the main challenges you face? Because that, that's very interesting because OCTO, you develop things both for internal use, but also mostly for your clients. And what are the main push bags or the main hurdles that you face with your clients when you want to implement eco design or some new architectural choices, for instance, that are more sustainable, that would reduce some environmental impact?

Dominique: First of all, the clients think that it's gonna cost them more to do eco-design because their teams are not trained because they don't really know about that. So most of the time they think it will cost much more. So this is clearly the first misunderstanding and when we talk to clients right now, our clients that are not really the French tech ecosystem. They are traditional clients, I would say. Sustainable IT is not an issue for them so far. It is really the very, very beginning. So it's pretty much difficult. So what we are trying to do right now is to switch to, I would say, eco-design by design.

That means that we don't ask any permission to develop like that. It is just the way we do the code.

Gael: Well, that's very interesting. This move like by default you do things in the green way, in a sustainable way, and you don't really ask permission for it. A bit like you would design things to be secure by default and security by default or that kind of approach.

Dominique: Exactly.

Gael: And Drew, you work mostly for internal clients, I would say, you have like millions of users of your platform. But I would say the product people are the one deciding with you what to implement, what features, et cetera, et cetera. Did you have the same hurdles? Did you face the same difficulties regarding adoption of a more sustainable way of delivering products, especially digital products?

Drew: First of all, I love that word, eco-design and I think design is actually the easiest time to think about the environment. Cause it tends to be a process of elimination and simplification. You know, do I really need that fancy animation on this webpage? You know, and it's easier to not build it.

It's cheaper to not build that fancy animation. So for me, you know, we had already built a lot of our platform before we started thinking about the sustainability angle to it. And had already done a lot of optimization just for cost optimization purposes, and some of the early understanding of how sustainability and how our environmental impact relates to other metrics, we have easier access to, like cost. You know, we were able to look back in time at some of our cost optimization efforts and saw that it very strongly correlated to lower carbon emissions. And that was really added fuel to the fire to continue to look for those opportunities. And really show that being greener is not more expensive in most cases.

In fact, I don't think any cases we had, we've made any sort of sacrifices to the capabilities of the platform. It's really how we went about building those capabilities and further optimizing them over time.

Gael: So that's interesting because to wrap it up. The two main issues you might face with your clients, whether they are internal clients or external clients, is this misconception of greener equal more expensive. Where actually it's more greener equals cheaper. Whether it's because you design less stuff, so you produce, you deliver less stuff or because you optimize also your costs, et cetera, et cetera.

It all goes back to raising awareness that you first need your customers or your clients to understand that there is something at stake. And otherwise they will not make the first move. So that's very interesting that both of you, you shared in with a very different angle the same challenge and eventually you say, well, that's all wrong, actually, greener is most of the time cheaper, not all the time, but most of the time cheaper.

Is that correct?

Drew: Yeah, and I could add, I mean, it's very simple math when you're running in the cloud, right? The more efficient your application, the simpler it, the fewer cloud resources you would need to deliver that application directly correlates to lower cost. So that's kind of easy math in my opinion.

Gael: So both of you, you mentioned tools. Before we discuss a bit more specifically, which tools did you use? What are the hurdles you might have faced using them? I'd like to go back to the question of metrics because the very first thing you started Drew with your team was trying to measure things and what triggered the decision to go full speed on sustainability.

On OCTO side, was this carbon audit ?And the huge impact that was created by designing and developing software services? What are the main issues you faced with metrics and what are the metrics you decided to track?

Dominique: Maybe I can start if you want, because it may seem weird as a consultancy company, but actually., I don't really care about metrics. And I don't really care if our metrics are really accurate or not. For example just to make my explanation more clear. When we started our first carbon carbon footprint, we knew it was gonna be wrong.

We knew that we were going to make lots of mistakes. What we knew at that time is that the real measurement should be way higher, way higher. For us, it doesn't matter because the main learning was not the level of our footprint, but the main learning was that we needed deeply to change how we were going to do IT services.

So for us, it was clear that it was going to be a change management program. So it's kind of weird, but metrics for us so far. I'm saying, so far, is not the key point.

Gael: Drew, how much are you aligned with this approach?

Drew: I do have a similar opinion. I mean, the very first question I asked myself is, you know, what is the environmental impact of the system? Our teams are responsible for delivering to this world. And I had no idea how to answer that question. So I started looking for metric. What metrics do I need to be tracking?

What tools exist? There were very few answers to those questions you know, three plus years ago. But I generally knew, you know, just common sense tells me that you know, if I consume fewer cloud resources, I'm kind of really having a lower environmental impact. It just, to me, was a sort of a common.

A statement. So really decided to build my own tool at first. And we did this during a hack week, a few years ago, just over about two days. You know, I've been thinking about it for a long time, but took this hack week opportunity to go build something with some other engineers and partner with our sustainability.

And I asked the sustainability team how they account for my team's carbon footprint. You know, and as you might expect for such a large organization, it's a very broad approach. You know, they have tables and mappings and things like that, but one interesting thing I learned at that time was Starbucks technology as a whole, accounts for roughly maybe 1% of the total carbon footprint of Starbucks. And you know, over 20% is just kind of the dairy that's used in our stores and that whole supply. So the reality is that because it wasn't a big target, there wasn't a lot of, you know, detail I can pull out of it. So I thought, you know, how do I go create my own metrics and, you know, ultimately said, okay, well I'll look at our cost that's directly correlated to the number of resources I'm using or our compute hours and for various services and built like a mapping between those metrics I have easy access to from our cloud dashboards. Apply some algorithm to it and, and come up with a number. Right? And I did that and we created, you know, a chart over time. And in addition to that also thought about building a recommendation engine. So not only what is the carbon footprint, which by the way, at that time was a complete wild guess.

Accuracy was not my goal, but starting somewhere was my goal. The recommendation engine are things that I just intuitively felt: if we did these things, we would consume fewer resources, we would be more efficient, and we would therefore have a lower carbon footprint on our platform. And just started listing out a whole bunch of those things.

And then came up with ways I can detect, well, am I doing those things or not? What opportunities do we have for improvement? For example, do we have greatly underutilized resources just sitting out there in the cloud, doing that a whole lot, could they be running on smaller businesses? Can we turn them off and move those workloads elsewhere and more densely pack and get higher utilization of our platform?

So those were sort of common sense things, and in the end, those are really the things that are most important to me. What areas do we have for just improving what we do? Not necessarily actual number.

Gael: Coming back to the metrics. I think that's maybe the most interesting aspect of our discussion so far, because you are both trained engineers, you are people working in a life of data. You put for accuracy, precise metrics, et cetera, and both of you, you come back with the, the same knowledge sharing, which is "we don't have that much accurate data when it comes to the environmental footprint.

It's getting better and better, which far from being something that much actionable, but we don't care. Because the trend, the momentum is way more important than the accuracy of the metrics." I think that's very interesting because it's very easy to push back for change, asking for more reliable metrics.

So do you agree, both of you, that metrics, it's okay to start with good enough or even garbage metrics if they are consistently immersed and that over time it helps improve and that all of their CTO, all of their CPO, all their head of engineering, they should, you know, cut a slack on the accuracy of carbon footprint and many other environmental footprints and start moving forward.

Is it an accurate way to wrap up what you've just both said.

Dominique: From my point of view, yes.

Drew: I'd agree with that, although I would also be quite happy if I did have accurate data.

Dominique: Sure. But we just don't want to spend time on that because we prefer to spend time on what you've said, the momentum, how you change the way people take their good sense decisions.

Gael: Hmm.

Dominique: Day to day work.

Drew: Yes, I would completely agree with that statement. And we are seeing better data coming from various sources. Our cloud providers are attempting now to create you know, a dashboard for their customers, to provide, access to carbon footprint metrics, which is something that really wasn't possible even just a few years ago.

Gael: How do you feel about those metrics? Starting to arrive and starting to be available. Are they good enough? How much? You mentioned in both of you, you work a lot with cloud providers, so the big three obviously, is it getting better or is it still a long road to go?

Drew: I'd say yes and yes. Like it's certainly a long way to go. But something is better than nothing. You know, I was fortunate enough when I presented at AWS Reinvent, I think it was maybe two years ago, two and a half years ago, I helped announce the AWS carbon footprint tool. You know, on the same day I was of my presentation, I co-presented and you know, I was happy to see that it get announced and launched a few months later. But it's kind of stagnated ever since then. I'd really love to see that get much more sophisticated, provide API access, and really provide a lot more granular detail for their customers. 

Gael: Fair point because AWS is under a bit of scrutiny, I would say, these last days with all the layoff and not moving that fast anymore compared to others. But the trend as a very big AWS client, do you still see a positive trend toward more transparency and sustainability from the AWS US team?

Drew: I do and, and overall, you know, really kind of building on Dominique's point a minute ago. You know, it's one thing to have the data, but AWS also made some of the largest renewable energy purchases in the world over the last two years. I'd rather have them do more of that than get better data from me.

It's my opinion.

Gael: Where is a priority. Yeah. And they do have a lot of infrastructure to provide with greener energy because they're stuck in some region in the US with not that low carbon energy or not that low carbon electricity to be more correct. But, okay. That's good that we started to mention AWS USbecause I wanted to ask both of you, what are the main tools you used?

I mean, we talked a lot about metrics. Obviously you started with people. You started with training, raising awareness, et cetera. But what are the tools that you mobilized to achieve your journey into IT sustainability, I would say.

Dominique: Since last October, I think we are pretty much lucky in France because we do have a new tool, and this tool has been designed by the French government and its name is RGESN and it stands if I want to translate it in English, it stands for general framework for eco-designing digital services. This framework has 79 questions.

It only takes half a day to perform an auto assessment, and then you get a first score and you have ideas about what you can improve. So it is a very first step to be achieved For us, it's a great tool. Certainly it's not enough, but at least I think it would be really great if every company could use it because it's free. And now at OCTO, we are running this assessment on every project we do for our clients. And what's amazing is that you got a score out of 100%. And when the team sees that there are about 40, 45%, then the team wants to go further. So we are at the very, very beginning of using this framework, but so far I find it much more powerful than all the top-down decisions that we have been taking so far.

Gael: With a bit of gamification on top of it, I want to get top score.

Dominique: Exactly. Exactly.

Gael: And which areas does this tool cover? Is it only about how you design your digital service, or is it also on how you host it?

Dominique: Exactly. You have eight different topics. You have topics about where your cloud provider, you have topic about on which kind of mobile your service is going to be running. You have topics in every field. When you design and develop and run digital services. It's really a good wide approach.

Gael: And we will put the link to this tool description in the show notes, obviously as usual. Drew, you mentioned already AWS sustainable dashboard, but did you leverage other tools like the assessment, an assessment grid as Dominique's just mentioned, or other tools to empower your teams and hand them into the sustainable journey.

Drew: Yes. And that, by the way, that framework sounds fantastic. I want one. Starbucks is in every cloud, but I'll talk about AWS cause that's the one I work most closely with for my systems. Prior to our sustainability journey, we were already very familiar and had worked very closely with the AWS well architected framework.

We had been through several reviews to make sure we're secure, efficient, cost effective, and all the other different pillars they have or still haven't and had in that framework. But, you know, again, about two years ago also at Reinvent, AWS launched sustainability pillar to the well-architected framework.

And that's actually a very similar sounding kind of set of questions that get asked. And ultimately generate a report on, you know, how well you're doing, what opportunities exist for further improvement. And again, that's a similar thing. If you're doing well, there's just a few more things.

Let's go tackle those things and finish the job, or look how much further we have to go. Let's go ahead and tackle the most important highest priority element. Moving forward. So that's actually a big piece of it. Along the journey of trying to figure out how to measure a carbon footprint, it definitely leveraged other tools.

You know, one more tool that comes to mind that I depended on to help quantify our carbon footprint as well as some opportunities for improvement, is cloud carbon footprint. An open source tool that was put out by the ThoughtWorks team to help ingest cloud usage data, cloud diagnostic. Usage data and generate reports that show cloud usage and cloud carbon footprint over time.

Even to this day, I actually use some of the logic that's used inside of cloud carbon footprint, but I apply it to some of my other Datadog dashboards that I look on a regular basis.

Gael: Yeah, cloud carbon footprint was actually the latest question on the Friday pool that we have now, the weekly pool that we have on the Green IO channel. Cause we gathered so much knowledge from all our guests that we decided to have this little game. And that's quite fun that you mentioned it because that carbon footprint was actually the latest question.

Bouncing back on what you said, Drew, actually, I realize that the referential, the assessment grid that Dominique mentioned does not have an English version. If among the listeners there are any people who'd like to volunteer to translate it, to put it somewhere on the internet, I will be more than happy.

And I will actually ask this question also on a few social networks. I try to be active and that will be actually super cool if someone, of course, on a purely open source, with a purely open source approach, would like to translate it and put it somewhere. Yeah. We'll be super happy to give him or her a hand.

But I think that will be very useful. You're not the first English speaker to tell me, oh, actually, I'd like to have a look at it now. You've got a plugin also that you can put on your brother so that the way to implement your diagnosis. So, very interesting tool, and it might also help a bit the discussion we're having at the W3C.

It goes beyond simple Web design, but it's interesting as well. That being said. Let's try to take a step back and with everything you shared so far and all those experiences, ongoing experiences, because I do understand your message to both of you that it's still in early stage, you're still on a continuous improvement approach.

The job is not done. And I actually don't believe it could be ever completely finished. The sustainability is a journey. It's not a destination. What if you had the ability to fast forward yourself in the future, what would you say to your future yourself in terms of do and don't?

Dominique: If I were in a magic world. That means that I think my advice would be to hire already committed people. May seem very, very easy. But for me it's key to have a team fully aligned on the same purpose.

Drew: And I love finding the right people. That's actually a great one, and I think Starbucks actually has sort of inherently a lot of those people. To begin with, our mission, our mission statement, is to inspire and nurture the human spirit, one person, one cup, one neighborhood at a time. That's a very positive message, and it seems to attract people who want to do good, who have this sort of mission driven at their core. You know, if I were, you know, leading an organization in the future and I wanted to make sure we did this right, I would be, you know, super clear that this is important, right? It's important across the board. I would empower everyone to come up with ideas within their own systems.

They know what best engineers know their systems, on how they can do better, what opportunities exist frequently, and that's just the way they design things. But other times it does require investment. And we wanna make sure we match the investment with, you know, how important we feel this is for our company and the world.

Gael: So starting with people, I feel very much aligned with what you both said. Now, taking a further step back, I'd like to ask you a couple of question going beyond tech teams. And my first question will be, and that one might be especially true for you, Drew, how green for tech and green by tech initiatives work together.

Drew: Yeah, it is a good question and it's not something I've dealt with directly. I've not had, you know, what we call the business side, ask my team specifically to do some green initiative, but that does happen quite a bit, you know, in the sustainability team or some other business. Department is looking to, you know, achieve some results or deliver some new capability that tech can deliver.

So that happens quite a bit. The five tech initiatives are ones that tend to come out of like our just inspire people that have an idea and either kind of bring it up to as a proposal or do it as kind of hack sort of situation. A lot of our hack projects which we tend to do once or twice a year.

You know, they get voted on and some of the best ideas get shared much more broadly. They get presented to our executive leadership teams and very frequently, more recently, more frequently, they're getting actual funding to go even further. That's where I think a lot of the by tech initiatives come from.

Gael: Dominique, what about greenwashing? Was it an issue? Was it the reason maybe starting with OCTO that you decided actually to be quite quiet about this move, this internal move into tech sustainability?

Dominique: Well, just like I said, it's a journey and we are really afraid of greenwashing at OCTO. Not only greenwashing, I mean, when we advocate for something, when we communicate about something. We really want that there is no issue and so we have started to communicate about sustainability and we communicate about our efforts, our findings.

We communicate of what we try, what we succeed, but what we don't succeed. We are more communicating about the journey. And less about achievements. But I think that now with the new framework. I think that we will soon be able to prove, because this is, I mean, a state framework, we will much more be able to prove what we are saying.

Drew: And I think greenwashing is always a concern. Speaking for myself, I do talk a lot about, you know, sustainable technology. But I certainly don't do it with a lens towards," Hey, look at all this great work we did "and use that as sort of the main point. The main point is I think we're always learning. If I have something that I learned and I can share that with someone else that helps them, that's a win for everybody.

So I think it is about the journey, it's about the details and opportunities for constant growth.

Gael: Yeah, thanks both of you. A very touchy topic and I've got a second one for you. And then I will ask you easier questions, I promise. But the second tough question is that you are both working in companies with big objectives when it comes to growth. Do you believe that decoupling, so only talking about carbon emission, a greenhouse gas emission, sorry.

Do you believe that decoupling can be achieved, but you can grow a company without growing greenhouse gas emissions at some point?

Drew: I think to a point, you know, we've definitely seen that within some of our platforms. You know, let's look at the last three years for our loyalty engine doubled the size of that business. That doubled the number of active users on that platform. You know, the carbon footprint is significantly down from when we started during that time.

And costs are down too and operational costs. Now we might look at that and say, wow, we were quite bloated three years. Which is true, but I think that over time, the lens of cost optimization and then after that carbon optimization has really gotten us to decouple that the growth from the actual cost and carbon.

Now at some point, these two things coalesce into and become more tightly coupled, and that's where I think it's less about the metrics itself and more about what opportunities exist for us to become more efficient both from a cost and department perspective.

Gael: Thank you. And Dominique, do you have an opinion on it as well ?

Dominique: Yes, I have an opinion. It's a very, very personal one. And my answer is no, I don't think so. And it's very difficult for me to say that because I like IT. I like this kind of industry. But we know that we do have a big issues with planetary boundaries. And we know that IT honestly is not doing any good on planetary boundaries right now. So I really think that we need to change the way we do business. Probably IT could help sometimes, probably it could not. I know this is a very political point of view, but I think that we really need to challenge the way we do business.

Gael: Thanks for sharing it, Dominique. That's not always easy. No judgment on this podcast. So I'm very happy that you feel free enough to share your vision, and that is true that Planetary Boundaries is a true challenge on how much we believe we can grow our current system, especially then we incorporate social injustice and stuff like that and where people should catch up and where people should slow down.

But that's, I mean, you've got great podcast and, and all the content discussing this topic way better than I could ever done, but that's still a very interesting point of view. Okay, so that was a difficult question. I'm super grateful that both of you, you agree to answer it very openly and honestly.

My two last questions are easier promise. The first one is, you already shared a bit about this. In one or two sentences maximum. What are the trend that you noticed in our industry today? Is it going toward the right direction when it comes in terms of sustainability, of awareness about all those environmental impacts?

I know that we focused a lot on greenhouse gas emissions today, but there are more environmental impacts like water usage, abiotic resource depletion, et cetera, et cetera. But hey, that's the way you started your journey. So I didn't want to lead the witness into things that were not actually things that you wanted to share. What is the trend that you've noticed both in Europe and more, maybe specifically in France for Dominique and in US for Drew, but actually you're both quite involved in community like climate action tech, we mentioned it, tech rocks for OCTO. So what are the trends that you've not noticed recently?

I would say the last two years.

Dominique: Well, France seems to be moving fast on sustainable IT. When I see the communities, the numbers of experts on that topic, but it's always too slow for sure. And you're right, it's not only about greenhouse gases and energy anymore. Now in France we tend more and more to use the lifecycle assessments and we try to go beyond carbon emissions because it's also a matter of what the usage biodiversity.

So it's the beginning, but now we are talking less about greenhouse gases and well, I see two trends. And it's different among companies. For non-tech companies, IT sustainability is not an issue so far. Just like Drew said, most of the time, the sustainability issues are somewhere else not on IT, so it's pretty much difficult for those companies, or for us as consultancy company to move on that topic. And in the French tech ecosystem, you have a few companies which have really started to take IT sustainability into account, but right now it's far to be the majority of them. So I really, really hope that the new tool I was talking about will help. 

Drew: And I think from, you know, a general perspective, when I started this journey, you know, again, three years back, I would struggle to encounter somebody who knew what I was talking about when I asked about sustainable IT. Fast forward to today, I think it's a fairly common topic. I think it, you know, ways to go as we said earlier, but at least it's understood.

There's a growing sets of communities of people thinking about these problems. And you know, as far as in sort of in the US, I actually looked to Europe. And what's happening there to understand really kind of the forefront of what we could be doing. So I appreciate what you're doing Gael and Dominique.

Gael: So thanks a lot for sharing your views on the general trend, both in the US and in France. And I promise this will be my last question, but if you had one or two resources to share with your audience to learn more about digital sustainability, IT sustainability, or sustainability at large. It could be book, it could be thought leaders, it could be articles, conference, whatever, podcasts of course. What would you like them to read or to listen to?

Drew: Well, I think we've already mentioned this one, but I really enjoy the climate action tech community. It's a Slack community. Amazing people with a fantastic set of organizers that are really kind of inspiring and help me learn and grow along my journey. And through that group, I learned about, you know, the Tom Greenwood's Sustainable Web design book that came out from a book apart a few years ago.

The kind of, you know, it's not a long book, but it actually does a very broad sort of overview of Web engineering sustainably and calls out a lot of different areas for sites can be improved and further resources are identified. I gave this book to every single person on my team as just a bit of inspiration.

Dominique: As for myself, those are going to be references for French speakers. Sorry about that. I really like a podcast from Richard Hanna, and the podcast is Techologie. So I find it very interesting because he invites different kind of of people doing sustainable IT just like developers, designers that they talk about accessibility, not only about eco-design.

Very, very interesting one. Techologie. And the second one is a MOOC it's a MOOC from INRIA, INRIA is a digital research organization in France. And I mean it's a MOOC which is free. And the name is the environmental impact of digital technologies. This is very well explained. Very well done to start on that topic.

Gael: And actually Dominique, you shared references that are available in English, so thanks a lot for that because INRIA has an English version. Yeah. And when I do a digital collage session in the English version of La Fresque du Numérique, I always mention obviously INRIA as materials to dive a bit deeper into the topics. INRIA has an English version and regarding Techologie you have a few episodes in English, I believe, and I must say that with the other French podcast L'Octet Vert so in English, I think it could be transferred by Green Byte. They are the two podcasts that inspired me to launch Green IO. I mean, there are two giants, Richard Hanna and Tristan Nitot that I owe a lot, and I'm very happy that thanks to you I can salute them and say to all the French speakers that please make sure that you pay attention to this two podcasts.

They're great. I mean, you can listen to almost all the episode, that's very valuable information. And when it comes to the climate action tech community, we've already mentioned it several times, but "hello everyone, so happy, all those great facilitators, all those great coordinators doing an amazing job."

So I'm super proud to be part of this community and I'm very grateful that I've been able to meet Drew thanks to you. And that's it. I would like to, once again, thank you for this beautiful conversation answering easy question. Mm, no, I don't think that there were that many easy questions. Very hard questions, very transparent answers.

So thanks a lot for both of you. I hope it will help a lot of tech leaders, product leaders, data leaders, sustainability leaders, to kickstart their journey or to ramp up their journey into sustainability, where tech is a great part of it, whether it's green by Tech, or Green for Tech. Thanks a lot, both of you.

It was a pleasure to be on the show. Have a great morning for Drew. Have a great evening for Dominique and I think I'm gonna call it a day now. Thanks a lot.


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Ready to explore the digital sustainability landscape of Singapore? 
Travel there with Gaël Duez to meet Thibaut, the local representative of both the Climat fresk and the Digital Collage in Singapore and Ian, founder of Greenie web. 
➡️ Join us for an insightful discussion as we delve into the Singaporean tech ecosystem and its sustainability landscape. 
✅ Our guests share their views on the evolving domain of digital sustainability, achievements, and trends in IT sustainability in Singapore and in South-East Asia, as well as their perspectives on the main environmental crises. 
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Learn more about our guests and connect
Thibault is a versatile sustainability practitioner and digital footprint expert. He helps MNCs draft roadmaps for leaner technology towards the greater good, leads Climate Fresk & Digital Collage workshops, and is the co-founder of a VC-backed circular economy startup, Found & Seek. 

A true advocate of an enthusiastic, solution-oriented sustainability that taps into the power of collaborative action. 

Ian Chew is the Chief Executive of Greenie Web, a climate-tech SaaS company at the forefront of digital decarbonization.
Greenie Web helps enterprises achieve their net-zero goals, reduces internet-related energy consumption, and provides a low-carbon method to digitize traditional industries and build Web 3.0. Ian's expertise in this field has been recognized internationally, and he has been invited to speak at various EU countries' classes program in Singapore.

• Thibaut's LinkedIn
• Ian’s LinkedIn
• Gaël's LinkedIn 
• Gaël's website 
• Green IO website 

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Thibaut and Ian’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode
Greenie Web
Found & Seek
E-wasteE-waste collection bins in SingaporeDatacentersRazer Inc.
Thibaut's medium (articles about Datacenters, Ecological Backpack or e-waste in Singapore)
Qcon London
Malaysia StarVC (Venture Capital)World Wide Waste written by Gerry McGovernAPI days in Singapore E-waste collection bins empowered by the National Environment AgencyClimate Fresk and Digital Collage in SingaporeStubborn optimism on climate - Christiana FigueresCNA : major newspaper and media in SingaporeNate Hagens
Transcript
Gael: Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO, the podcast for doers making our digital world greener, one byte at a time. I'm your host Gael Duez, and I invite you to meet a wide range of guests working in the tech industry to help you better understand and make sense of its sustainability issues and find inspiration to positively impact the digital world.

If you like the podcast, please rate it on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite platform to spread the word to more responsible technologists like you. And now enjoy the show. In this episode, we go to Singapore to meet Thibaut and Ian. Both will facilitate the first sustainable track at the API days conference this week.

So this interview is very keen to my heart because I had the pleasure to meet John, the founder of API Days Singapore, in the Paris session last year. In the middle of the main hallway, crowded like hell, we tried to get our hands on the sandwich before jumping to the next round of conferences. He shared with me his interest in sustainability, how he was enjoying the sustainable track I was hosting and asked me if I knew anyone in Singapore. I immediately introduced him to my dear friend, Thibaut and BOOM, voilà !After Qcon London last month. Yet another big tech conference dedicated significant time to the sustainability topic. Well done. Why Thibaut ? Thibaut is a local representative of both the climate fresk and the digital collage in Singapore.

He has managed to boost their participants and create a vibrant community of facilitators with diverse backgrounds. On top of this volunteering activity, Thibaut is a consultant in digital sustainability. And before his latest adventure, he has an extensive dry, quick hold of managing business units in the digital sector in France, in Singapore, and also in Hong Kong.

Why Ian? Maybe because he has his picture in several journals as Last Days, the star manager, the CWR and more to come. But to be honest, maybe because he founded 13 years ago when no one actually cared about the topic: Greenie Web, his digital decarbonization agency to green the Internet. And now full disclosure, we should have had a female guest with us today.

You know how important gender parity is for me. But she was prevented from speaking by her organization at the very last moment. This is something I notice more and more, and this really upsets me because a new employer should be able to bar someone from sharing her professional experience, providing no confidential information is shared.

Still.

Let's now dive with our guest into the lively Singaporean IT sustainability scene. 

Welcome, Ian and Thibaut. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today !

Ian: Thank you, Gael. It's a pleasure to be here.

Thibaut: Thanks, Gael.

Gael: Thanks both of you. Ian, I'd like to ask you about your journey with sustainability first, as I do with all my regular guests. But first I'd like to start with a more personal question. So how proud was your mother?

Ian: Ah, that question. So just to give our audience a bit of a context, about a week or so back I actually posted a LinkedIn about one of my first features in a national newspaper. So even though I'm Singaporean and what we do predominantly is based out of Singapore. I had this wonderful opportunity to be featured on a complete full page in the Star Malaysia, which is Malaysia's largest English publication.

 It's a full spread across two pages in the middle of the newspaper, and it has been really my dream to share about sustainability on a national scale. So that was something that I was very proud of. And it also harks back to my childhood when I shared with my mom that one day I hoped to be in the newspaper for something positive, for something newsworthy, and it was a dream come true.

So that moment was a very proud one for my entire family, not just my mom. And very happy that you asked that question because it really brings smiles to my face, even just describing it.

Gael: Yeah. But I can't imagine, that's great that you manage to, as you say, raise awareness in - I've read the Malaysia Star when I traveled in Malaysia so a couple of time, and that is definitely a big newspaper there and being able to raise awareness in- such a topic that is not that mainstream, like sustainability it is, but digital sustainability and tech being an issue as much as a solution, that's not that common in Malaysia as far as I remember. So really, congratulations. How did this journey in sustainability start certain years ago or even maybe before?

Ian: Definitely. So the turning point for me really was one of the summits that they had back in 2009, so it was the Copenhagen Summit, and I still recall reading of that. It was called the Hopenhagen Summit. So instead of C, they replaced it with H because in 2009 that was supposedly back then one of the major turning points, right?

We've got a lot of people talking about climate change. That, for me, was one of the first large scale movements after the year 2000. So I was, as a much younger person, very interested. And one of the things that happened in that same year was that I first picked up coding. So people were talking a lot about biodiversity.

There was a lot of talk about deforestation and how to combat that, right? Combat wild forest fires. But in my mind, back then, when I first started coding, I was thinking to myself what can be done for technology? What can be done to ensure that technology does not go down the path of the other mainstream, I would say, assets or mainstream activities that we do.

Because when we had the industrial age, we had all these factories and no one thought about sustainability from the get-go. Right? So now they- or rather back then- they were then thinking of how to make, say manufacturing greener. How to make the physical supply chains greener? And I was thinking if they had done that right at the very beginning when they were first building factories about a hundred years ago, then we wouldn't have had that problem.

So back in 2009, when I first started picking up coding, tech was still much newer as compared to today, right? A good number of people still didn't own personal computers. They didn't have personal laptops. Lots of people I knew actually went to internet cafes when they wanted to surf or to play certain video games, right.

Certain computer games. So back then tech was still very nascent and I was thinking if we could embed sustainability into tech from the get-go, then we wouldn't be facing this same problem that we had with the industrialization age. Because in the tech age, if we talk about sustainability in tech from the beginning, then we would have a very sustainable journey: one in which our future generations would not have any trouble taking over, and one in which we would have no regret creating. So that's a bit of the genesis story with regards to my well journey in tech and sustainability, 13 years back.

Gael: And Thibaut, what about you? Did you ask the right question from the start or is it a bit more like me who after almost a decade, more than a decade in IT like "oops, actually, we should pay attention to sustainability at some point".

Thibaut: Yeah, so I come from the other side actually. Cause I crafted my career in IT consulting. I was a local partner for IT projects -like, I don't know- HR apps for banks, this kind of stuff. I also worked in machine learning and AI. But this topic really came to my mind during Covid where I actually decided to shift.

I was in the midst of I mean, I was realizing something was off precisely because I didn't ask myself the right questions. And more importantly, I think I didn't ask my customers the right questions cause I was really: "oh, I've always had customer facing roles and my role was to advise and to help them build meaningful Web apps".

These kind of, you know, IT digital structures. And now that when I look back, I realized them, I really didn't ask the right questions, and I contributed to projects that were beyond not stupidity. It's a bit harsh to say that. I realized I was working on apps. I perfectly knew another team in the company had it, but you know, business is business and I had to deliver because that was my pay grade at the end. Right. 

And my approach of tech and sustainability together comes from a more- I would say, -French pessimistic approach and more like a pragmatic approach, saying, "okay, you know, tech, you've been working in this and I realized I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to make an impact. Like it is not as exotic as the end.

It's more like, "okay, you know how to do this, but you want to do that, so how can you make something out of these two and see how it goes?" So this is pretty much my story.

Gael: And once again, COVID has brought a lot of bad things to the world, but I cannot count the number of people. It has actually helped to pose a little and think about their job and shift or adjust things in their professional and personal life. That's very weird and amazing at the same time.

That being said. Regarding Singapore now, because that's actually the main hero, the main character of our story today, it is a beautiful city island. What could you tell me about tech in Singapore? Because I read pretty amazing numbers like VC funding. You've got, I think, 90 of the 10 biggest tech companies in the world do have some presence or even headquarters in Singapore.

It seems to be very vibrant as well when it comes to funding a lot of startups, et cetera. So is it just a hype or is it something more grounded in Singaporean culture?

Thibaut: I will actually as my wife is Singaporean. So when I say we, and when I say Singapore, I'm including myself not as a citizen of Singapore, but as somebody who's here to stay, which is something is important to re-situate because sometimes people are just here for a few years and, you know so I won't speak on behalf of Singaporeans, but at least I feel part of their wonderful country.

I think Singapore is at the crossroads right now. Just before, we prepared this podcast with you, Gael, you mentioned. This concept of pharmacon, which is a concept I really find truly amazing and extremely powerful, explains that basically something that can be seen as a silver bullet, as a remedy can also be considered as something that makes a situation worse, like a poison.

So it's a very old concept, which I really think should resonate with our conception of technology today in Singapore and beyond. But going back to Singapore, they are attracting a lot of talent, a lot of funding, a lot of actual interest from the world, from Asia and also from Southeast Asia. And they need to make their decision whether technology should be leveraged for the greater good or should be leveraged for other topics like, I don't know, speculation, financing or whatever.

When you have a look at what companies are saying or what agencies are saying, you actually see the beginning of something rising here where I would say that to the highest level of national government agencies, they know that there is something to tap into and companies feel it too.

They feel something, but they have a hunch. But they still can't grasp how they should do it, what they should know and what would be the approach. And in general, I think, when it comes to sustainability with the capital S in Singapore, the strategies here, the KPIs are here, but the tactics, they are very, very scarce to find.

And a lot of exciting projects in Singapore are actually into the investigation of how you can make sustainability real and operational beyond just a few numbers, carbon footprint calculation and these kinds of things. How can you make sustainability relatable and reality rooted in the life of people at home and in the companies?

Gael: It's very interesting this crossroad image. And Ian, what are, according to you, the key features of the Singaporean Tech scene at the moment?

Ian: I think that's a very good question. To me, the Singaporean tech scene, there are two parts to it, right? The first part would be the pre VC part, and the second part would be the post VC part. So the VC era in Singapore actually is very young. It probably began about 10, 15 years ago, plus minus, right? And the first group of VC, that came to Singapore, were not exactly local VCs there. It wasn't an organic process in which venture capital suddenly sprouted up in Singapore, it was very much government driven. The government saw a need for there to be venture capital, to really grow the entire tech ecosystem, right? Because prior to the VC era, Singapore, it was very much of family businesses or individual hobbies who became very good at certain niche areas.

An example would be creative technologies that were very innovative, right? They actually created something that's called the sound blaster card. You can look that up. In its time at least, it was one of the most advanced tools that you could have in a computer. Right, but coming back to the present day in this VC era, we see that the Singapore real ecosystem has managed to grow quite steadily in the last 10 years or so.

A lot of it has been government supported, and when we tie it to our conversation and our topic today on it and sustainability, I think that it's a very good time to be in Singapore. Right. Because the past 10 years was spent building this entire tech in a sense IT ecosystem. And now there is this very large push both by industry and by the government to ensure that sustainability and climate change is at the forefront of matters.

And it's really for two very big reasons. 

The first one is because the country, our country , is an island nation, right? So it's a very existential issue in which if we don't play our part for climate change and the sea level rises in the way it has been rising, or the rate of rise increases even more, the country may cease to exist in a hundred, 200 years time.

Right? So that's one. 

And the second thing :To do with the competitive nature of the global economy because climate technology and sustainability in general would be one of the largest drivers of growth in the 21st century. So whoever, who lacks behind in this industry would lose a very important competitive edge in the global economy.

And as a country with little to no natural resources, being able to harness climate technology at its best is something that relates to the survival of the nation's economy. And so is also an existential issue from an economic sense.

Gael: And suddenly I feel very, very stupid because I was expecting an answer regarding how the Singapore economy wants to stay cutting edge. So exactly what I said in this second part, but actually didn't realize that it was a matter of survival for Singapore to fight by climate change. Yes, it's an island.

It's not a very mountainous island. So yes, actually you are absolutely right. The crossroad image is beautiful because Singapore is a crossroad and is at a crossroad. But business wise and sustainability wise, and bouncing back Thibaut on what you said with a broader vision to Southeast Asia. Can you tell me why Singapore is a beacon and kind of maybe leading the charge against climate change and other environmental crises and how Singapore is different from the rest of the region and how the rest of the region is keeping up the pace toward more sustainable?

Thibaut: Yeah, I think, I mean, again, I don't want to be rude, right? Just consider my inputs as somebody who truly loves this place and, and I try to be as mindful as I can. I feel Singapore is kind of cursed in a way because again, it's a beacon and honestly, an ivory tower in the middle of a region where actually it strongly clashes with the situation of the countries around it.

It's very hard to compare the status of sustainability in the Philippines. Very famous for the plastic pollution, for instance, and Singapore for simple reasons:

In terms of talent, again, I'm repeating this, but in terms of talent and of funding, they are not playing in the same playground.

 Singapore truly has an absolutely, honestly, a unique opportunity to actually be the flame bearer, you know, like during the Olympics to propose a new future. To represent this, I think this shift in terms of mindset. I recently joined a conference with a youth climate activist. And there was a senior minister related to the transportation authority in Singapore.

He was exposing to the climate activists and to the audience on that day that he wants Singapore to shift from being the garden in the city to the city in a garden. And we find that extremely smart and beautiful in a way to reverse the topic. This shifting of mindset.

Personally, I think it strongly shows how much Singapore wants to lead the effort in sustainability within its borders, but also encourage foster collaboration on the regional level and show the example, show how it's done in a way, cuz Singapore again has the opportunity, has the chance to have all the material they can, they need, to craft this desirable and appealing future to craft tech and sustainability.

Gael: Ian, what are, according to you, the main hurdles that other countries in Southeast Asia face at the moment to speed up on sustainability?

Ian: Yes. Yes. Definitely. So to me, I don't feel that they're hurdles. In fact, I feel that they're really, really good opportunities and that's really why, if we look at it from a more macro perspective, a good amount of VC money, right? So we're talking about venture capital firms either opening new offices or increasing their footprint in Southeast Asia.

Right. So a good amount of VC money is flowing into Southeast Asia because there are these opportunities within the region and in a sense, the various countries in Southeast Asia. People like to refer to us collectively as a region, but we aren't as homogenous as most people think we are. In fact, Southeast Asia is one of the most diverse places.

Around the world, right? We are made up of 10 different countries and hundreds of different languages and different beliefs and practices. So it's a place where there is a great amount of diversity, and this diversity is really key to the region's growth. It brings about new ideas and from these new perspectives and new ideas, you can get truly new innovation.

So to me, addressing your question, Gael I feel that Southeast Asia has lots of opportunity. The hurdles may really well be related to the lack of at -least in the past- relevant capital to fund the innovation. But as we've seen in recent years, the amount of capital pouring into the region has accelerated, and that's why you see more and more startups being born in the region and even more and more unicorns being mentored in the past couple of years.

Gael: And some of them being in the climate, tech sector. Indeed. And so if we roll up our sleeves and focus a bit on "What is being achieved in sustainability in Singapore?". Could you share with us some initiatives that you really feel should be put under the spotlight? Whether it's in data center sustainability, maybe a change in the way things are designed in the digital industry or the way they're coded or maybe the way that people handle data and everything related to AI or model training. Where things are moving and what are the landmark initiatives that you'd like to share when it comes to the Singapore Tech scene?

Ian: I'll just hop in here. So from my perspective, I feel that there has been an increase in awareness in general sustainability. We're talking about people being very mindful about things like Earth Day, earth Hour. In the second half of last year in Singapore, we had a climate action week. So in terms of sustainability as a whole, right?

We're talking about awareness regarding plastic waste, regarding General GHG, which stands for greenhouse gas emissions, right? There is an increase in such awareness, but if you look at it specifically from an IT angle, right, sustainability in IT, I think it's still very nascent. And I can tell you from experience because at Greenie Web, when we talk to corporations, when we talk to large corporations, when we talk to smaller businesses, right?

Your SMEs, your small and medium enterprises, there is a very eureka moment experienced by these corporations, right? They still feel that sustainability is a given each time you use a digital process because they grew up, or rather they were trained in a way that they were trained in the past 10, 20 years, in a moment in history where digitization automatically equated with going green.

In other words, when they first stopped using paper to send up mail, right, they started using it. They were told that they were going green, and that to some extent has been true. Right? But we are seeing what we call in-house at Greenie Web, the carbon financial divergence, right? Whereby finances in the past used to cap the carbon cost of an operation, whereas now with software, the financial cap that used to be placed on top of carbon has since been dissolved, and now you have this divergence where costs can be kept very low, but carbon emissions can skyrocket. Your carbon footprint is no longer restrained by your budget, right? A thousand dollars can get you maybe two, three, even five years worth of electronic digital marketing service.

And so you can send out these emails every day. And if you look at the carbon cost per email and you multiply that by the number of emails you send now in a month, multiply that by the number of years a thousand dollars can get you for those professional services. You now have a far larger carbon footprint from the digital wall then you would have had in a physical world.

And so these are the things that we like to share with our partners, right? And we like to share with the general public because long gone are the days whereby going online means you're going green. In fact, in the present day, by going online you could actually be tricking yourself into thinking you're going green, but actually be doing the exact opposite.

So that's a very long answer but I hope it gives you a bit of a picture flavor of digital sustainability.

Gael: This shifting moment when people realize digital does not always equal green is always very interesting. It reminds me, you know, the examples that Gerry McGovern took in his book World Wide Waste, when he actually talks, brings the topics of e-reader. Hmm. And that spontaneously, people would say, well, that's wonderful to buy a Kindle or whatever kind of e-reader you want because I will save so many trees to be chopped off.

And the answer that the studies when you incorporate life cycle analysis, et cetera, et cetera, for the US was kind of astonishing because depending on the study, you had a positive impact on the planet. If you read between 20, and for the other studies , it was 60 books per year. Otherwise, the carbon footprint is negative.

It's better to buy physical books than an E-reader and on average in the US. An adult citizen will read two books per year on average, of course. Huge discrepancy here. That's really stuck me with this example of, yeah, that's not that simple. And knowing that a lot of people are actually getting more and more aware of it in the tech scene in Singapore and pretty much everywhere around the world, this is like a huge battle that is being won as we speak at the moment.

Do you have other examples to share about initiatives taking place in Singapore at the moment?

Thibaut: Yeah, so actually Gael, you mentioned something, a keyword and that's actually my favorite approach to calculate impact footprint or in terms of waste of technology in general, which by the way will be the topic on our track during API days in Singapore with Ian here. It's the life cycle.

I think it's extremely important to have companies and individuals understand that the dematerialization is just materialization elsewhere, just not in our backyard. And to help them perceive this, I really like to use the circular approach cradle to grave approach focused on the lifecycle.

When it comes to understanding the life cycle assessment of technology, it goes through three steps, right?

The manufacturing, the usage of data, and finally, the end of life, whether it's obsolescence or recycling slash e-waste. So in Singapore, actually, we have a few incentives that were launched recently that can actually represent each of these steps. And the fun fact here is that Singapore really likes to rely on local champions to push for topics.

Example, manufacturing. You have this company that you may know called Razer, Razer very famous, I mean, in the gaming industry at least, a very famous brand of laptops. And they are gonna launch their new eco design laptop in the next few weeks. I hope to be part of this amazing event because they are planning some cool incentives to mention that.

But Singapore is now taking the topic seriously of eco-design hardware and manufacturing thanks to the promotion of a local champion. Because Razor is Singaporean now coming to usage one word must be mentioned and I know Gael, it's true to your heart. It's the data centers. So data centers in Singapore represent roughly 7% of the energy consumption, which is, when you think about it, it's huge in terms of ratio.

It's huge. 7% of the energy in Singapore is used for data centers. And also here you have some actual local champions. So for instance, our friend from coolest DC and PS that may be listening to this podcast in the future, who's actually working on innovative ways to develop data centers through smart cooling systems and a better layout of racks, et cetera.

And it's actually super important for Singapore to find their space in this industry for a simple reason :a lot of projects that were designed to go to Hong Kong- in terms of data centers- are now rerouted in Singapore for reasons that are quite obvious. You can imagine, especially between the fact that the US and China are fighting over technology topics and IP intellectual property.

So Singapore actually is benefiting from this shift of strategy from the big tech companies, from the US to actually absorb new projects of data centers and Singapore is actually super interested in these topics the change of approach in the Singapore government on data centers project that were a few years ago rejected for sustainability reasons and now they are re-accepted for the reasons I just mentioned, is actually very pragmatic, but very representative of the strategy on Tech of Singapore.

Finally on the e-waste part, the end of life, Singapore launched on the 1st of July, 2021- so not so long ago, almost two years ago- very exciting project of electronic waste collection bins that was decided by the National Environment Agency that now is collecting a lot of waste because in terms of number, for instance, in terms of electronic waste.

Back in 2020, you had roughly 20 kilograms of electronic waste per pack per year in Singapore, which is huge compared to the other countries in Southeast Asia. So to summarize this, you can see that Singapore understood quite extensively the necessity of addressing the life cycle assessment and started incentives either private through companies on regulation level for E-waste, for instance, to take this topic very, very, very seriously. And it starts with awareness, which is actually a topic that we can delve into later.

Gael: Very interesting the approach that we need local champions like having a change, a move toward a digital system, be rooted with local participants, local champions in how the Singaporean governments and other actors promote local champions. Very interesting approach indeed. Not necessarily the one always followed in Europe, but already 7% of the energy being consumed by data centers.

And because of geopolitical tension, this number might rise both in absolute and related terms. Should it be a concern? How sustainable is it for the industry? Ian, do you have any ideas on it?

Ian: I think that most people in the data industry are also cracking their heads with regards to the reduction of energy consumption and green data centers in general. And that's really rooted in government policy as well, because about three years back, the Singapore government actually launched a moratorium on the building of new data centers.

So that was something that Thibaut alluded to. From somewhere around 2019, 2020, all the way till the end of last year, right about the second half of last year, you couldn't build a new data center in Singapore. There were many reasons for it, but excessive data consumption and of course land space were key considerations when talking about data centers.

So the idea of being able to squeeze more into existing data centers. To ensure that new data centers were built in a way that consumed much less, has always been top of mind in the data center industry in Singapore. And I think that as we shift into a world that is I would say hyper digitized with so many more people coming online in the Southeast Asian region for the first time this year in 2023 and for the years to come.

The need for data centers will only increase in this region, and that's also extra impetus for people creating data centers to really think of how they can do so sustainably because data centers are not short-term digital infrastructure, right? They are digital infrastructure meant to last for decades, if not longer. And sustainable planning, in addition to the sustainability on the hardware devices will be paramount in ensuring this transition for us. At least for myself because we look at the more software side of things. We are also exploring ways with several of these partners in industry to see how software sustainability can increase the durability of hardware and data centers, allowing for extended life cycles so we don't have these use and throw or use and then recycle kind of situations that have been very rampant and that really add up to the e-waste situation experiencing by data centers in many other parts of the world.

Gael: Most of your clients are receptive. Do they manage to find a way to switch the way the code, the way they design software, and still answering the needs of their final customers?

Ian: I think we are still at a very early stage right now with most of these partners that we are talking to, they're still in the stage whereby they're trying to understand more, understand how a change in code, a change in software or the refactoring of things within the digital wall can affect downstream processes and workflows.

It's not as developed as we would like it to be, but I think that the necessity of the situation has brought them to the table in ways that we would not have imagined for many years.

Gael: So still in the awareness phase, but not that early anymore. Thibaut, awareness is something that, yeah, that's your daily branded bread and butter almost now. So maybe you could confirm or comment on what I've just said, that the level of awareness among technologists, I would say in Singapore is rising fast. Is it something that you've noticed ?

Thibaut: I'm gonna tell you I have many examples. I'm gonna quote one that I like to mention. When I arrived in Singapore two and a half years ago I remember that I wanted to do this, I wanted to work on the social social environmental impact of tech and helping companies design their linear infrastructures in a way. And some, not all of them, but a fair portion of sustainability practitioners that time in Singapore didn't mock me.

Alright. But they were like, really, "you really think it's gonna be something to take care of?" " Do you, don't you think we have more pressing matters like energy shift?" Now I'm not saying companies are eagerly looking at this topic, but at least nobody's mocking me anymore because they realized something was off and something that could be used in this area.

Okay. Technology and sustainability, it's not as obvious or as completely it's not black or, or white. Right? So that's actually in terms of awareness, I would say that we are still in the going from zero to one in Singapore. We are still in the very early stage of this. Now, when it comes to companies and I think that's what Ian is implying when he's working with partners.

When you go to companies, you have to speak their language, right? And the language of companies when it comes to sustainability in general, and especially in Singapore, is this carbon footprint. If you don't take this approach of carbon footprint to companies they will not listen to you actually because they will not find a value in what you deliver.

I have a lot of examples of that as well. When I talk to companies saying, you should do something about your carbon footprint or about your IT sustainability roadmap. Always comes the question of what is there for me? And what they imply here is either how much money are you gonna make me make, or are you gonna make me cut?

Or how much CO2 am I gonna save? It's maybe very complex actually, to address this topic in companies for a lot of reasons. First, I can definitely vouch for that I guess, but it's very hard to explain how much cO2 is generated from your technical infrastructures if you want to be very accurate. And the second thing is that technology also bears various impacts like pollution, mental health and biodiversity, which are absolutely not taken into accounting, carbon accounting companies.

So sometimes you feel a dissonance between the approach you have, the service you may deliver, and what the expectations of companies are.

Gael: I think it's not only located in Singapore that the carbon accounting and yeah, raising the level of awareness when it comes to climate change is kind of the golden key. Helping you to enter in quite a lot of companies now. And after that you've got an opportunity to talk about the other environmental crisis, the other planetary boundaries.

But carbon is the, as you say, what was your wording: the standard language to talk about sustain. sustainability.

Thibaut: Yeah, you gotta give them what they want. Right? It's very important. Maybe more generally on awareness. It's changing a lot. We can't compare maturity, even though the level of the lifestyle in Singapore is very high. You can't compare the level of maturity in Singapore and I don't know, North America or for instance, however I believe, I mean, that's what I'm doing, as you said, as my brand and butter. But I really believe in the power, the power of communities, right? Let's forget about CO2 footprint, whatever. Honestly, this is interesting, but you can't expect, you can't afford to lose time on exactly knowing how much CO2 you will save.

Let's act now. And I can see that definitely in Singapore, it's changing and it's about making connections that matter. And sometimes, you know, we focus a lot on feedback loops that may trigger the end of the world, like permafrost or I don't know, this kind of event. But we never focus so much on the feedback loop that can bring change to a higher level. Maybe, and that's what I say when I do workshops. I hope that I will be in one of my workshops one day at the next level. Because if Elon Musk actually did a workshop about climate change awareness a long time ago, maybe he wouldn't be considering some solutions he's mentioning like putting aerosols in the atmosphere et cetera.

Gael: Well, actually you want to have a workshop where you will have Elon musk and it will help you having Elon Musk not becoming Elon Musk. So you are running anti, you know, prevention. You've got a prevention program against the new Elon Musk of this world.

Thibaut: Let's imagine a multiverse where Elon Musk actually took part in a climate climate workshop or a climate threat. It's very important, I think, and there is a part of selflessness and awareness that I know it's kind of a leap of faith, but it's important for people who are crafting this kind of knowledge to believe in what they do because for sure you won't be able to see the impact the day after, but still you have to believe in it.

Gael: Yeah, agree with you. And how many participants so far in Singapore for climate fresk and digital collage, it's like more dozens, hundreds, thousands.

Thibaut: Ah, I would say both combined we are, we reached 4,000, I would say.

Gael: Oh my goodness.

Thibaut: Actually, it's actually growing a lot of momentum and we realize that working with people unlock unlimited potential. And now I can't say it for, I won't name anybody, but we are going to work with national government agencies to help them also embark on this wonderful journey to see, to identify and to show that sustainability does not necessarily have to be about regulations or bad news. It can also be exciting and appealing futures, and we are really helping companies also here through the community of volunteers to see that the pathways are exciting and it's gonna be hard, but it's gonna be brilliant.

Gael: Yes, actually this is why I really enjoyed it and it was truly refreshing to hear Ian rephrasing my sentence from hurdles to opportunities because I also believe that optimism is the way forward. A stubborn optimism to Christiana Figueres. 

Ian, like taking a step back actually and looking at the scene, like the broader scene at Singapore and beyond.

How do you feel today about climate change? I mean, you rightfully mentioned that it's actually an existential threat for your city, for your way of living, et cetera, et cetera. So how do you feel? Is it like a burden that you know is on your shoulders 24/7? Or actually, do you feel empowered or do you feel more optimistic?

Yeah. What is your state of mind at the moment?

Ian: So I feel that there is growing optimism with regards to the climate movement in Singapore. Back when I first thought of Greenie Web about 13 years ago, actually, it's 14 years back in 2009. The level of awareness has certainly shifted. Back then people were just talking more about carbon emissions.

Yes. And a lot more about looking at the climate crisis from a localized perspective, right? So how would it impact Singapore? How would it impact our coastal shorelines? How would it impact our economy? 

I think it is a testament really to the growth in awareness and the maturity of said awareness.

People in Singapore are now thinking about how climate change affects, not just Singapore. But other small island nations like us around the world. Right. How does climate change impact animals in oceans far away that we may never see? How does climate change impact potential diseases? Right. We're talking just now about the melting of the permafrost, right?

And how a lot of ancient zoonotic diseases can be released in the process. Right. So to me, I feel that there is still lots of room for growth. We've come a long way since I first started, about 14 years back, and that's a good reason for optimism because change doesn't happen overnight. And I feel that if we continue in the trajectory that we're headed to, there is every reason to believe that new innovations will come to be.

More people will join. Very interesting and meaningful. Say workshops just like climate fresk and digital collage that Thibaut is leading. And hopefully even one day we would have someone in Singapore or from the region that will be able to come up with a moonshot idea that becomes reality that will have an outsized impact on how the world deals with climate change.

With regards to my reflection on how climate change and our treatment of it has come to Singapore and we'll head for the next 10, 20 years.

years 

Gael: Thibaut, do you want to add something?

Thibaut: I'm French. I have to balance a bit of optimism. It's true that when you retook that idea, I actually did this exercise last year cause I was preparing a masterclass for an MBA program to talk about digital footprint. And when you read articles on straight times CNA, the major newspaper and media in Singapore. Tech is only seen as the solution.

Only, it's never considered as something that can actually bring additional problems or that can be done for nothing or that will bring pollution elsewhere, et cetera. So I think we have to look at the bright side and be optimistic, but I strongly believe and mean you just earlier, let's not be blind about it.

Let's use our brain, our common sense because it's not so hard to deploy technology for the greater good. And maybe, I mean, from what I see in companies, the major challenge, I would say the best practice I have is to think of the user first. Ian has actually a lot of things to say on this, maybe we'll talk about that during API days, but putting some user-centered approach because there's no one size fits.

Of course, especially climate change, sustainability might actually be a good mindset, a good pattern to keep in mind to prevent technology from being leveraged for nothing or for something that is not gonna be very useful. I mean, most of the time, and believe me, I worked in this industry and this IT project, but 99% of the time the project I was working on, on machine learning, our AI, a good Excel document would've been way enough.

And sometimes we just want to, for the sake of fanciness, we want to add extra layers of complexity. But let's streamline a bit. Let's take a safe step back and to quote Nate. You also have some great simplification ahead, and it doesn't have to be necessarily sad or bad news.

Gael: Oh my God. Quoting Nate Hagens on my show. Now you made my day Thibaut, and actually you also met a wonderful transition. I'm such a big fan of this podcast. I didn't have that much the opportunity to share the wonderful job he's doing with it. But the thanks a lot for bringing the topic on the table and that's a great transition because the question, the last question I wanted to ask both of you was :

Would you recommend one or two thought leaders in Singapore or elsewhere, or one or two articles or books for people to grasp a bit more of what is at stake when it comes to digital sustainability? And of course, if it's a bit more focused on Singapore or the area, that will be awesome.

But please feel free to share whatever you want..

Ian: So on my side, I think that, honestly, Gael, I think you've struck gold with today's session because Thibaut is really one of the people in the sustainability and tech arena that has played an outsized role in the development of our particular niche, in today's context. Right. To give you a bit more context and our listeners as well, the sustainability and tech ecosystem in Singapore is still relatively small, so there aren't exactly that many players.

In that regard, Thibaut and his work with digital collage would be one of the key resources for anyone who is in Singapore and listening to this podcast right now. And once you get your first toes right into the idea of digital sustainability, digital collage is a wonderful place to be. 

On my side, what we are doing at Greenie Web is we are also launching the 28 by 28 program. So don't worry, this is not a Forbes 30 under 30 kind of program. The 28 by 28 program that we're launching at Greenie Web is to celebrate 28 years worth of negotiations regarding the climate crisis. It's basically in celebration of COP 28 this year, and the aim of this project is really to educate students from 28 different institutions around the world about digital sustainability. Thus far, we've already had our very first session in February, we did a hybrid session with the University of Tampere in Finland. We had our second session about a week back with students from the Singapore Management University, SMU, and we're actually having a session this week with faculty members from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. So for this, for this particular question, I'm afraid I don't have particular local resources, local thought leaders, but I think Thibaut and I are good starting points, and if anyone would like to join us, and this is a shout out to anyone listening to this podcast as well, feel free to join because the Singapore ecosystem needs every hand we can get.

Thank you.

Gael: Beautiful closing words because a call to the arms. Join us for the digital sustainability battle. But thanks a lot, both of you for joining. Actually, it was great to have this. I think it is the first time that we've got a Green IO episode focusing on a specific area. You know, most of the time I love to have cross national guests so that there will be two perspectives, but I think this focus on Singapore was very, very interesting.

It's interesting to see how much the governments, the states play a role here. So it's not only in France as if we follow the usual caricature, but anyway. So thanks a lot. Thanks to both of you. I hope that the API Day sustainably track will be an amazing success. At least they gathered very talented people.

Starting with both of you. So thanks a lot for joining. It was great to have you on the show, and I hope that this podcast episode will help you also to raise awareness even further of the usual people you've already reached. So thanks a lot again.

Thibaut: Thanks, Gael. Thanks a lot. It was an amazing opportunity. And speak soon.

Ian: Thanks, Gael.

Gael: And that's it. Thank you for listening to Green IO. Make sure to subscribe to the mailing list to stay up to date on your episodes. If you enjoyed this one, feel free to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who could benefit from it. As a nonprofit podcast, we rely on you to spread the word.

Last, but not the least. If you know someone who would make a great guest, please send them my way so that we can make our digital word greener one byte at a time.
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