Green IO

Elaine and Ross hate recycling. Both know first hand about our computers’ and smartphones’ life. About the wasted opportunities to better use the precious resources into it. Elaine Brown is the CEO of the Edinburgh Remakery who refurbished 295 laptops last year. She’s also a keen expert on the right to repair issues. Ross Cockburn is the Trustee of Reusing IT who has been dealing with repaired devices from Africa to Ukraine over the last 25 years. Gael Duez sat down with them to cover multiple topics such as: The business of ITADThe financial and social rewardings of giving to charities The SSD revolution for longevityLinux, the (not so) secret weapon for reusing ITThe reality of Digital poverty Right to repair laws without teethThe multiple cost of Windows 10 EOLAnd … a new acronym invented during the recording: IUTA! ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conference is in London on September 23rd and 24th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 Learn more about our guest and connect: Elaine Brown's LinkedInRoss Cockburn's LinkedInGreen IO website Green IO SlackGaël Duez's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Elaine and Ross's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:Reusing ITThe Edinburgh RemakeryDanish Government moving to libre officeHOP (Stop Planned Obsolescence) associationAdoption of free and open-source software by public institutionsReports from UK Government on Open Source ApplicationsUsing ESG to boost portfolio company value in private equityDeloitte report on ESG effect on EBITDAThe EBITDA of ESGTranscript (auto-generated)ROSS COCKBURN (00:01)Recently the game changer for everybody in Elaine and I's world has been solid state drives. You can take a solid state hard drive and we have done this already, a Core 2 machine which is 20 years old and that machine will perform as quickly as a lot of people's brand new laptop.Gaël Duez (00:21)Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO. I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.Today, I'm going to share with you one of my secret recipes. When I deliver a keynote or talk about the environment of footprint of tech, I often ask the audience if they have a smartphone. They tend to laugh. I'm not sure why. Then I ask them to take it and to guess its weight. After a few seconds of auction style interaction, I deliver the right weight, which is around 70 kilo, because to build a smartphone, need around 15 kilos of fossil and 55 kilos of minerals. And this doesn't take into account the tons of water needed to extract the components and manufacture the device. And this doesn't take into account all the greenhouse gas emitted during its life cycle or the pollution emitted, including during its end of life phase, better known as e-waste. These numbers are the reasons why our guests today hate recycling. They know firsthand about our computers and smartphones life. The wasted opportunities to better use the precious resources Elaine Brown is the CEO of the Edinburgh Remakery who refurbished 295 laptops last year. She's also a keen expert on the right to repair issues. Ross Cockburn is a trustee of Reducing IT who has been dealing with repaired devices from Africa to Ukraine over the last 25 years. So welcome to the show, both of you. It's a pleasure to keep on exploring the rich and vibrantElaine Brown (02:12)Thanks.Gaël Duez (02:23)British ecosystem of IT sustainability. I didn't say English because both of you, you're based in Scotland. Welcome to the show.Elaine Brown (02:31)Thanks, lovely to be here.Gaël Duez (02:33)My pleasure as well. And bonjour. If we go for French, guess quite a lot of the listeners will be a bit lost, but thanks for making the effort, Ross.ROSS COCKBURN (02:41)Well, good.Gaël Duez (02:43)You know that Green IO London is actually in one week. And the topic this year is good for business, good for the planet with a question mark because we will discuss this assumption. And when we were preparing the episode, actually something struck me, it is possible to save money while doing cleverly decommissioning of IT devices, because more and more it costs money. So it could be the case of good for business, good for repairing IT devices.ROSS COCKBURN (03:14)Clearly if you've got devices running your business and they are five years old and you're going to replace them but you give them six years then that's going to go for your business isn't it? It's going to be good for the bottom line. You're going to save money. So there's two sides to this good for business, know, good for the planet. There's profit making and there's saving money and the two quite often don't sit very well together. They're uneasy bedfellows as we would say because you'll have accountants saying we need more sales and then you'll have accountants saying well actually we need to reduce some of the cost here in the business because if you reduce the cost effectively if you half the cost you double the profitsElaine Brown (04:05)I think it's a no brainer. Of course, being sustainable with your tech is good for business and good for planet. And that is the basis of what the Edinburgh Remake is based on. It's really driving those businesses to understand that the tech that they have, they have to have it. We understand that it's a digital age. But what they can do is the end of life of their tech and their journey in that business is not the end of life for that tech. And that's where businesses sometimes have that mismatch. think, we don't want it, we don't value it, you know, and we'll just buy some new. But what they can do is in that buying new stuff, they can think about what they are discarding. And if they donate it to the remake, we… are sort of Scotland's leading social ITADs, But different to other ITADs is that the key is on the social layer because it's the ESG is. Donate your end of tech, you don't want it, but there are millions of other people for whom that tech has still got life and we can do amazing things with it and it's that ESG piece. And for us, it's created our business. So it is good for business for us because it's created green jobs and it's great for the planet because it's tackling that e-waste, but it's also doing something magical around the social. It's about giving that gift of connectivity to other people. And for the businesses themselves that are donating the tech, it's good for their business for them because their consumers more and more are demanding that they become more sustainable. That's important to them. So if they can demonstrate that they're doing that, that's great for their bottom line because they're going to get more consumers, more customers choosing their service rather than another company because they know that they've got sustainability at heart. So for me, your title of your conference coming up in London is spot on. It is good for business and it's good for the planet for our communities.Gaël Duez (05:57)That's an interesting feedback, Elaine. There is just something that I'd like to clarify. Obviously, if you're a B2C company or if your enterprise customers pay a lot of attention to sustainability, yes, there is a clear benefit of running a more more sustainable business and letting people know about it. But a lot of companies are not under this kind of pressure, let's be honest. Most of the economic world is about B2B exchanges and the pressure about sustainability is not that high. Still, I guess you can save money because, and this is where I would love some clarification from both of you, it costs money actually to dispose a company e-waste. Am I right? At least in Scotland or maybe in the entire UK, I don't know.Elaine Brown (06:43)Yes. Yes, some ITADs will do it for free, but then they'll add on costs. And it does cost them because they've got to make sure that they're complying with environment legislation. So waste transfer notices and data wipe costs money. And that's often why businesses are reticent to do anything. They'd rather just stuff things in cupboards and deal about it later because they are worried about the environmental legislation that they need to comply with when they give it away and also the cost. And so that often makes them inactive. Those two things seem insurmountable. So let's just forget about it. And I'm sure most businesses have got those cupboards of doom, as I call them, where they're just stuffing old stuff in their cables, whatever, to deal with it another day. But the day is now.ROSS COCKBURN (07:38)Thank youElaine Brown (07:39)And we've got to deal with it now.ROSS COCKBURN (07:42)You have to realize now that the whole ITAD is an industry, it's a business. The big guys, in the larger users, the NHS, are my biggest donor. They're a huge user. They have 19,000 in Edinburgh devices alone, of which we get one fifth of every year being replaced.Elaine Brown (07:46)Yes.ROSS COCKBURN (08:06)Now for me as a sustainability activist trying to give people digital inclusion, that is fantastic. They're doing what I would say is best practice in the sense that they're making sure that anything that they are discarding is no longer of any purpose to them. It's going to get a longer happier life helping me educate children in Africa, Ukraine or wherever, or supporting charities in Scotland with low cost tech. So they've tipped that box massively. The alternative would be for those devices to be dismantled. Some of the recycling companies or the ITAS don't even dismantle them. They shred them. The money and the amount of electricity and probably water involved in shredding e-waste, turning it into granules that they can then be either hydro or pyrometallurgically all the minerals are extracted it must be massive absolutely huge I'd love to give you a number right now but I can't.Elaine Brown (09:12)Seen it firsthand, just having visited an ITAD and a lot of the companies that demand that these ITADs shred it is because they're pitching it on security. We want the whole thing shredded because then our data cannot be shared anywhere. That is rubbish and that is an absolute disgrace. So to me, that should just be stopped because there is ways to wipe data without shredding the entire machine.ROSS COCKBURN (09:22)Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ It is. Again. It's a debacle basically and then you've got the leading leading company that provides Wiping solutions Blanco, I don't mind naming them because they've bought up all the other wiping software companies out there and They actually say that you know Maybe maybe their own software isn't the right thing to use if they put the seed of doubt, but they say that. All other software is not good enough. You need to use Blanco. And you get people just project fear. It was the reason that we are no longer in the EU. It's the reason that we voted to leave. It's that we spin fear into society. And then people make rash decisions based on so most businesses feel that it's not possible to wipe drives. It is certainly more costly as Elaine said because a, Blanco will not give you their software for nothing, you pay for a wipe and it takes time because you have to take the drives out, you have to load them up so the labour cost in doing the right thing is a lot greater than doing the wrong thing and therefore most organisations will do the wrong thing purely and simply because of the economics.Gaël Duez (11:00)Okay, so let me pose here. So first of all, ITAD, can you just explain the acronym?ROSS COCKBURN (11:06)You're late.Elaine Brown (11:06)It's IT asset disposition. So it's basically tech disposal service. So these ITADs will come into big companies and say, you know, we'll take back all your least items, we'll take back all your end of life items, and we'll deal with that. And we might charge a little bit, but it's a problem solved for you. And then these ITADs often then sell those items. And then they will give the company sometimes a proportion back of that sale and then the business feels like we've done our bit, you know, but they don't know the journey of that tech, they just are feeling like, well, we've done our bit, we've got rid of our tech, we can now, and we've got some money back, so we can now buy in more tech, and they don't want to know the story. And I think that they need to know the story and they need to understand the story and it needs to be a better story if they understood that, would be a no-brainer for them to use people like ourselves who are transparent with the story. We're not shredding, we're doing community. We don't use the word recycling in the remake array. It's all about repair and reuse. is the key thing. So these ITADs are massive. They are massive. And about money. They're about money on the proportion that they're saying that they're doing the right thing, but Ross and I would probably say that, are they really? But it's a business. It's a business that's been born out of the need for people to get rid of their tech, to bring in more tech. That's where it comes from.Gaël Duez (12:34)Is it a business that actually save money for end user company or cost money? I've got a bit of a understanding because do they have to pay ITAD to take care of the tech or do they actually get some money back from ITAD once the tech has been resold?Elaine Brown (12:41)So it's a bit of a mixture. Most will say, we'll do this for free and we will get your proportion back because it's like a 70-30 split and so they'll give some money back to the provider. But sometimes for certain items, so some items will be free, they'll do that service for free and then they'll give money back. So it seems like brilliant. But then there'll be bits where they will charge for additional services. So it's all about where they can see where they can get money from those companies. So it's a bit of a mixture, you know, but the key thing is that the business that's donating thinks, we'll get some money back, but there'll be some costs along the line as well.ROSS COCKBURN (13:33)Having been the IT manager of a huge electronics company, and the start of my journey into this world came from being on the other side of the fence. I was tasked with getting rid of 500 computers that were in a high-based storage area for finished product. So the finished product that our company manufactured had to go into this storage area. At the price moment in time that I was taken through to that storage area, I was told… We need all this space. Get rid of all these computers. And the business was not really, they didn't care. They were just like, we just need the space. You just get rid of the things and let me know when I can use the space for a finished product. The only thing I would say most companies are really, well, they have to by law, they have to make sure that they just don't dump it in the ground. It can't go into landfill. So that is the bottom line. That's the baseline. And that's why SIPA, the Environmental Protection Agency in Scotland are a very important organization and you can get yourself into a lot of bother if you breach their rules and regulations. So both Elaine and I will be SIPA registered because we're handling this material, we're moving it around, we're transferring waste. We sometimes hate calling it waste because to us it's precious new computers for young mums children who are digitally excluded. I think the bottom line is that most companies will just be thinking not to landfill, get it out of here quickly because we need the space. We can't put new computers on the desk while the old ones are there. So it's move quick and get it out. I know Elaine said that there'd be lots of cupboards, but I would say most of the big guys, they just move very quickly. They subcontract companies to come in, 10 engineers come in, and in a weeks period, they will completely clear an office building of all the tech, put the new tech in, and the old tech goes off to an ITAD, and then we don't know what happens. Well, we sort of do, but.Gaël Duez (15:45)But just to finish on the financial side of things, so obviously there is this opportunity cost of having a space which is used only for garbage stuff. In the sense of the company, obviously we do know that these IT equipments are not good for the bin yet. But if they give this IT equipment to you, they will not have any issue regarding regulations, that's for sure.ROSS COCKBURN (15:52)Yeah.Gaël Duez (16:12)But they will give it to you, they will not get any money back. So where is the financial incentivization for themROSS COCKBURN (16:18)No, and I, we reward them with social good. You pick remake array or reusing IT, you know that you've gone beyond the sustainability right for the planet bit. You're massively taking the social good. But you're also double-edged sword, that...Gaël Duez (16:36)Okay.ROSS COCKBURN (16:43)We're going to keep that device running as it was fit for purpose, as it was designed to be used. Potentially for another five years, in my case sometimes 10 years. If that's not good for the planet, what is?Elaine Brown (16:58)Yeah, and again, I come back to why businesses are sort of starting to think about it is because the environment, the ESG, the environment, social and governance is becoming more important sometimes than the money aspect because of tenders and procurement. And what it is, is legislation and the need for money that's driving them to do it. It's not out of the goodness of their heart. It is because it does make business sense ultimately for them because of their ESG. And I've heard this firsthand from businesses who now donate to us and said, yeah, we could get some money back for this. But actually, the money part is not the important part now because for our business to survive, we've got to be in the market for procurement. We've got to be in the market for bids and tenders. And ESG is becoming the key thing, not necessarily the bottom line instantaneously. But by doing the right thing, we will get the bottom line up. So that's why they're doing it, but they're being dragged to do it because it's a business sense.Gaël Duez (18:02)I got it. I think we should now try to size and better understand how positive this impact is. And you mentioned several times a social aspect. So I've got actually two question now the first one is the size. mean, how many perfectly functional devices are thrown away or disposed away?roughly speaking in Scotland or in the UK, just to give a sense of proportion. Do we have these numbers actually?ROSS COCKBURN (18:28)I think there was something like 17 million was UK wide. ⁓ If you wanted to try and Pareto that diamond is how big is Scotland in relation to the rest of the UK? You could probably get around to a couple of million, maybe even a million devices, but that could include laptops, desktops, phones, you name it anything anybody needs but it will be in the millions.Gaël Duez (18:55)The order of magnitude is in the millions. ⁓ We're talking about a lot of devices. And then, how efficient is reusing approach of yours? Ross, you mentioned something about Ukraine and the fact that computers were used in Can you tell us a bit more about it and how long the lifespan is extended? Is it like one, two years? Is it 10 years? I'm very curious about it.ROSS COCKBURN (19:12)Cool. So recently the game changer for everybody in Elaine and I's world has been solid state drives. You can take a solid state hard drive and we have done this already, a Core 2 machine which is 20 years old and that machine will perform as quickly as a lot of people's brand new laptop. People say, well how do you do that? And I say, well… Microsoft is basically a monster truck filled with everything that you want to have if you were going out on the biggest adventure. You're going to have all the tools, everything is in this monster truck. And that's great if you're off into this wilderness where you don't know where you're going to get things from. But if you take a completely different approach and fling out half the stuff that you don't really need or never gonna use, and you think in the open source world, then you can take a Linux build and you basically say, what do we want to do? So you reverse engineer it and you say, well, I want to send an email, I want some word processing, I maybe want to do some presentations, I've got email and yet biggest thing, I want a browser, I need a browser. If you just put those four or five functions onto a machine, we've got those machines running in Ukraine on 15 gig, on the of devices that the NHS and the Department of Work and Pensions, so these are for thin clients, they're tiny little boxes that people stick on desks, they're used to access a server where all the applications are and then the short term processing is done very quickly by the thin client. We've realised by working with our friends at St Andrews University that we could actually get an operating system onto these as a standalone machine. And people said, you'll not get an operating system on 20 gig. It's on the motherboard. I said, no, we can. We stripped down Unbuntu and LUnbuntu and it took up 10 gig. There's still 10 gig there for files, other things. I have now got 9,000 of these out in Ukraine, in the eastern part of Ukraine, going into schools in Ukraine, keeping children safe and educated while there's drones and cruise missiles flying overhead. The normal course of action in the West with these devices, once they'd stopped being thin clients, would be to destroy them, because we don't have a use for them. We don't think about open source. We don't think about extending the life of those devices because we don't need to.Elaine Brown (22:04)Ross is like me, know, when businesses start to sort of think three to five years, they're going to get rid of them. But for us, these devices are still got a lifespan. So probably anything from three to five years, they'll be getting from businesses. ⁓ But they are still of use.Gaël Duez (22:12)Yeah. Okay.Elaine Brown (22:24)We in the remake rate encourage behavior change. So we are selling to customers refurbished tech that's come from businesses. So those businesses think they don't have a life anymore. They absolutely do. We refurbish them, bring them back to life and then sell them to customers. So that to try and get people to think that you don't have to buy the brand new shiny thing that comes in a package that's all, you know, looks lovely. And as Ross says, it's got millions of things on it that perhaps you don't actually need. So we actually pride ourselves in the remake rates. We don't upsell. If you go into certain shops in the retail world, when they go in, they're based on selling you bells and whistles that you don't need. Whereas we sit and listen to our customer. And very often, they need just the basics things. And again, those refurbished kit can actually do that. A cost point that is not, it's going to be good for their pocket.ROSS COCKBURN (23:19)Okay.Elaine Brown (23:21)But also great for the planet and it's keeping that device in use longer. So it's just about people valuing things differently. And we always say at the remakeery, second hand is not second best. It's actually the cool thing to do. It's the thing that we should be so proud that we have got this refurbished bit of kit. And we should be so proud to say it's six years old, it's seven years old. That's where we're trying to get to rather than people saying, I've got the latest gadget, you know, and I'm going to keep it for a year and then I'm going to get rid of it to get the next one. That should be, you know, holding your head in shame. That's where we need to get to. ⁓ROSS COCKBURN (23:58)That's one of our biggest challenges is people's perceptions and buying habits. And we're all going to have to work really hard to change this. And if you don't mind me swearing, but I say that we live in the now and new fuck you generation. Because Amazon have given us delivery, I can order something and I'll get it later on today. So I want it now. And I want that new thing now. And do you know what? I don't care about the planet, about the amount of fuel that was taken to get that delivered. You know, we have to change people's buying habits, consumer habits. We have to make, make do and mend what the remakery are all about. We have to make that cool. That's what people do. You know, I grew up in a time, which was the seventies, where we went to a thing called Jumbo Sales. That's where I used to get my next set of clothes was from the clothes that were getting thrown out by people elsewhere. My next door neighbour, we got hand made downs, I got a second hand bike, I did my bike up, And if society doesn't change all that thinking, then all the things that you're doing with Green IO, all the things that we're doing will not be worth a drop in the ocean.Gaël Duez (25:14)And actually that's a very fair point, Ross, because that's something I wanted you some clarification about. So on one this change in consumption and how Elaine framed it, like, yeah, you know, let's go back to the basics, what people truly need. I understand for some users, but I think there is a bit of the elephant in the room with gaming, and we know how… the massive share of people playing online games. I mean, I'm part of them. You cannot really run steam on a five years old or 10 years old device. Yet this is the main use for many people. So how do you foresee the future of reusing IT devices also with this huge pressure from the gaming industry?Elaine Brown (26:02)So yes, so it's back to, we can't get away from the fact that people will buy devices that meet their needs. that's fine. And we're not saying you can never buy anything new, you can never buy the latest thing. That would be bonkers and we're in this digital world. But what we can educate these gamers to, and this is what we do at The Remaker all the time, is when they no longer want that gadget because they're moving on to the new thing, that they realise that they have to be sustainable about they are giving away and that is the key thing, you know, that they don't want it, that the parts, the amazing treasure that's in those devices can still have a life beyond their gaming life. And then equally at the Remakery, we have a wall in the Remakery with a Retro Tech and it's full of gaming devices of 20 years vintage that are all still working. They are all still working, beeping and making fantastic retro tech noises. And we engage those gamers in coming in to see so that they can understand the rate of the pace of change.ROSS COCKBURN (27:00)Yeah.Elaine Brown (27:13)But those devices still have a place and they absolutely love those devices. know, they're geeking out on them and whatever. But it's an education piece for them to sort of say that, you know, the devices that you're using today are going to be the retro tech of tomorrow, but they still have a place in our planet. They still have a place that we should preserve them and nurture them. So we're not about don't buy anything new ever again. We're about thinking differently about what's inside that tech and nurturing it andROSS COCKBURN (27:41)Yeah.Elaine Brown (27:43)Passing it on the future.Gaël Duez (27:44)And this is quite funny because we've noticed over the last years, I would say, a tendency in the gaming industry also to push new games with a retro style or some sort of older user experience. think of the Obra investing massively in the gameplay rather than the visuals.ROSS COCKBURN (27:57)Yeah.Elaine Brown (27:58)Yeah, just buy some retro tape fromGaël Duez (28:06)Just to get you right about the sort of secret recipes that you refurbishing. I heard two things, but correct me if I'm wrong. The first one is open source, which is a magical wind to extend the lifespan of a lot of devices. The second one is and the fact that today we have tools to avoid shredding the hard drives and making sure that we wipe them crystal clean, I would say. Is this right? Am I missing something here?ROSS COCKBURN (28:36)You're absolutely spot and I think what you were saying earlier about, you know, were discussing buying habits. Elaine and I both want people buying new computers, new devices, because if they weren't buying new computers, we wouldn't have devices to give away. What we want to make sure that they are doing is doing the right thing with the old device. You know, it's not stop progress, it's not stop buying. We want all this. But what we want is the right thing done at the end of life in terms of, and I hate the word disposal. It makes it sound like garbage and it's not. It is somebody's new computer. It's just, you just have to look at it in that way. And we do a lot of education with a lot of the donors that we have in and around us because when we were going into some of the bigger institutions to collect things. The desks and their offices and cupboards have been cleared with no thought of reuse. Everything had been put into a quick disposable metal cage so it could be rolled out to our vehicle and quickly repurpose it. said, look guys, you're the start of this process. If you don't help me here and all these TFT monitors are scratched or all these laptops are dented. What chance have I got in making sure that we can re-engineer all these things? So the education has to go back into the businesses in beyond the simple, it would be great for you to give us your stuff. Well, now you've made that decision. How do we do the material handling that preserves it and gives it the best, greatest potential chance of becoming a reused device?Elaine Brown (30:23)That's the key thing because a lot of these businesses see it as waste. They see it as waste. And Ross is spot on there. It absolutely breaks my heart. We've got some businesses who are literally flinging, flinging monitors into metal cages and things and going, here you are. Like we're some sort of garbage disposal service. saying, but we are about reuse and repair.Gaël Duez (30:24)So that...ROSS COCKBURN (30:28)Yeah. Good. Yeah, yeah,Elaine Brown (30:48)That is the waste hierarchy, the top of the waste hierarchy. What you're giving us becomes non reusable. And the other thing that annoys me is a lot of companies, again, because of data security, they're sending us things that are remote locked or bios locked. And that means that our potential to actually reuse that item becomes impossible. And so therefore, they've just given us a piece of waste that we're going to take for part.ROSS COCKBURN (31:11)Yeah, they're bricks basically. They're you know, iPad or Macbook that's four years old, that's MDM locked and I can't do a thing with it. And then it takes you about six months to find the person that can unlock the thing. And it's so frustrating. But we probably like you, have a set of, we have almost like a contract now that we hand out terms and conditions. If you want to work with reusing IT, remake it, here's all the things you need to think about when you are decommissioning. That's the word for it just makes the whole process a lot smoother. And the exciting thing is that I think as more and more young people come into higher positions within companies, so they're becoming the decision makers, then we're findingElaine Brown (31:40)Yes.ROSS COCKBURN (32:03)And Elaine will back me up on this. They're making the right decisions. So one of our biggest ones recently was a huge financial organization called Agon. And the gentleman in Agon who wanted to give reusing IT their laptops, he had already decided before he met me that this was going to happen. We just had to work together to get all the other parts of the business to sign into this because he was 100 % convinced that getting £50 per laptop back from Dell as a rebate was not worth more than the opportunity to let that laptop carry on doing its job, educating someone.Elaine Brown (32:42)And it's the stories that those reused devices bring that is money in the bank. That is money in the bank. And more and more the companies want those stories and that's what we provide to them. They want the stats of tonnage diversion from landfill and CO2 emissions saved. They do want that because that is part of their journey and their ESG. But what they are asking more and more from us are the stories and they want to be part of that story.ROSS COCKBURN (32:46)Absolutely.Elaine Brown (33:10)So when people, businesses donate their tech, a proportion of what we refurbish we sell to make money to help us do it, but a proportion we gift to those that are facing digital poverty. Now, Ross does amazing work in gifting those devices to war-torn areas. But here in Scotland, we've got over 800,000 people who are facing digital poverty. Digital poverty means that they don't actually have a device.ROSS COCKBURN (33:31)Yeah.Elaine Brown (33:37)So they can't connect in the digital world, or they have a device that's not sufficient to live in this digital age. It's maybe a mobile phone for a family of five trying to connect digitally to this world. That is digital poverty. So again, the devices that we then refurbish for gifting helps to tackle that digital poverty piece. So we work with over 60 other charities here in Edinburgh who identify the beneficiaries, who identify these families that are… needing to be digitally included into our digital world. then we donate on behalf of that business and the businesses want to come in. They want to be part of that gifting story. They want to meet the people and that is what they want. They want the stories of what their devices have done for people in our community. And we provide them with those wonderful stories that then they put into their annual reports, they put into their tenders. That is money in the bank to them because they have done amazing good. And they're quite shocked the fact that here in 2025, we've got that amount of people in Scotland, a wealthy country, who do not have the ability to engage in the digital world. It's a scandal. It's a disgrace. And that is where our reused IT is doing amazing work, because it's bringing that gift of connectivity to people who didn't have it. So it's great for the planet amazing for these people who can then take part in life here in Scotland.ROSS COCKBURN (35:07)ThereGaël Duez (35:08)That's closing the loop. And just one side note, Elaine, because you're also someone who knows how to communicate, as you rightfully said, or was it Ross? I don't remember. Disposal is an ugly word. And because the IT word loves acronym, I suggest you could use UITA, which means nothing, but it will be unused IT asset. And by using the word asset rather than disposal, it changes completely things in people's perception because an asset is an asset is something that you either sell, you buy, it's got value.ROSS COCKBURN (35:41)Yeah.Elaine Brown (35:46)It does. It's got value, yes. It's about terminology. We've got very good over the last 20, 30 years of using the word recycle. So you'll hear everybody sort of say, oh yes, I recycle and what have you. As though this is it, they've done it, game over, they've done their bit for the planet. And it's just that terminology, but recycle is actually not the good thing, you know? And so what we're trying to do at The Remaker, it's all about using language to get your message across. And so we just bang on about repair and reuse. And then people start going, yeah, I remember, you my grandparents used to repair things and we bring the joy of repair. We run a repair cafe every Friday here at The Remaker so people can come in, get a cup of tea, slice a cake, lovely.ROSS COCKBURN (36:24)Yeah.Elaine Brown (36:41)And they bring in their tech hardware for repair or their textiles for repair. But the difference is they stay and they watch that repair happening and they learn how to do it themselves and they see the magic of repair and repair is magical and people get this real feeling of joy when they walk out the door with a bit of kit that they thought, I'll never get that fixed and they fixed it and it's going to last and they feel a pride in the fact that they've repaired that themselves and they're going to value that differently. So it's getting that word repair out there. So we want to get away from recycling because that's going to evoke the wrong feeling. We want to get into the reuse and repairs terminology because that's going to give you a warm glow.ROSS COCKBURN (37:25)Yeah.Elaine Brown (37:25)And people and assets yes we use that word all the time because it is a value.ROSS COCKBURN (37:31)Have a big part to play in this, all governments have, because the agency that manages a lot of this from our perspective is SEPA. They call it waste. That's not a very good definition to start. I hate it when we go to a donor or a client and say, can you give me a waste transfer note? And I go, it's not waste. It's somebody's new computer.Elaine Brown (37:51)Okay.Gaël Duez (37:53)So I.ROSS COCKBURN (37:56)I think we need to redefine things and IGaël Duez (37:59)I got it. Naming things is crucial here. And there is a massive investment to do in communication and even a bit of marketing to make repair sexy again and stop using the word recycling, et cetera. And it seems that you run pretty much a business operations because if I… gather the different pieces of information that you provide. Basically your three secret weapons are, as we said, open source safety and also education of your donors, to make sure that they handle the devices properly. So I understand better. And I also understand better social impact because I was not that much into it. mean, the numbers about digital poverty and the amount of people around the world still needing digital devices at cheap or zero price. Yeah, it makes a difference and this story can be appealing to a lot of companies or individuals. So I got it about how the repair industry is taking off and very fortunately taking over a bit about this myth of recycling because we all know in IT, recycling doesn't exist. We have a bit of down cycling, which is managing to extract a few resources from the massive amount of resources used to build an IT equipment and used not to the same purpose, but to a purpose where it will be less pure and less valuable. So for instance, using the plastic from the case for housing construction, but it is definitely not to build another case. Now I've got an amazing news for both of you, because as you said, you need new laptops and devices to feed this process So I've got a great news for you.ROSS COCKBURN (39:28)Yeah.Gaël Duez (39:42)And this is not a joke, Microsoft has decided to terminate Windows 10 support and thanks to Microsoft. Thank you so much, Microsoft. We're gonna have millions, dozens of millions of new devices that will be ready to enter your process. isn't it such an amazing news?ROSS COCKBURN (39:42)Thank you. Well, on the one hand, on the one hand, I'm crying for the rest of humanity and big businesses. I'm going, what a shame. But on the other hand, I'm going, yes, because, you know, certainly the scale of the operation we have in trying to help children in Ukraine, Africa don't even get started. I mean, there are millions, tens of millions of children who are not.Gaël Duez (40:04)hahahahaElaine Brown (40:06)ThankROSS COCKBURN (40:25)You know, we thought the digital divide was something between the West and Africa. We found out during lockdown that we have a big digital divide in our own country. we want one of the reasons I'm doing any of this is I want to get, but I want to get the Scotland, Ukraine, the Western world sorted out digitally included, sustainable, all the rest of it, so we can focus on trying to help children in Africa. But Windows 10, great. mean, Microsoft's made that decision. It's created a whole new source of devices for us. It's not great for the planet. Nope, definitely not. It's probably not great for big businesses having to spend all the money. I'm sure they're not overly delighted. And it is actually starting to backfire on Microsoft because the Danish government have now said, for certain departments, we're not using Windows anymore. We are going open source. There's an article that we recently published on a blog that we do about inclusivity that was all about the Danish government moving across to Libra office in certain departments as a trial. And they've said, Microsoft office, bye bye. You've had enough money. So there's a lot of change happening. no, I and Elaine probably agree with me, know, the Windows 10 thing, shame for business, but great for us.Elaine Brown (41:52)It's a double edged sword really. It's back to just enforcing obsolescence again, which is already there anyway. So yeah, and for small businesses, because Scotland is made up primarily of SMEs, small, medium sized enterprises. And for them, that's a huge cost to their business. So it's kind of educating them that perhaps they could go with the refurbished kit and use a different system, Linux or whatever, you know, and that might drive our B2B business, you know, through refurbished, because I'd love businesses to start buying refurbished from get go. That would be great. And we do that a lot with a lot of our charities around here and social enterprises when they set up their businesses, we encourage them to buy refurbished kit right from the beginning of their business, it's good for their pocket etc. But yeah we're doing a big campaign around the end of 10 at the moment to try and get those businesses to do the right, you know if they're going to have to change because of it then do the right thing with the end product theROSS COCKBURN (42:58)Exclusive for you, Gail, that like everything else with Microsoft and the spin, it's not the whole truth because 10 isn't completely going. There are essential security updates will be continued to be supplied to those customers that are so large that they are not moving to 11. So Microsoft has said, right, OK, we realize you're such a big customer. We will continue to support you until you're ready to move with essential security updates. They will also support education at a cost, one pound per machine per year, with essential security updates for Windows 10. So they're not completely killing it. They're just saying, we'd rather you move to 11, but if you can't or won't, we will keep helping you. It's not the sales pitch. The sales guys go, no, shut up. Don't tell them you can sort of use it. It's it's all or nothing.Gaël Duez (44:01)But I was a bit sarcastic when I was introducing the Windows 10 scandal, But what is your stance from the Right to Repair movement? And I know, Elaine, you're quite invested into this initiative. What does it say about the maturity or the pitfalls of the Right to Repair in IT?ROSS COCKBURN (44:07)No.Elaine Brown (44:22)Well, for a kick off, it doesn't include laptops and what have you to a huge degree. that's the thing, you know, they're concentrating on tumble dryers and washing machines and everything. Great, fabulous. But, you know, e-waste is driven by a lot of the technology that we have. So it's missing a trick there. And again, I'm hugely invested in the fact that I don't want words on bits of paper. You know, we've had directives, we've had route maps, we've had investigations. Lovely. Makes for beautiful bits of paper and legislation that looks like you're doing the right thing. But here we are. I it was talked about in 2021 and here we are in 2025. No really further forward in my opinion around laptops. In fact, for the last two years, I've attended the Repair Cafe in, well, this year it was in the House of Lords, last year it was in the House of Parliament where we took the right to repair. So we took our repair cafes down to the actual Houses of Parliament, down to the House of Lords and got MPs etc to come and see what repair cafes, whatROSS COCKBURN (45:21)Yeah.Elaine Brown (45:35)Right to repair means and getting them to sign the declaration and they took their moment of glory where they're signing the declaration for we support the right to repair they get their photo opportunity it's lovely we've had a nice trip down to London but where are we we're still no further forward so you know in principle it's a great idea but again it's not widely forecast to the customer so that they don't know their rights to demand bits to be open it you know thatROSS COCKBURN (45:45)Yeah.Elaine Brown (46:02)Tools to open devices, the right to repair and not get their warranty out of date, what have you. So it's not broadcast widely to the consumer, it's not being to the manufacturer, and it's still in my opinion words on bits of paper. That's position.ROSS COCKBURN (46:17)Yeah, I totally agree. Gael, I've got a great idea for a television program and it's going to get teams of people and you stick an iMac in front of them and you say you've got half an hour, can you get into the iMac and take out the memory or the hard drive? And I swear to God, would be a bunch of them that eventually would just hit the thing with a hammer becauseElaine Brown (46:39)Yeah.Gaël Duez (46:40)What you just mentioned is absolutely pivotal years ago, France was one of the first countries in the world to adopt a law against planned obsolescence and for the right to reaper. It was pushed very hard by an association that I admire a lot which is called HOPE it's Alt a l'obsolescence programmée so it means in French stop to planned obsolescence and one of the most vocal members of this association is Laetitia Vasseur and she has petition, has lobbied, she managed a lot in this field. And recently she was debriefing this massive achievement and she dropped a number that was astonishing for me. There are three cases waiting to be judged by the French justice. Once I think it's canon. The other one is not HP. The other one is Apple and I cannot remember the third one. And the problem is that there is a low there are association and a department of the French government suing these companies and there is no court actually kickstarting even the trial. And it has been seven years. So what is the message here and why? And I can understand unfunded and not expert enough, I would say, court and people of law to deal with their super technical trials. But that says something about, let's pass a bill. Let's look all shiny on the newspaper. But actually, it won't move really the needle and we will not really face big businesses because we will not sue them.Elaine Brown (48:16)Until big businesses and manufacturers are held to account and perhaps fined and it really sort of knocks them where it hurts in the pocket, will they move to do it? Because everything about their business model says, well, we don't want people repairing stuff because that's going to mean that they're not going to buy stuff and we don't want to give them the tools. So they're not advertising, hey, people out there, you know, we've got the tools if you want to open up your. It's back to, there you are, there's legislation, it's lovely, but it has no teeth, it has no teeth and no driver.ROSS COCKBURN (48:47)Yeah.Gaël Duez (48:51)It has no teeth.Elaine Brown (48:53)You know, we started this conversation talking about education But equally, what we've got is circular economy skills gap here because here in education. No student at primary school, no student in secondary school, no student at college or university will ever learn the skills of tech hardware because it does not exist in our curriculum. So there is a skills economy gap right away. There are jobs to be had in the future in this area, but we are not equipping our education to upskill these people. And when kids come in and do a bit volunteering with us, they're like,ROSS COCKBURN (49:22)Yeah. Yeah.Elaine Brown (49:32)Why are we not getting this at school? This would be cool, but we're not teaching it. So we are really far behind. If we're talking about we are racing against time now, for our planet. Our education system and our curriculum system is not identifying the gaps that we need to fill. And that worries me.Gaël Duez (49:50)So thanks a lot because Elaine, actually, you closed the loop of the podcast. We started with education. We finished with education. We learned a lot all the way during the podcast. It was interesting, the discussion also about the Windows 10 scandal, because as you say, Ross, it's a bit more subtle than it looks like. And it also explains things onROSS COCKBURN (49:57)Yes!Gaël Duez (50:13)How much the right to repair is still a wishful thinking more than an actual law applied to everyone starting with big corporations. So thanks a lot for this. Is there any final piece of positive news that you would like to share with the listeners, even if you already shared quite a lot of good numbers and positive trends?Elaine Brown (50:34)Yeah, I always like ending on a positive and whilst it sounds like in our podcast we're sort of saying, we're going nowhere, we are because we have to keep having that voice and here at the Remakery our strap line is, waste less, live more. And I believe that there's opportunity for us all to do that if we truly waste less. We're going to live better lives, we're going to have a better planet and it is doable if everybody just gets the message and you know I'm sure we can improve the planet one refurbished laptop at a time. let's not lose hope, there is hope. Would you agree Ross?ROSS COCKBURN (51:03)Yeah.Gaël Duez (51:12)IT items at the time. I love this one.ROSS COCKBURN (51:17)I have a bit of an adage that I sometimes like to look back in time to see what I should do now because we're human beings and not one problem or one situation hasn't already been. We just have to put it into context. so recently I discovered Ada Lovelace and she was a mathematician she's sort of widely claimed to be probably the first computer programmer. 1815 she was born her approach was poetical science and I thought poetical science what's that and basically it's when you merge imagination and intuition and the poetic spirit with logic and analytical rigor and mathematics and thought. And I think that the hope for all of us is that the businesses, the numbers people adopt a little bit of this poetic spirit, this love of life, they become dreamers. They want to go back to the simple things that we all shared when we sat around campfires and we just helped each other move on. You know, humanity, wisdom, all these simple things that we had in the early, early days, was when we all we had. And if we can get back to that more and use that as our philosophy and our thinking, then yes, there is hope for us all. And we will have a green future. We will save the planet. But I think we have to go back in time, back to the very early days and look at things and learn lessons from our ancestors that are calling us from the depths and saying, guys, don't give up. You know, it'll be OK. We got you here, so now just go don't go fuck it up basically.Gaël Duez (53:08)So Ross, thanks a lot because now we know that we have the biggest army because the dead are more numerous than the livings. So that's maybe the best news since the beginning of the podcast. Anyway, thanks a lot both of you. That was a lovely podcast. I learned a lot.ROSS COCKBURN (53:16)Lord of the Rings, we're here! We got the wee tea poured out, we'reElaine Brown (53:19)This is putting into walking day tonight.Gaël Duez (53:33)And I'm pretty sure the listeners will do as well. We don't talk that often about hardware and IT equipment, at as much as I would love to, but thanks to you, that's a gap that we reduced a bit today. So thanks a lot.ROSS COCKBURN (53:40)Thank you for asking us. Bye. Au revoir. Bye bye.Elaine Brown (53:49)Thank you. Bye.Gaël Duez (53:51)Bye.Gaël Duez (53:55)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on the website greenio.tech. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it either on social media or directly with relatives working in the IT industry, it will help them see that a strong momentum is starting around repair and that's good news.In our next episode, we will be back in the US discussing water consumption of data center again, but this time from an academic perspective, we will have the pleasure to welcome two of the most renowned researchers on the topic of data center and environmental sustainability, the Dr. Mohammad Islam and the Dr. Shaolei Ren. Stay tuned. By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more, so visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter and check the conferences we organize across the globe. London is next week. September 23rd and 24th are the dates with an amazing lineup to discuss the question, good for business, good for the planet?As a Green IO listener, you can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP. Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

Anne Currie, co-author of "Building Green Software" and seasoned cloud veteran, dives into the intersection of AI and energy efficiency. She uncovers how software developers can leverage AI models to minimize energy consumption while exploring the stark differences in strategies among tech giants. The discussion also touches on the challenges of measuring AI efficiency, the burgeoning role of renewable energy, and practical lessons from global leaders in sustainability. Navigating through critical questions and strategies, this conversation is a must-listen for those passionate about tech and the planet.

Anne Currie, co-author of 'Building Green Software' and a science fiction novelist, dives into AI's role in energy efficiency. She discusses the pivotal moment of DeepSeek and its impact beyond just the product. The conversation touches on AI scaling laws and the brute force approach to optimization. Currie emphasizes the importance of open-source solutions for creating efficient software while addressing the need for AI to harness renewable energy. Prepare for an enlightening exploration of technology's sustainability challenges!

Masheika Allgood, a lawyer and tech activist from Santa Clara, dives deep into Silicon Valley's staggering data center water usage. She reveals that Google’s water consumption recently surged by 28%. The conversation touches on innovative cooling methods and the environmental toll of air and noise pollution from these centers. Masheika discusses the regulatory challenges and the role of tech lawyers in community activism, urging the tech industry towards greater transparency and sustainability in their water practices.

What does it take to go beyond raising awareness in green software? To avoid checking just boxes? What is required to scale green software practices in a company? To discuss these issues, Gaël Duez welcomes Anita Schüttler on this episode “from the trenches”. Anita is a seasoned software engineer and expert on digital sustainability. She works as Head of Sustainability at IT company neuland. Besides, she is a co-chair of the German Bundesverband Green Software, an auditor for the Blue Angel for software and a Champion of the Green Software Foundation. Together, they covered many topics including: The Formation of the Bundesverband Green SoftwareThe CO2 Challenge ProjectScaling Green Software Initiatives & measuring its success The Challenges in Certification ProcessesThe Emotional Roller Coaster of Nonprofit InitiativesAnd much more!❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conference is in London on September 23rd and 24th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A huge gift for your huge support. 🎁 Learn more about our guest and connect Anita’s LinkedInAnita’s websiteGreen IO website Green IO SlackGaël Duez's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Anita’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode:Digital Collage workshopneulandBundesverband Green SoftwareTools landscape that Bundesverband Green Software "tools & measuring" working group put togetherCo2 Challenge des Cyber ForumHolmes websiteBlue Angel for resource-efficient softwareTranscript (auto-generated)Anita Schüttler 00:07In IT,  you unplug your servers or you do a deployment and the emissions are gone.  And this is so great.  I think we actually do  have  a  common ground to be ambitious.Gael Duez 00:26Hello everyone,  welcome to Green.io.  I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world,  one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. What does it take to go beyond raising awareness in green software. To avoid just checking boxes such as inviting a speaker, organizing a digital collage workshop or training some volunteers in eco design. What is required to scale green software practices in a company? To answer these questions, I'm delighted to welcome Anita Schuttler on the show. Anita is a seasoned software engineer and expert on digital sustainability. She works as of Sustainability at IT company Newland. Besides, she is a co-chair of the German Bundeswehrband Green Software, an auditor for the Blue Angel for Software and a champion of the Green Software Foundation. Wow! But what convinced me is Fiona Leinbundgut, our MC at GreenHire Munich this year, introducing Anita to me as a die-hard Green Software engineer. And after exchanging with Anita, I had to add die-hard Green Software Engineer  scaling Green IT from the trenches because she shared several real life examples which were truly inspiring and which she will share with you now.  Hi Anita, thanks a lot for joining Green IO today. Anita Schüttler 02:18 Hey Gail, it's so great to be here, thank you. Gael Duez 02:19You're welcome, you're welcome. You know,  when  Fiona introduced  us. She mentioned that you were hands-on green IT practitioners.  I think she said something like  hardcore  green software  practitioner or something like that.  So I was like, oh, great. We're going to talk with a lot of use cases from someone being actually in the trenches. And you know how I love this  sort of episodes with feedbacks from people doing things, facing challenges and sharing what works, what doesn't work, et cetera. But then we had a discussion preparing the visit and you mentioned the Bundesverband Green Software. Yes, I managed to pronounce it properly. And I was like, oh my God, I wasn't aware how active this association was and actually launching a pretty big project. So I've got a few questions for you. And if you don't mind, I would love to start with this topic. And maybe my first question would be,  how did you join this association? Anita Schüttler 03:23Yeah. So it's called Bundesverband and  it sounds really German. I know you can just call it Green Software Association.  Basically, what did the Green Software Foundation does worldwide? We aim to do on a German level.  So  the Bundesverband is pretty young still actually, it was founded last year.  the story goes like this,  there were some companies who were already working together on this green software topic  and  they wanted to accelerate what they were doing, they wanted to bring it  out to the people and this whole thing didn't get much traction and at some point they said, maybe we have to think this like two steps bigger. Why not create a Bundesverband? this thing, it's, it's, yeah, it's an association. So it sounds like something from the German government or so, but it's not, it's companies coming together and doing this. And we have this for several fields, like AI is one of them as well, or can have any other.  And I was already  talking to those who were  thinking about founding such an association. We were somewhat  being friends with each other or becoming friends. And  when they said, let's found this  association,  I said, we want to be part of this. We want to be one of those companies that join as the first ones. So with my company, neuland and… I asked everyone internally and people were actually pretty excited about this. To sum it up, we're actually a founding member of the Bundesverband Green Software. Gael Duez 05:35 Congratulations.  Can individuals join this association or is it only company membership?  Anita Schüttler 05:38 It's meant as a company membership, but we do have members who are single person companies. So NGO also is fine as well.  Or if they're in academics, they can join. Gael Duez 6:00 Okay. You were already doing a lot of green IT stuff. What was the motivation for you more personally to join them?Anita Schüttler 6:02 Yeah, I was actually really excited about this because it felt like, okay, now we got a movement and now we have something that we can show to everyone and where we can,  uh, put up some big signs and tell people about what green software is. And it looks more official, so to say. Yeah. And it looks like a bigger thing. And we really noticed this when, as soon as we had this association, there was a different kind of speed behind this and more of a push behind this. yeah, that really accelerated a lot of things and moved it to another level than it was before.Gael Duez  06:42And that might be my thank you, Captain Obvious moment. But  why did you have this need to create a German association? Why not, for instance, creating a chapter of the Green Software Foundation? What drives you to  go more in-depth at the local level? Anita Schüttler 07:09Yeah, so Germany is actually pretty active also  in terms of the Green Software Foundation.  For example, we have the most Green Software  champions of any country  within the Green Software Foundation champions.  We also have several meetups. I always join the one at Karlsruhe every month  because it's online and everyone can join bit of an advertisement to  join this Green Software Meetup. And still it felt like the Green Software Foundation was too far away. I think it's very  focused on the English speaking  countries or English speaking community.  it's a pity because there's so much going on in Germany and there's so many people who are interested in this and  really doing things. So we wanted to gather those and get in more companies and people to join us and do something without maybe even without having this barrier of the language. Because when you tell people to say this in English or to communicate in English, many are put off then if they are not this familiar with English as well.  Gael Duez 08:30I was sort of expecting the answer, but I didn't want to lead the witness and of course the language barrier and the connection to the local ecosystem is super important. And that is also true that we need to think in ecosystem and it's perfectly fine to have large global association, well connected with more local ones, with more specialized ones. You have  some  being launched about AI, for instance, or  e-waste and that's perfectly fine. Thinking in ecosystem is very important, but I just wanted to make sure.  And  so far, so the, Bundeswehrband Green Software is one year old and you've got a pretty big project as far as I know. Can you tell us a bit more about it? You've already advertised it at Green Eye of Munich, but then you've got a second chance. Anita Schüttler 09:30So I have to start earlier actually, because this project that we're currently trying to launch has a history already. So as you might know, I'm part of, well, I'm a co-chair at the Bundesverband Green Software. And  my other co-chair  is Aydin Mir Mohammadi. And Aydin is really a pioneer of the first hour and he's  all in  very internally motivated. And he launched  a project in Karlsruhe. So Karlsruhe, if you have no idea, and I had no idea before either is a city that has about 50 % IT companies. So there's a really strong digital ecosystem there. And what Irene did together with others in Karlsruhe is that he went to the local cyber forum it's called there. And together with them, he started a project called CO2 Challenge. So the idea of the CO2 Challenge is that companies commit to reducing 40 % of their digital emissions within one year. And to make this happen, they get a free mentor or mentorship by a person  who will guide them on their first steps.  What do we have here? What can we take a look at? And basically,  what are the low-hanging fruits where we can just, yeah. Turn stuff off or so. This is what we want together with this. And this project has been running in cars for about a year already and it was  really successful. it's,  you know,  there was no,  we measure everything beforehand or whatever. It was really  low entry points. We just count servers or so. So like this, you can't see this right now, but yeah. Rule of thumb. And now the idea is to take this project and scale it to a European level. And  what we want to do is we want to have  coordinators  for at least three European countries. So obviously Germany will be in there, all of Germany this time, not just Karlsruhe.  We already have the Dutch who are very excited about this and want to join. And currently we're still  actually struggling to find a third country. I'm very much hoping for France because they have such a strong ecosystem already. And who knows, maybe we'll find a fourth one even. And then we want to have regional levels, so regional clusters. And those will actually be working with the companies to really make it happen on the local level. And there will need some proper measuring and counting and not just rule of thumb this time. Yeah. Okay. So there are quite a lot of things to unpack here. Gael Duez 12:49And just for clarification, the goal is to reduce the IT related emissions by 40 % or four zero within a year compared to the  SBTI target for the ICT sector, which is 45 % until end of 2030. So that's pretty ambitious. How did you manage to convince people to go for such an ambitious  target? And why this number? Anita Schüttler 13:17I didn't tell me this a few days ago. We were talking about, shouldn't it be 50 % just to make it even bigger? And when I first heard this, it was like, oh my God, so much 40%. That sounds like really a lot. And, um, I didn't said, yeah, I wanted to make it sound like a lot, but not that much. So it's less than half. And I thought this sounds good. So this is where the 40 % comes from. And  the idea is that in IT we have so much waste and everything is so wasteful. And if we just manage to turn off this waste, if it's 40 % in the end, no one knows.  Maybe  we actually do manage to reduce 40%. And if you see  how much, like for example, environments are running, even though they are not used, 40 % actually isn't that much of a big number anymore.  but yeah, we want some ambition because that's what I always think is a good thing about IT, reducing  emissions in IT, unless  unlike in physical environments where it really takes a lot of effort to even get a few percent in IT, you  unplug your servers or you do a deployment and the emissions are gone. And this is, this is so great. So I think we actually do have a common ground to be ambitious on.  Gael Duez 15:05It makes sense to have aspirational goal. But in that case, I feel a bit of a contradiction  between we need to measure that we want to assess that people are shooting for big goals and the rule of thumb, because we all know that there are a lot of low hanging fruits, especially in companies where there is no green IT ambassador or sometimes even sustainable the ambassador.  But how do you manage to say it was pretty successful? What were your success criteria? Was it more like the number of companies or people joining or was it the actual results that you managed to get so far? Anita Schüttler 15:31Yeah, so maybe I mean, Aydin will be mad at me for telling this, but  we don't have hard numbers, but we have soft numbers from Karlsruhe  where they. Yeah,  back of the envelope calculations. If we turn this off and it takes this much and it runs for this long and we have the grid makes, example, how much will this be? yeah,  we're sometimes a little,  yeah, well, uncertain. Is this gonna work out really well? Because if you only take a look at this first step, having a few companies to start with and lowering some of what they do, it might actually not be that much overall at the end compared to like when you compete with say a factory that does cement or whatever,  we have no chance at all to make this happen. I think what our advantage is that  with such a program there will be a lot of training and we plant a seed here  for the next years to come and more and more people will really learn how to be a practitioner because that's what it takes to become a mentor at all. And then you have those people in the companies, they will  accelerate what's going on there and they will spread this whole thing to the next company and so on.Gael Duez 17:09I understand now it's a learning by doing process  and that whenever the calculations are less and less back of the envelope and more more rooted in best practices, then of course  you will be backed by harder numbers.  But to be honest, the back of the envelope calculation that you already shared, mean, if you divide by two your number of servers and you know the energy consumption of the electricity consumption story of your server  and  somehow where they are located and the  carbon  emission factor of the electricity grid  in the region, it's a bit less than back of the envelope. Starts to be quite serious. So thanks for the clarification. And actually when we were chit chatting before hitting the record button, you mentioned that this project, the CO2 challenge that you want to bring at the European level was,  and I'm quoting you here, an emotional roller coaster. I think it's actually pretty cool if you can share what you meant by this, because when we consume non-profit projects or initiatives,  we don't necessarily see the amount of energy, sometimes money,  but also cognitive loads that are needed to kickstart them and even  more important to ramp them and to nurture them. So could you explain a bit more what you mean by this and  what do you expect to achieve also obviously with bringing it at the European level? Anita Schüttler 18:49Yeah, first of all, we are a pretty young association. We have pretty low member fees to make it possible for everyone to access this association unlike when you join a bigger association  and  money is very scarce. So  we're going for  an EU funding and we need a very high level of funding. So  there's programs on the EU level where you get like 60 % of your funding  and there's a lot of money, but when you have to provide those other 40 % yourself, you certainly might have a big problem if you don't have money flowing in from all sides, which we don't have. And currently there's still a program called Life, and this is the one that we're going for. The problem is this program was  built with the intention of accelerating the energy transition or rebuilding ecosystems. So lots of physical things and now we come with our IT stuff and we actually don't really fit into this program. But we still  want to get funding from this. So when you look for which program could be the right one for us, we always feel like we are sitting between two chairs because we don't really fit into this one, but we also don't really fit into that one. And  we have to make sure that we serve the criteria for this program to get funding at all, but still be true to what we want to achieve with this. So this is the first problem.  We get some  help from someone  who does this on a regular basis, EU fundings. And she's always very excited about what we want to try to achieve because it's something new and it will bring attention to this whole topic to the Brussels level, to the EU level because they don't really think of this decarbonizing IT thing at all right now. You can see this because there's no program for this, to fund this. Instead of like for AI. Just pick your program right now.  So she's very excited and we are near the hand are always very, Oh God, this is never going to happen because it doesn't fit and they won't fund us. And then we'll sit there and have no money at all. Maybe by the time this  podcast comes out, we'll have made it successfully. I hope so.  My present self will then be happy  for my future self. So we'll see.Gael Duez 21:47I find it really interesting what you've just shared for two reasons.  There is this question of scaling and even for a nonprofit, like what you describe is basically investing for fundraising. And that's not really something that you think  that often when you launch an association. But when you want to have a larger impact, here comes a question of scaling and resources and just the time that people will put on the table is not necessarily enough. that's a twist of a mindset to say, okay, we're going to pay people to get more money, et cetera. And some people might feel uncomfortable with this. Like, isn't it getting too commercial or whatever? But on the other end, as you mentioned, if you really want to go beyond a few initiatives in Germany and go at the European level, then it makes sense to get resources. So yeah, thanks a lot for sharing. This feedback and this bit under the hood approach. Yeah. And the second point that struck me, but it's a bit like, you know, I'm rambling on this is my, what I call the green IT curse all the time, which is like IT is flagged as green by nature. And as you mentioned, AI is everywhere, et cetera.  we don't have any. Anita Schüttler 23:00 Electricity is a hundred percent renewable and we're done.  Gael Duez 23:20 And we're done. Bravo. And the issue is, of course, that if I were the European Commission and I was checking which sector to decarbonize first, I mean, I could consider road transport as much as  the IT sector, because basically we emit as many greenhouses,  and this other sector.  But people will spontaneously think, oh, all these trucks, big polluting trucks, etc. We need to electrify them.  And no one will think about data centers or devices and so on. So it's really interesting that even to get funding to do  decarbonization of IT,  you don't fit anywhere. Yeah. Anita Schüttler 23:55We're accelerating so much and this IT sector will be a biggie in the future  and no one's thinking of this right now. \Gael Duez 24:00I agree. I agree. The trend is really worrying.  speaking of it and maybe it's time to move to which is second part of our interview,  as I mentioned in the introduction. And what really interested me in the discussion we're having and we had to prepare the episode  is  this question of scaling. I mean, you're someone who tries to bring things at scale. And obviously you described it super well with  how from a small car's way based association you're trying to bring it to the European level. But it's also something that you did a lot in your work and you've got some good use cases to share about taking a good idea and making it at such a level that it starts to have a meaningful impact. I would love to get your feedbacks, get your insights from the trenches. Anita Schüttler 25:00So my company is  we build software for e-commerce. Yeah. And this in itself is I  actually want to call it a problem here because we've lost some  activist people over the years because they wanted to work on something that will provide the world with a better out view instead of  consumerism and more of this. But I love to stay because it means that I  get to work on where it's maybe needed most at least on  what I can choose, where I can choose to work. So  I've actually started out as a programmer in my company 15 years ago now.  And  like five years ago or so,  something happened. There were the  demos from Fridays for Future in Germany. They were really big back then.  We as a company were joining with a big group of people on a demo that was like 80,000 people or so, maybe 50,000, I don't know, a lot in any case. And there was so much momentum at that time, 2019, before the pandemic, that we said we want to do something in our work environment as well. we founded a guild internally at Newfoundland and we looked at our operations, what can we do better there? And back then, we already found that actually our biggest factor might be the software that we build and we have no means to find out how much that causes.  Some three years ago, I finally had my company where it needed to be for me to switch from being a programmer to being a full-time  sustainability practitioner. I had a lot to learn back then, but this is where it started. And later that year,  I found out about green coding and  found that this is actually where it all can come together for me. So what I bring as a programmer  and what I'm interested in as, yeah, a person,  a mom, yeah,  a citizen of this planet. And from there it all got going.  in the beginning, it was like,  I wanted my company to  help me push this topic. And they always said, Anita, you have to make it successful, then we'll back you up. And if no one's interested in this, then there will be no backup in the first place. So this is a bit, huh, what? But this is just how it happened.  actually, I got there. It just took me three years. So what we did in the beginning is that I worked with our teams.  We have  one or multiple teams for each customer  and we sneaked it all in. Yeah. We  looked at what are you doing there? And then like a one and a half years ago, I suddenly had the first of our customers and it's a big corporation. One that is on the stock market and they have over 300 IT people working for them all over  Europe, actually. And they  actually started out their green IT journey just with a small workshop. And they asked me, I was so happy, I can't tell you how happy I was. They asked me to get there and  have a workshop with them, talk about what is green software at all and what are the principles that you look into and so on. And then nothing happened again for a year.  early this year, they came back and they said, we have a big sustainability strategy for  our  whole corporation and  green IT is part of this. And we want to do role specific trainings  for all of our over 300 IT practitioners. And I was like, yes, yes, this is such an important step. Those last few weeks and months, I haven't had much free time to be honest, because  I was doing so many things in parallel. And  we had two  trainings of two hours each, just basic knowledge about sustainability, about negative impact of IT and so on. And then we had  training for  product management, product owners, project managers, UX and UI, like a real deep dive until no one was able to do anything anymore after four hours or so. And just recently we had another deep dive for web developers, backend developers, architects, operations, and so on. Gael Duez 30:15And this deep dive, when you mentioned web developer, backend developer, architects, they were all in the same room, this is  one single course or you split the deep dive into all their specialties? Anita Schüttler 30:31Yeah, so  what's important to know is that the teams that are working on their piece of software, they're always cross-functional teams. So you have everyone that is needed to make this piece of software happen in the same team. And at first I thought, I would be cooler to have them all split up and each of them gets their own training. But then I realized that it's actually pretty good if like, for example, the front end developers know about operations and architecture as well.  like the  product owners know about UX and so on. So they really can work together then. So this wasn't just me telling them stuff. I had a lot of practical exercises in this as well. So where they get to discuss and  work with a tool to really find out about this, yeah, sustainability in IT thing.  We took a look at a lot of  measurement tools and I had some exercises where they had to  use them themselves and find out how they work and how they can, for example, use EcoGrader and the web sustainability guidelines together to find out what to do and so on. Gael Duez 31:55So it means that you had doing this exercise, both a product manager, a UX, a web developer, etc.Anita Schüttler 32:00Yeah, get them to work together. Gael Duez 32:09What struck me also is the time span. You're almost talking in years, not in weeks or months. It's, you know, I planted the seed and eventually one year later they came back to me and say, oh, we want to launch a full program, et cetera. So it's, it's really a, a work of patience, I would say. Anita Schüttler 32:30Absolutely. You need really, you need a long breath to get this done. Both me and my company, I'm really now seeing a lot of traction and a lot of support, but it took years to build and I think it's the same with customers. have a first  meeting of some sort, they get to know you, then nothing happens for months. At some point they will come back. Then you plant the next seed and then you wait for months or maybe even a year again until the next step happens. And in some ways this is good because the, for example, the measuring ecosystem has evolved a lot in that last year. Now I actually were able to show them, look, this is the green metrics tool. We've used it. This is what it looks like. This is how you do it.  So  I wouldn't have been able to do this a year ago. And the reason I was able to show them all of this is because we did it ourselves in our company. And that's a big thing for us as well.  Gael Duez 33:37That's a big point. And that's definitely a topic that I would love to investigate with you. Just  one quick question. You mentioned green metrics tool.  Are there a specific set of tools that you use in your company?  Where does it come from?  Anita Schüttler 34:00The green metrics tool is  a tool that was built by green coding solutions in Berlin.  Diddy,  shout out.  Yeah, they did a lot of really great tools. And by the way, the Bundesverband green software now has a landscape. Just like the CNCF, for example, they have a landscape as well. And we have a working group that worked at this landscape of measuring tools. can find it on landscape.bundesverbandgreensoftware.de.  Yeah. And it's a tool that you can use to measure  how much your software  uses in which  phase of the software life cycle. So looking  in from the outside.Gael Duez 34:42Well, thanks a lot for the clarification.  now getting back to what you mentioned is that you practice it in your own company.  Can you provide us an example on how you deploy  green IT  measuring tools and how you make sure that  a piece of software or full software is actually getting assessed and how you reduce its environmental footprint? Anita Schüttler 35:06Yeah. So  this is, have to talk about two different things here. The first thing is that we always work for a customer and we work together with the customer. we usually also have people from the customer working with us together in the same team and all of the software that we build belongs to the customer. So this means that either the customers in the journey, they're on board or we… have very limited ability to do something. There's been  some sneaky stuff going on where we  had a team that did this together with the product owner from the customer and they  labeled their project cost reduction. So in Jira it said cost reduction  and  then we had our  green IT  tasks and every sprint we had one task that the team did  over time. It reduced some money as well, of course, but it was actually meant from a different perspective. If the customer is not actively asking for this, we have to be sneaky about it. Gael Duez 36:20Was the fact that  you planted the seeds and went almost undercover using the word cost reduction where actually you were looking for carbon reduction,  was it  useful? to get  broader adoption? Yeah, okay. Anita Schüttler 36:40Yes.  And actually,  the stuff that we did in this project, it was so cool. And I talked about it at conferences as well. Because for example, this team,  when we talked beforehand, they were very certain that this service,  uses 80 % of our,  causes 80 % of our cost. This will be the service where we have to start. And then we started measuring and found out that no, not at all. This service has like 7 % or so of your emissions, but this other service that costs you, I don't know, five or 6%, it causes over 50 % of this team's emissions. This was really an eye-opener for me to find out. And then we tweaked their servers. We played around with the setup of service that they had and how many instances where and so on and were able to get  the emissions of this setup down to like four or 5%. So basically reducing almost half of the emissions that this team caused in their operations. Yesterday we had our internal conference again and  in last year's conference I talked about this and everyone's really interested in,  how does this work? What do we have to do to get it done? Yeah, so you always learn from whatever you do. And then you talk about it and others will start  being interested and asking the right questions. That's really cool. Gael Duez 38:15That's cool. And it creates inspiration.  And you were mentioning that you needed to mention two things. The first one is that you work always with a customer, otherwise you don't have that much impact. And I get the second thing about the feedback you wanted to provide about using the tools internally was...Anita Schüttler 38:33So  this year, we actually now have a software that belongs to Neuland. So we have full impact of this.  It's a search software called Homes. It builds on open source software like Solar, OpenSearch, and so on.  But now we were able to do whatever we wanted with this. And  we used this ability to do whatever we wanted to say, we want to have a Blue Angel certification for the software and be one of the first companies at all to get a Blue Angel for their software.  So the Blue Angel is an environmental certification that you can get for all kinds of stuff. And it's published by the German Environmental Agency together with the Ministry for Yeah, environmental ministry or so. And you can get this for like, it's known for paper, for example, toilet paper, whatever. I've seen it on  a ship as well, which was  very weird. You can get it for data centers. And  a few years ago,  there was also a version for software that only had one company getting certified. And that was the Ocula by KDE. And that was it because the  requirements were so high that it was not practical at all. And then it was reworked a few years ago, like two years ago or so. Now we have two  software that have this Blue Angel after what was reworked. The first is the Green Metrics tool,  which it already talked about.  And  the second is Nextcloud,  which is really nice as well. But  all these software that were certified so far, they were open source. And now we came with our almost but not completely open source tool and  we started late April.  when we did,  asked Arne, who's our measuring partner,  we measure everything on his cluster, and Philippe, who's  in the Bundesverband together with me active and he's like I am an auditor, he's audited all the other softwares that got the Blue Angels so far.  And I asked them,  we want to be done by the end of May. This should be no problem at all.  it? And they were kind of,  let's see. And  I was pretty naive in the beginning.  And then it took us like until the end of May and even still, we're still not done. I can say that the green metrics tool evolved a bit as well in this process and we all learned a lot and it's just important for someone. Someone has to do this. Gael Duez 41:47How come that it took so much time? Anita Schüttler 41:39Yeah. So,  first of all, the software wasn't done yet.  It still isn't.  I'm someone who always goes,  I always go to my colleagues.  We have to be fast. Come on, let's do this. And the software was still changing while we were already measuring. And the team was working on the software and I did this certification process together with a colleague  of mine,  Tilo,  and we had no idea about how the software is working. So we had to  learn how is it working under the hood.  And the thing about the Blue Angel is that  you can see  it was written with a different kind of software in mind. It was written with,  we have this installer, you click on it, it installs everything, and then we have to make sure that it's good and it doesn't do anything crazy. And now we come,  so Nyland is not a product company. Yeah, we're  a company building software all the time, but we don't usually build products. And  Holmes is not a product as well an accelerator. we had to,  we have like five Docker containers that we had to orchestrate one after the other. They need to wait for each other.  We need product data that has to be imported and only when it's, when this product data is there, we can go on and so on. So this process was pretty difficult already. And  then we did the measurements and found out that, so the Blue Angel asks you to have a standard deviation of not more than 5 % over like 10 or 30 measuring runs. And we had like seven, eight, 9 % standard deviation. So what is happening there? And yeah, until we tackled this, so we found out we need more memory for solar and so on. So until you're done here. And then we thought we were done, but we had to redo all of our measuring  because we had to split up our scenarios. So you need usage scenarios. We have one  for a back office where someone is configuring something. And then we have a usage scenario that  imitates the real  online shop that will search something. And this  scenario of Yeah, it's basically J-Meter doing this. No one had this before. We had to split up those because they were together and so on. So lots of problems where all of us learned, not just us at Neuland, but also  Anne  and Philipp, they were learning and yeah, the tool evolved over time. And I think we've  taken quite a few hurdles in the process and I hope that by next week we will actually really be done with this. Gael Duez 45:00Okay, excellent. And if someone were to ask you, how do I scale green software  practices in my own company? What will be the top advices, top tips that  you would tell him or her? Anita Schüttler 45:10Top tip number one. Be as close to what the people in your company are actually doing as you can. Don't  come with green  software principles on a high level because  they  will not have an impact in the daily work. look at what people are doing, translate for them, and then ask them to do this or that, which you know will really have an impact. Second is  depending on what company you're in, it might actually be a good thing not to talk about sustainability. know this sounds really crazy, but I've had so many conversations where people said, oh, this is cool. We already thought about doing this. Oh, we are actually already doing this, but not for sustainability reasons, but for reasons X, Y, Z. So Green Software provides so much value on so many levels that people often don't even realize that you're doing something for the environment here because it also  adds so much value for other things that a company is after. Gael Duez 46:25I can feel that. I was about  to add,  yeah, be prepared to be patient. That's a  long game. Thanks a lot, Anita. That was a lot that was shared for a single podcast episode. So I wish you the very best with your… CO2 challenge and the ramping up, I would say, of the Bundesvenband Green Software. Yeah, thank you. And also that all the efforts that you've put into your company and your clients will actually keep on  spreading. So thanks a lot for joining the show. Thanks a lot for having me. was great to be here.  Gael Duez 47:00Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO. All the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on the website greenio.tech. If you enjoyed this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Each vote is worth a thousand likes on YouTube. Talking about social media, sharing this episode on your favorite one, or directly with relatives working as a software practitioner seems also a good idea to provide them with inspiration to go beyond raising awareness and scale green software engineering. You got the point. Being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more listeners. We are now going to do a summer break or winter break, actually, for me. And Green IO will be back on Tuesday, August 19th. Who will be the guest? I don't know yet. I have a couple of interviews to edit and I'm not sure which one will come first. Make sure to subscribe to email alerts or notifications on your favorite podcast platform  not to miss it. By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog  and check the conferences we organize across the globe. As you guessed from this episode, Green IO Munich had a great first edition last week  and of course,  all eyes are now on Green IO Llondon on September  23rd and 24th. As  a Green IO listener,  you know the drill,  you can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP.  Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference  are all gone.  I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you fellow responsible technologists  build  a greener digital world.Roxanne 49:08 one byte at a time❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

“Climate activist in a suit”. This is how Rainer Karcher describes himself. It is an endless debate between people advocating for the system to change from the outside and those willing to change it from the inside. In this episode Gaël Duez welcomes a strong advocate of moving the corporate world into the right direction from within? Having spent 2 decades in companies such as Siemens or Allianz, Rainer Karsher knows the corporate world well, which he now advises on sustainability. In this Green IO episode, they analyse the current backlash against ESG in our corporate world and what can be done to keep big companies aligned with the Paris agreement, but also caring about biodiversity or human rights across their supply chain. Many topics were covered such as: Why ESG has nothing to with “saving the planet”3 tips to tackle the end of the month vs end-of-the world dilemmaEmbracing a global perspective on ESG and why the current backlash is a western world only issue Knowing the price we pay for AI and how to avoid rebound effectThe challenge with shadow AI and why training is pivotalAnd yes they talked about whales also and many more things!BTW, Rainer will also be one of our 2 keynote speakers at Green IO Munich next week where he will wrap-up the day after having represented SustainableIT.org on the NGO panel as their CSO. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conference is in Munich on July 2nd and 3rd. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 Learn more about our guest and connect: Rainer’s LinkedInGreen IO website Green IO SlackGaël Duez's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Rainer’s sources and other references mentioned in this episodeGreen investment needs in the EU and their fundingEU Omnibus package EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)China’s new CSDS standards: Far-reaching requirements in sustainability reportingChina introduces basic standards for corporate sustainability disclosuresSustainableIT.org Green IO episode with Laetitia Bornes part 1 and part 2heartprint.euheartandzukunft.eusustainableit.orgTranscript (auto-generated)Gaël Duez (00:00)Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO! I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.Gaël Duez (00:27)Climate Activist in a Suit When I first read this statement from Rainer Karcher, it immediately resonated with me. How can we move our corporate world into the right direction from within? It is an endless debate between people advocating for the system to change from the outside and those willing to change it from the inside. And today I'm welcoming a strong advocate of the second option. Rainer knows this world well, having spent two decades in companies such as Siemens or Allianz. He founded Heartprint a year ago to keep on advising them on sustainability. Today, we will try to analyse the current backlash against ESG in our corporate world and what can be done to keep big companies aligned with the Paris Agreement but also caring about the biodiversity crisis or the human rights across the supply chain. By the way, Rainer will also be one of our two keynote speakers at Green IO Munich on July 2nd and 3rd, where he will wrap up the day after having represented SustainableIT.org on the NGO panel as their chief sustainability officer.Gael Duez (01:40)Welcome, Rainer. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (01:44)Thank you very much for having me and thank you very much for the very good introduction. I'm really looking forward, first of all, to meeting all of you, hopefully, who are listening now, and to meet you, Gail, in Munich on July 3rd, which is Munich, which is my hometown. So I'm really happy to be part of that and just looking forward to seeing you all.Gael Duez (02:01)Yeah, thanks a lot for this and you have a lot of pressure on your shoulders. I know that because you're playing home. So we expect a lot from you.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (02:08)And you can, you can. I'm not sure whether I'm able to fulfill, but I'm very much looking forward to at least giving a bit of thoughts and sharing my mind.Gael Duez (02:13)I'm sure you will. Thanks a lot for this. And you know, when we were discussing how ESG is delayed from most agendas due to according business priorities in the current times, you were actually very vocal about the lack of business acumen of decision makers doing so. Because according to you in particular in such times, ESG remain a major business goal and executive committees or board should not, and I'm quoting you here, deprioritize future readiness. So there's so much to unpack with this stance of yours, but maybe you could start with explaining what you meant by… and deprioritizing future readiness.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (02:58)Absolutely with pleasure and thanks for that question. Well, let me just maybe circle back a little bit. And as I've started my combination of IT where my foundation lies, so I'm an informatic person since 1997. So my career started in IT and kept it that way for quite a long time, exactly as I said, more than two decades. And about five years ago, I've started to get into sustainability from a business perspective and combine my private passion for environmental protection and for certain other things with job and with IT. But at that time, there was a very strong focus mostly brought up from Fridays for Future and all the for future type of combinations. And the society, I think, got very much more interested in talking about the topic, which was a good one. And then from my perspective, things happened. It just turned into something which nowadays is called the green left wing woke type of a thing. And once you start using ESG or sustainability as a term, people are, or least the majority of people are like, ⁓ gosh, come on, again that thing and again that talk. In particular, if you go to businesses and if you go to the C suites of companies. And the thing is, ESG was never meant to be a left green, woke type of a thing. It is just something for ensuring the foundation of our future. And if we're talking about future readiness, from a personal perspective, from a company's perspective, from business and from survival, than it is about just being aware of what's going to happen, create transparency of what to expect and have a bit of an ability to predict what you can do and how you can influence things. What I mean on that, bringing that down to ground level is if you own a company, if I just got handed over a company maybe from the fifth or sixth generation back something which was founded 100 years ago. The only thing I'm very much interested in is keeping my business going. And whatever it takes, I need to be ensured that the future and whatever is happening there is something I'm able to either influence or to predict to be able to adopt it. And that means that if, for example, there is someone crazy coming up in the US and raising taxes to 50%, I should be aware of how much influence this will have to my income. If I do have a lot of business which has been made with the US, I should be aware. And I should have a plan B, some kind of a backup plan if things are going to happen, what they're happening. And the same is relevant for anything which could come up from the environment. If there is a hailstorm showing up in three days, if I am a car dealer and I do have 1,000 of cars parked outside, I should be aware of that. And I should have an ability to maybe bring them to a parking garage or elsewhere. If I do have maybe agricultural business ⁓ I'm going to take, I should be aware. If there is a very dry summer to be expected and maybe set up something which is helping to water my plants. Otherwise, I most likely have an issue from a business perspective. So nothing of that has to do with saving the planet or just doing some kind of good stuff and saving animals or insects or anything. No, it has not. It's a very purely business perspective in ensuring that my business is able to keep going.Gael Duez (06:10)And how do you differentiate in that case ESG from, I would say, risk management that every good company should have put in place?Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (06:22)That's the fun thing. There is not that much of a differentiation and there doesn't have to be. So resilience and risk management is something which, at least in exactly the way like you said it, I did work for Allianz, which is an insurance company. So they are very much interested in all that aspect. So resilience plays a crucial role for them. So take their business perspectives, which is indeed just in trying to regulate as little as possible as damages and just selling policies and polices or insurances as much as possible as well. So the business model is at risk if things turn around the other way. So if they have to regulate a lot of damages caused by strong weather results, for example, take the latest example of Switzerland where there was hundreds of households just pushed away from a glacier which just broke. If you are the insurance company and you have to regulate that. This makes you multi-million or even billion worth. Take the example of wildfires which took place in the US, in Los Angeles, same thing there. So if you're an insurer, you have to be aware of the risks which could occur and just then make your business based on that. And that awareness, that risk awareness is exactly what we're talking here as well. So future readiness comes very much with exactly this. But that was the example of an insurance company. If I'm a local small medium-sized company, producing anything for maybe the big enterprises. Those companies normally do not have a view into this. There might be some little, yeah, different sessions depending on what kind of business you do, but most of the small medium-sized companies don't even have a division looking into risks or analyzing them. And that's exactly where Future Readiness comes in from my perspective with very small, very concrete examples, not with 120 PowerPoint slide type of strategy paper, which you need to read through and then still nothing changes. No, tangible results, tangible and grabbable examples of how to make yourself aware of what to expect. And maybe another example, even if I'm a small company and I am the ones maybe producing some electronic components for big suppliers, I do have maybe dependencies from Asia, from electronic goods which are being produced there. So supply chain risks a core. And that is something which to me is a perfect example of the classical ESG. So I have environmental risks, have social aspects like human rights, I'm doing the production cycle, modern slavery and all that things. And I have governance structured things which are, for example, regulations like carbon board adjustment mechanisms. So the term ESG itself, sustainability as a term, might be in a wrong angle in the meantime and being wiped off the agendas. But you change the narrative and if you just change the perspective towards something which is be aware of what to expect and try to find a backdoor plan, try to find something which can help you with diversifying maybe your supply chains. Then we are talking about future readiness from a pure business perspective, nothing to do with saving the planet or doing something for anyone from the green party.Gael Duez (09:19)I fully got it and it brings a question in my head because quite often it seems to be for medium sized business, even for big corporation, very strong tension between what should be done to be future ready, but in a matter of years and what must be done to be financial ready for the next quarter report for instance or even just to meet the end of the year from a financial perspective. And this tension I've met it quite a lot with people saying yeah I know that at some point my factory might get into trouble because we might not access water in such a cheap and easy way that it used to be the case before. Yet we know about this supply chain issue and like 90 % of our suppliers are based in Asia. But under the current economical circumstances, we cannot do anything else. How do you answer this sort of not necessarily even a pushback, but just question arising from your clients?Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (10:23)Yeah, yeah. Well, there is two angles which I always try to come up with. So the first one is depending on the size of your company, you depend on loans from banking and financial industries. So if you invest into new machines, if you have a big project coming up, you need to have a cheap and a very good and affordable loan from banking industries. And I just yesterday read an article that the biggest investment bank from the Nordics plus the European Central Bank already reacted to omnibus. So the current deregulation ideas from the European Commission, so to say, and just simply decline. And they just simply said, well, you can either go ahead with CSRD and with the reporting like it was supposed to be and like it was originally, or you can just count on it that depending on your interest as a company, loans are getting more and more expensive, or you won't even get one. So this is the first reaction I would have. Just simply think about that. If you have even a short-term type of a planning, if you only have a six-month or a one-year perspective ⁓ to look into the future, you still are in trouble if you completely ignore that topic, if you try to avoid thinking of it just based on, well, the European Commission decided to just push it up for another two years. Well, the banking industry does not. They are very much interested in already understanding how future-ready your company is of today.Gael Duez (11:41)But it's funny that you're mentioning the banking industry because you know there is a famous hearsay that there is no climate deniers among insurers because the insurance world is perfectly aware of the devastating effects of climate change. But the financial sector and especially the banking sectors comes under much more pressure usually because they still finance fossil fuel expansion plan and the like, and they're not really super clear on how to finance the ecological transition. So it's kind of a surprising example that you provide. And if you could elaborate a bit on it, like, do you really believe that the banking sector is actually now pushing more and more for sustainable practices? I'm really curious about it.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (12:31)So I'm mixing emotions to be honest. I do know a lot of people out of that bubble and in particular within due to my time in Allianz in the financial sector. So I do know a couple of people even in the largest banks of the world. And yes, for sure, there is a lot of praying water and drinking wine. There is a lot of, yeah, let's just do this and that. And you need to invest into sustainable futures and still. those banks are the ones which are investing the most still in oil and gas, which is our enemy. So therefore, let's be clear on that. But on the other side, from a pure business perspective to those banks, I know from those people that the risk analyzes ⁓ for all of them. And independently, whether they invest a lot or just very little or nothing into oil and gas, all of their risk assessments came up quite clearly. If they put millions into any kind of companies and invest into any kind of companies without a clear strategy, the risk is way too high that they never see that money again. And from that perspective, they will have to change and they will change. Is that something which can happen like a finger flip? It can't. So this is something which takes time. And that's another thing which I've very much learned during the last six, seven years now in the big corporates. If you believe that a 300,000, 500,000 people company is able to be changed within half a year or a year, it can't be. Even if it has to. And even if, yes, for sure, the pressure is incredibly high. This is where, and probably already can now listen to the climate activist and the suit. So this is that mixed and emotion type of a thing, which I'm struggling with each day and trying to find that balance and transport that into a narrative, which has been understood then from the C-level back to your first question, because yes, I know, and I'm the activist here, the windows and the opportunities are closing rapidly fast. And I just listened to Johann Rockström last week in Berlin, who just showed up the graphs of what to expect and that the two degrees won't be something we can expect in 2040 or 2050, no, already by 2030. So it's incredibly increasing at the moment and the rise of the temperature and the loss of species in biodiversity aspects, all of that is dramatically increasing and we should and we have to act the fastest as we can. But on the other side, we lost that opportunity already 15 or 20 years ago. So this is something I could get depressive now and looking back in anger and say, well, we should have, but no, this is not me. So the optimistic person in me as well. Let's do whatever we are able to and let's push it as hard as we can, but still keeping it realistic. circling back to your original question, the second point on that is, well, if I do have a company which completely ignored the aspect of sustainability so far, I always come up with the argumentation, well, then let's start with things where you're even able to save money. So the return on invest is immediately there if you, for example, look into energy efficiency. 90 % of small medium-sized companies never ever looked into an energy efficiency aspect with automation. This is where then the digital comes up and my twin transformation heart beats a bit louder. There is so much opportunities today where you are not even able react manually anymore and you don't have to, but just implement very easy, easy to consume, very affordable solutions to increase energy efficiency. Save energy and so therefore save money as well and get the return on investment quite rapidly. So and this is where you can have a starting point with and based on that define a strategy and a vision for your company and what most people in particular the C level is underestimating is of how many people within the company are already interested in supporting that ideas. So majority of small medium-sized companies I've spoken to in the last 12 months was at the beginning like yeah well you know. This is not a topic for us and nobody speaks about sustainability as a whole. And there is no clear vision and strategy. And I doubt that we just get the approvals from the employees and from operational roles. And they have been all wrong. 80 % of human beings, and that's the average value, are quite well aware of what's going to happen. And 80 % would like to change and take some kind of an influence, but they don't because they don't have the ability to in their day-to-day jobs. If you just grant them a vision and an idea and a strategy and some kind of support, you would wonder as a small medium-sized company of how much is possible to be changed in a very short period of time with all the knowledge, the experience of your employees, of the people surrounding you.Gael Duez (16:55)So actually, it's not two points, it's three aspects. The first one being get good financing conditions by being sustainability compliant. The second one is go for savings and cost savings equals energy savings and actually reducing waste most of the time comes with some sort of a cost savings. And the third one is actually please your employees and your stakeholders and your shareholders, maybe, but at least your stakeholders because most of them are more climate aware than you might think so. So that will be your answer to this usual pushback end of the world, end of the months. And Rainer, you mentioned the omnibus law, so maybe for the listeners, and there are many of them not based in Europe, if you could just clarify what it is. But also it helped me ask actually you another question, which is actually a double question. So it's three questions in one, I think I think you're having a hard time with me. I'm sorry with this.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (17:46)I'm enjoying it lot. I hope that keeps it interesting for the listeners. That's the only thing we would like to get.Gael Duez (17:56)Excellent. If you can just briefly explain what is the omnibus situation and how you connect it with the current backlash against sustainability that we see in Europe and in the US, and maybe also because you're a very global person, well connected around the world, how much of the current narrative that we have in the ESG circles or sustainability circles at large is actually a western bias because as far as I'm checking on the news around the world there are a lot of other countries still implementing ESG regulations. seems it's always a bit difficult to assess what is going on in China especially when like me you don't speak Chinese and you don't know the culture that well but it seems that for instance China is pushing a very ambitious agenda on ESG regulation. They're actually quite aware of the biodiversity crisis. It doesn't mean that they're doing everything to solve it, yeah, how much we are just convincing ourselves that the world is now facing a backlash where it's actually Trump and its European followers that are actually doing this backlash. So it's a lot of questions and you can feel free to unpack them the way you wantRainer (Heartprint GmbH) (19:08)I like the global perspective. And exactly as I said, I'm working globally since a long, long, long time. So that I did spend most of my career in global faced companies. mostly had colleagues from all over the world and influenced them from different cultures and from different type of thought and mindset, which I always reallyGael Duez (19:13)Yeah, yeah.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (19:26)let's just maybe start unrolling the questions and getting a bit of explanation. So the omnibus is something which came up now, in particular due to the economical crisis which we are facing all over Europe based on the new US administration and all the tariffs and taxes and all the things which he came up with. ⁓ And I'm not further commenting on because otherwise I could get immediately very angry. But let's just stick it with that. Since he's in place, the European Union tried to find ways to support European economies and lower bureaucracy and lower the effort which has to be taken, for example, for non-financial reporting. So it is a quite already established type of a thing to… put yourself into non-financial reporting. It's nothing of just now a year or two. This has been in place since quite a long time for big corporates. So a lot of companies with more than 1,000 employees and 50 million on the revenue do have to report that since already 15 years or even longer. So it just got replaced then by the so-called CSRD, which is the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Within that, was, or there are, ESRS, so that's the reporting standards for environmental, social and governmental structures. And that exactly was meant for the next three years to bring it further down to reporting even to companies above 250 employees. So not the smallest ones, not the hidden champions, but companies with 250 employees and more would have been required to report. Omnibus now with the idea to reduce bureaucracy, to make it a bit easier for the small companies was brought in place to just limit to 250 employees company, but to raise that to a 1000 people company. So there was a couple of millions which would not or which are not affected due to that any longer. And it was then pushed by another two years. So not with implementing it by 2025, but 2027, 2028. And this is exactly where the criticism comes from, from my point of view, that with omnibus, things are being delayed at a time where they should not be delayed. Future readiness, as we spoke about already, is being even de-prioritizing companies are not looking into it. Because this is a bit of the typical carrot and stick situation. If you're not enforced in doing, you don't. At least that's the majority of companies who are looking into that. If there is no law in place, which pushes me to do something, then I just simply don't do it. And that's exactly where I think we need to change the perspective and need to come into another angle. And that is which most likely didn't even make it into the news. There is, with coming with Omnibus, so that was a bit of the good part of it, a voluntary type of a reporting. So that's the voluntary standards, which is then meant to support the small companies with creating a very simple and very much slower and smaller type of a reporting to standardize that. So if you're working with a big enterprise, if you are a supplier for a big enterprise, you mostly get sustainability questions anyhow day by day on your table. If you're in tenders, if you try to work together with others, you need to report on sustainability. And the voluntary standards was meant or is meant standardize that, that you don't have to reply to each of your customers in a different way would like to have it in an Excel sheet. The other one as a PDF, the third one as an email. The fourth one would like to have maybe access to your database with an API. So to standardize that, ⁓ Omnibus came up with the voluntary standards. And this is something which I think makes total sense. And in exactly that way, I think if you look at it and keep the standards, keep the reporting for the big corporates where there is a lot of things already in place and a lot of reporting already has been happening for the last two years or at least one year and keep that and bring it more to a standardized way for the small companies. So this would be a bit of the explanation what the omnibus is all about. To your second question, I 100 % agree. We are looking very much on the depriorization and on everything is getting worse and worse over time now from the industrialized Western world. If you go to other parts of the world, if you go to developing countries, if you go to sub-Saharan Africa, they have a complete different view and a complete different perspective on sustainability as a whole. And why? Because they're under pressure much more than whatever we are already. If you go to India, for example, in my former surrounding in Allianz, I had a huge amount of colleagues working in India. So 6,500 of Allianz technology employees are working in Trivandrum in the most south of India and in Pune, which is more in the north. What I found and still find is a lot of passion, a lot of engagement of the people there to really make things happening because they were affected much more than whatever we are. ⁓ And not only from a climate perspective, not only from rising temperatures and the loss of water and strong weather results, but plastic pollution, as an example, if you take plastic pollution, well, we do have a very good recycling system. So what you couldn't see now is that I just ⁓ questioned whether it is a good recycling system.I'm I just did see a reporting which was science based just two days ago, which was just showing up the recycling quotes in Europe, which are less than 12%. So we are reducing the recycling to a very little minimum and only PET has been recycled. All the rest as it's mostly combinations is not. So if you think we're good in that, we are not. It's just been mostly sold or burned or just dumped somewhere, we just don't see it. And that's a bit of the difference of what it is in India. But back to the question, you said it as well. China, for example, took over a third of the European CSRD. Well, a bit of an adopted wording and somehow a little bit of a different angle. But a third of the regulatories which we came up with for the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which is now being pushed away through omnibus, has been taken over from the Chinese government and brought into local laws. And well, I'm not putting, and don't get me wrong now, I'm not putting an autocraty and a society which is ⁓ putting pressure on human rights from every angle and ignoring human rights from a democratic perspective like what we are looking into. I'm not putting that into a positive view, but exactly as you said it. So the depriorization of sustainability and ESG is not at all happening all across the world, It might come up from a different interest. And if you take China, for example, which is the country with the biggest increase of solar and PVs over the last two years, that comes for sure not from a ecological reason, but a pure economical one, because solar is in the meantime, the cheapest way of producing power to the grid as you can get it. And this is exactly the reason why they do it. So there is definitely different type of interests. But on the other side, Like you said, those who are affected, those who are feeling pressure, either on waste or on temperature or a lack of water or lack of biodiversity, if you have to start pollinating plants manually by hand, if you have to have people climbing up trees, pollinating apples and oranges to get the fruit at the end, because there is literally no bees left, no insects left to pollinate in other ways. Then you start thinking and this is exactly what we are still missing and already not given an answer why I think it is what it is. I think we are still way too protected in the Western industrialized world. Still everything is in supermarkets, still everything is somehow affordable, still everything is existing. If I open the tap, there is still fresh and clear water I'm able to drink right out of tap, at least in the majority of Europe. And that is something which I think is a bit of just pushing away the realities of what the world as a whole looks like and the global issues are.Gael Duez (27:28)That's funny, it is exactly the word that popped in my head when you were discussing and explaining the global situation that we are still so protected. protected or putting very nicely things under the carpet, as you mentioned for the plastic recycling or downcycling. By downcycling, mean that you use the product to build something with a less quality, so for instance, plastic bottles, they will never be used to make other plastic bottles as the little recycling sign could wrongly advertise us, but more to create carpet or garments or whatever. And I think this would be much more understandable for the the general public, if we were talking about downcycling rather than recycling. But this is a green IT or digital sustainability podcast. And I'd like maybe to zoom in a bit and ask you, how shall tech companies navigate these troubled times and embrace the paradigm that you've just described, starting with future proof. No Sorry. Starting with future readiness.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (28:36)And future proof is a good one as well, so we can talk about it in both ways. So that's totally fine. So try to visualize a butterfly. A butterfly is only able to fly if both wings are moving. And if there is only one wing, it will immediately drop off. And that's exactly what I try to explain what twin transformation stands for. It's the transformation of, and that's the one wing digital, and make digital sustainable. So looking into your own footprint into the things which are just coming up due to technology. So that's a major energy consumption. Take AI, which just now skyrocketed the energy consumption of data centers all across the world and still keeps going. So I think we are already at 3 % of the world's energy, which is consumed by data centers purely, just data centers. So not everything else for infrastructure, networks, Wi-Fi, whatever type of things, no purely data centers. And this is going to be predicted to go up to maybe even 22 to 30 percent in the next years due to AI because of a massive energy hunger which comes up on that. Same is relevant for water consumption. So all those data centers need to have cooling independent whether they use direct cooling, which is mostly a closed circle or and this is the majority of data centers use cooling on the roofs with chillers, whether it's just water chilled and used for such kind of cooling just have a massive consumption of fresh water. And this is something which we still don't have an answer for. And well, this is the own footprint. If you take materials, if you take the amount of equipment which is being dumped each day instead of circular usage and instead of refurbing the company devices and just handing it to a second life or just ensuring that materials like raw materials ⁓ is being just reused again. of that is the outcome and the own footprint of digital. And that needs to be turned into a sustainable aspect. So you need to be transparent. You need to know how to treat things and sustainability needs to take an influence into that one wing. The other wing is the sustainability transformation or the future readiness transformation. And all of that to get support from digital. What I've experienced in most of the corporates in the past and still, if I look into companies nowadays, there is a lot of manual effort if it comes, for example, to the reporting aspect. what we've spoken about a bit earlier, CSRD and all the non-financial reporting, most of the companies, and I hope that you agree in listening now, still have Excel and SharePoint and PowerPoint and emails and PDFs and whatever type of things as a source and data tool to work with for such kind of reporting. Does it have to be that way? No. There is definitely digital answers. Is AI supported answers, there's a lot of things in automation you can just achieve in supporting your surrounding and your work. And thing is, those people who I met who are in sustainability manager roles, in sustainability head roles, chief sustainability officers, majority of them is non-IT people. So they do not have even an idea how to make things different than with Excel or with PowerPoint or anything else. So what it needs is digital and IT people need to support those people because none of them is in such kind of a sustainability position to just do non-financial reporting. None of them is interested in day by day shuffling Excel sheets and counting numbers. All of them would like to take influence and make things happen within the company surrounding and I am able to support them with digital. We are able, for example, in product cycles. So taking another example, Green Digital Twins, this is a very perfect version. If you create a digital copy, a twin, of your product, of whatever type of material type of thing you're working with in a company and just color it a bit green in remark of looking ⁓ into maybe the weight. If you reduce weight, do a digital twin without even producing something, you can maybe lower weight for a transport of a good. If you repairability already upfront, you can support the longevity of a product. If you just have an awareness, of which components are being used in a final product, you're even able to already predict the recyclability of that product. All of that are definitely a lot of things where digital can support sustainability and the other way around, where sustainability needs to have a closer look into the digital world and ensuring that digital is not increasing the issues and the problems, but helping them and supporting.Gael Duez (33:09)You know, a few weeks ago, had a Letitia Bornes, a researcher on digital sustainability and one of the good experts of rebound effect. And when I was listening to you after having listened to her, I'm sort of having mixed feelings about it because, I mean, on paper, what you describe is flawless. I mean, and I love the butterfly example, by the way. But what has been happening over time is that every time digital enhance or improved processes, reduced waste, reduced energy consumption and so on, some sort of rebound effects happen, which most of the time cancel out the gains. And this is always where I'm a bit cautious. Like I would love to deploy what you're describing, like a word where IT and AI and so on would purely focus on reducing creating a more livable planet But this is not what has happened most of the time. It's a nuanced world and I don't want to be oversimplifying here. How do you deal with it? How do you create the conditions where what you describe will actually happen rather than having this crazy rebound effect like, it's more efficient by 50%. So let's spend 70 % more on it to gain new customers markets. Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (34:34)And that's a very concrete danger I do see as well. That's without any doubt. And the more efficient we will get, let's now follow maybe the predictions of the big corporates, the tech giants from the US who are currently now predicting that AI will solve most of the issues. AI will increase the technology which is being required for carbon capture and storage. AI will help us for fusion reactor development and all that things. So they make us feel thatGael Duez (34:44)Thank you.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (35:00)AI and digital will solve all the world's issues and we can just lean back and keep going than what we've done already the last 100 years. And this is the complete opposite of what it should be. And I agree with you. So there is definitely a huge risk that there is rebound effects in certain other areas. And that's even more showing the importance of people like us who are aware. And it's all with awareness. It all comes with transparency and with understanding what the outcome is and that we always pay a price.Gael Duez (35:05)Yeah.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (35:29)I think, and now let's just maybe circle into a bit of another angle. So far, we've kept it mostly in the environmental and technological aspects. maybe a bit increase the focus on the social component and meaning on us, human beings. If you take the amount of people with mental health issues and depression at the moment, which is massively increasing, mostly due to the pressure which we face, mostly due to all that always on things with social media. And if you just take all of that, think people are getting more and more aware, well, there might be an outcome with what I do each day and there might be a price I have to pay for. And that's exactly what we need to be aware of. If we use digital, if we use AI, if we use technology, it is not what the ones producing it and making the most money and billions out of that is trying to sell us. It comes with a price. That price is something which we have to bring up even more on the agendas and why it needs to have collaboration, why it needs to have NGOs. Even if in the US, for example, NGOs are not that famous anymore and Trump is wiping off kind of financial support for them, we need them. We need to have people who are independent, who are not money driven, but who are driven from values, from common good, which are interested in changing the world. Are they the ones to answer all of the world's questions? No, they are not. It's a balance between. And that brings me back to my own personal brand, to that climate activist in a suit idea. It needs to have a balance between both worlds. And that comes again, repeating that with the awareness of what is the price and what is the outcome we can get and finding a right balance in reducing the risk of any kind of bouncing back into then doing even more and even doubling than maybe the outcome.Gael Duez (37:12)And that's absolutely right. And you mentioned two things that actually would like to get a bit of a highlight from you, which is the price we pay for AI. And I think the example you took was excellent. And you mentioned the NGO and I briefly mentioned in the introduction that you're the chief sustainability officer of sustainableit.org. So for those who are not familiar with sustainableit.org, I would say that this is an NGO who focuses mostly on IT executives such as CIO and CTO How do you help them with your CSO hat future readiness and also to push back this AI frenzy with this sort of fear of missing out the syndrome that we are facing to take a balanced decision.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (38:01)Yeah, thank you very much for that question. So maybe for those not knowing me, I'm working full time in my own company for Heartprint which is my paid job, my day to day job, which is paying the soup on the table for my three kids and for my wife and the family at home here. And then they do have ⁓ a side job, is pro bono for sustainableit.org. Sustainableit.org, exactly as I explained it, was found about three years ago in the US. It's a classical NGO, no commercial interest, no financial interest. The only thing we get financially is the fees from the members, which are in the meantime 135, mostly exactly as I said, big stock listed companies from all across the world. And what the initial idea in nutshell was all about is in defining standards and in just joining a group of people who are interested in doing the same and speaking up with one voice towards those who are trying to fool us. So that was a bit of the initial idea, because if you started ⁓ five years ago, in requesting maybe carbon footprint from hyperscalers, you got either no answer or completely hidden type of an answer without any value. And that was something which started the idea in defining sustainable standards in IT and by IT increasing the pressure with speaking out of one voice. And in the meantime, it just got developed. We've got changed a bit of the focus to AI and now we are defining currently together with roughly 50 people from such kind of companies and member companies, but as well supported by science, by the UN Global Digital Compact, by World Bank and certain others, what is responsibility in AI and what does it mean as a standard. And this creates currently guidelines and this creates white papers and a bit of a framework which is being released in roughly three weeks, so end of June. And the idea here is to… Again, define a standard which currently only has certain angles and certain local aspects. So there is, for example, the European AI Act, which got defined about two years ago. But this is, first of all, not comprehensive. There's very little in it, which is on environmental aspects, for example, water consumption and stuff. On the other side, it's European and it doesn't have a global reach. And so therefore, what we try to do here is in defining that things. And my job there is in supporting the board as a member of the board in adjusting then maybe strategic angles to take as an NGO as a whole. as you can clearly guess already, so the US headquartered NGOs are quite heavy under pressure at the moment. So if you're talking about diversity, equity and inclusion, which plays a major role, if you go in ethics, for example, for AI, as well in standards for sustainability, this is quite difficult at the moment for all the US people. In the board and even for us being an US headquartered NGO. So what we're trying at the moment is to change a bit of the pressure more to European sides. We are creating a newly adjusted European advisory board and we are then trying to push things more from that angle because we can. We are still in the democratic freedom to talk openly about things and we are still able to just push things further in… regard of diversity aspects.Gael Duez (41:14)And in Europe, science is not a gross word. So we can keep on talking about it on fact-based rather than belief-based. now circling back, so thanks a lot for all these explanations about the symbol.it.org and how also it helps us understand better what is at stake at the moment with the US. With your members, and maybe it's too early for you to answer, but how do you advise them to embrace AI wisely. Mean, do you have some concrete example or is it too early to say?Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (41:48)No, I can at least give some maybe one, two ideas into that aspect here as well. So what it all comes up with, and by the way, this will be promoted then as well and will be opened up to public as well with very concrete guidelines and practical how to start things and very practical examples from the big companies which are members of Sustainable IT. But one of the things is, again, transparency. So if I, and this is an example. Where German Railway, Deutsche Bahn, example, started already about a year ago or something. The usage of mostly then the on-prem AI solutions, so none of the big corporates is using public ChatGPT or Mistral or anything else. They do have their own on-prem solutions for data privacy reasons, which do have then with an API for sure the large language models of big solutions on the market or copilot and everything else but they still have their own on-prem solutions. That means they do have an opportunity to influence how it's been displayed. And one of the things Deutsche Bahn did was displaying after a prompt what was the energy consumption caused by that prompt. if anyone from Deutsche Bahn is using in their internal AI system ⁓ their large language model to create maybe the next PowerPoint slides or just an email to the next manager maybe asking for a celery raise, then there is an immediate response which just shows the prompt you just used did cause 25 kilowatt hours of energy use. So that is one of the very concrete examples which I would propose if you're in a big corporate surrounding to just come up with a bit more of understanding and awareness. And what it requires then, and this is maybe a next example, if you're working in a smaller surrounding just using AI from public offerings ⁓ in maybe paid options like OpenAI, Mistral, with Luchette or anything else, then it is again on training. So don't hand it to your colleagues. Don't hand it to your employees just completely without guidance, without awareness, without a training. They need to understand what the outcome is all about. they need to understand sometimes a small language model would do and sometimes even a Google search would do. Well, maybe a bad example because Google just wiped off the standard Google search and replaced it with AI.Gael Duez (44:04)Yeah.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (44:07)What I was going to say is you need to be, again, aware. And that awareness could either come with transparently showing it. If you do have the ability, if you don't, start things with a training. now maybe to those who are just listening, say, well, we still don't use AI within the company. I bet you do. You just don't know about it. And you just don't maybe want to know about it. Because if you, as a company leader, are not providing solutions for your employees, they'll find their own ones. And I mean, it's very easy to register for the full free versions or just pay, I don't know, $10 or $15 per month for Le Chet or anything else just on your private account and still use it in the company surrounding. And I am sure in most of the companies, a lot of people are using already AI, even if there is no official answer, no official provided service form from the company perspective. So training, training, training.Gael Duez (45:00)I've never thought about shadow AI the same way as shadow IT, but actually it makes total sense. But thanks a lot for this. And thanks a lot for providing this concrete examples and the feedback from your position at sustainableit.org. I think we are out a bit of time now.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (45:05)Yeah. So do we.Gael Duez (45:21)Let's finish with a positive piece of news. What is according to you? ⁓ The news that you got recently that uplifted you the most. can be in sustainability in general, or it can be in IT sustainability more specifically. Feel free to pick the one youRainer (Heartprint GmbH) (45:40)Very good question. So I would like to maybe turn the angle again a bit into something probably unexpected, and this is whales. ⁓ So a very good friend of mine, is Frauke Fischer. She is a biodiversity expert from the university in Germany. And she wrote a book which is in German, Walmacht Wetter, or translated version, ⁓ whale is causing weather. And if you're interested in reading that book, I can highly recommend. It's something which explains how whales are influencing weather during their lifetimes and once they die. one of the positive news I recently read is due to whale protection, which is in most of the countries in the meantime a common thing, there is only very little exceptions, but due to whale protection, the number of big whales and blue whales and the whale population in general just got… way, way, way better than what it used to be and what it looked like and way better than what got expected. And this is, to me, just an example if we really want to make things happen, if we are really willing in changing something and the transformation is then understood from the majority of people. If there even is a couple of people declining or still not believing in things, if the majority is following that path, we are able to make things happen and influencing in a positive way. And this is exactly what I would like to maybe use as a closing remark for myself.Gael Duez (47:04)I love it, especially because I go whale watching every year. That's the sort of ritual before going back to school because in Réunion Island, that's the perfect timing. But, I love it.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (47:17)I didn't even know about that. You're well watching. at that. So without speaking about it upfront, I touched something which is close to you as well. I love that.Gael Duez (47:24)Excellent. Well, Thanks a lot, Rainer, for joining the show today. And I'm really looking forward to hearing you on stage at Green IO Munich. And thanks a lot for joining there as very happy.Rainer (Heartprint GmbH) (47:36)Thank you very much, for having me. It was a great pleasure talking to you and looking forward seeing you soon.Gaël Duez (47:41)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on our website, greenio.tech. If you enjoyed this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with other responsible technologists is also a good idea to provide them with inspiration. You got the point, being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more listeners. In our next episode, we will welcome Anita Schuttler, a well-known IT sustainability expert involved in many NGOs to talk about the latest developments in green software engineering. By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. Munich was a huge success last week and the next one is in London on September 23rd and 24th. As a Green IO listener, can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP. Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.Green IO New York, ICT4S, GreenForum Berlin, Green IO Munich, … Eventually responsible technologists have more an more places to meet, learn, share, and grow our community. A world of opportunities and … frustrations because many of us cannot attend all these great conferences. 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How is sustainability covered in main tech conferences? Sure cybersecurity, DevOps, or anything related to SRE, is covered at length. Not to mention AI… But what room is left for the environmental impact of our job ? And what are the main trends which are filtered out from specialized conferences in Green IT such as Green IO, GreenTech Forum or eco-compute to generic Tech conferences? To talk about it Gaël Duez sat down in this latest Green IO episode with Erica Pisani who was the MC of the Performance and Sustainability track at QCon London this year. Together they discussed: The inspiring speakers in the trackWhy Qcon didn’t become AIconHow to get C-level buy-in by highlighting the new environmental rikThe limit to efficiency: fine balancing between hardware stress and usage optimizationWhy performance and sustainability are tight in technology  Why assessing Edge computing’s positive and negative impact is trickyAnd much more!❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conference is in Munich on July 2nd and 3rd. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 Learn more about our guest and connect: Erica's LinkedIn Erica’s WebsiteGreen IO website Green IO SlackGaël Duez's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Erica’s sources and other references mentioned in this episodeQCon London's "Performance and Sustainability" track with a list of all the talks/speakersBuilding Green Software by Anne Currie, Sarah Hsu and Sara BergmanPrevious Green IO episode with Ludi AkuePrevious Green IO episode with Sara HsuGreen Software FoundationWilco Burggraaf's page on GSF which has links to his writingTranscript (auto-generated)Erica Pisani (00:01)Think sustainable technology is inherently performant for the most part. And I think that those two things actually they're pretty well associated with each other.Gaël Duez (00:12)Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO! I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.How is sustainably covered in main tech conferences? Sure, cybersecurity, DevOps and its DORA metrics or anything related to SRE is covered at length. Did I forget to mention AI? Not anymore. But what room is left for the environmental impact of our what are the main trends, which are filtered out from specialized conferences like Green IO or Ecocompute to non-specialized conferences, the big tech conferences. And to talk about it, I'm delighted today to have Erica Pisani with us. So Erica lives in Canada, Toronto, software engineer in a FinOps company. And when she doesn't work, she enjoys playing violin and working in the woods with her dog, which might give us hints on why she eventually managed to be the MC of the Performance and Sustainability track at QCon London this year. So I'm really glad to have you on the show Erica and that's going to be a great debrief that we're going to have.Erica Pisani (01:42)Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. I'm super excited to join Green IO.Gael Duez (01:47)You're more than welcome. So, Erica, how did you end up being the MC of the Performance and Sustainability Track at QCon London this year? And please share with us the long version where you explain how you started to get interested in IT sustainably in the first place and is there any, I don't know, maple syrup involved? Yeah, I know it's terrible cliche. Go for it.Erica Pisani (02:07)No, no, I do love maple syrup. Unfortunately, it's not necessarily part of the story. But I guess the longer story is I originally, so the punchline, guess here is I came to sustainability in software development through edge computing. And really I started looking at edge computing because I just didn't know what the heck it was. A couple of years ago, every like cloud provider from, and I was working at Netlify at the time, every cloud provider from Netlify to Versal and Cloudflare and like AWS that were going on and on about compute power being available at the edge, data being available at the edge. My coworkers were so excited about edge functions launching and I straight up had no idea what they were talking about. And for me, the best way for me to learn stuff is to try and learn it as if I was gonna teach it, which is that age old advice. So to motivate myself to learn about Edge, I ended up deciding on a whim to pitch a lightning talk of I'm gonna talk about the Edge and I'm gonna talk about why it's important and exciting for software developers. No sustainability component in it whatsoever. It was just I wanted to learn more about it. And fortunately it got picked up because it was this huge thing. And I got extremely lucky that through the great vine of conferences, my talk got the attention of a member of the programming committee at QCon in 2023. so I go to QCon London and I can't remember what the track was at the time, but there was a sustainability track there at the time and Sarah Bergman was speaking. And I remember going to see her talk and I'm sitting there and I can't remember the name of the talk exactly, but she's, talking about the different scopes and the stuff that you see in the building green software book. And as I'm sitting watching her talk about this, I realized that the edge that I'd been focusing on for so long could actually play a part in the sustainability, sustainable tech movement. And so I ended up completely overhauling my talk because I was just like, just want to focus on learning more about sustainability in tech and how this can tie in and we can leverage it in this really amazing way. And I got so excited that like for me, felt like one of those turning points in how I view my career where I wanted to start looking through how I build software through that lens a lot more seriously. And because I was so excited about this, another programming committee member maybe about a year later because she kept hearing me talk about, and we kept in touch just because we met at the conference, got along. and she's like, so we have another like sustainable track that's going to be a QCon. And at that time I had been doing a few different conferences and was kind of tapped out. I was, I needed a break. So she's like, you don't have to do it this year, but consider it maybe for next year. And so, you know, 2025 Qcon London is about to roll around and she asked again like would you be interested and I was like I'm recovered I am ready to go let's do this and so that's how I ended up hosting the track this year.Gael Duez (05:26)Excellent. That's really, really cool to kickstart with something you don't know and having this approach like I want to teach about it to make sure that I understand about it, which is I must admit a bit of my approach as well. Like I love ending up teaching pretty fast when I'm investigating a new field because that's the only way to actually put your brain is not always purely backed by science or research papers. So yeah, I got you on this one.Erica Pisani (06:00)Yeah, and I don't know about you, but for me, sometimes when I'm in a rush to solve a problem, I sometimes hand wave over things I don't understand and just keep going. And when you have when you force yourself to like, okay, someone's going to ask this question, you have to understand why it's behaving in this particular way. It's so much better in the long run, but it's definitely always tempting to skip when you're when you just want to get the shiny thing working.Gael Duez (06:14)Absolutely. Yeah. And it's especially true when you've got some momentum in the field, like in green IT or IT sustainability at the moment, where there are more and more. And that's the good news. There are more and more people getting involved, talking about it, posting about it. mean, my LinkedIn be read the entire, the eight hours nonstop with this sort of constant media production, we tend to forget about the longer form of thinking, which is reading a book or preparing a course. And that helps actually to structure much more the topics you're investigating rather than just, I've heard about him. I've heard about her. she read. She did something amazing. She said something amazing. But at the end, how do you connect all the dots is really missing. That's my feeling when I'm reading too much of my LinkedIn feed, which is, guess, the only social network that I'm still active in.Erica Pisani (07:12)Yeah, no, I understand. And even just like all the newsletters available out there too. It's very overwhelming.Gael Duez (07:16)Yeah, wow. Oops. And I play guilty for the green eye one, but it's a monthly only. It's a monthly only. I choose the rhythm for the reason.Erica Pisani (07:24)It's one of the few that's like gone through my, what's the word now, my frequent like just purges of my newsletter inbox. It's managed to stay the test of time.Gael Duez (07:32)Yeah. That's a good test. Erica, let's talk a bit about QCon this year in April it was. Were you also in charge of sourcing, finding the speakers?Erica Pisani (07:51)Yeah, I was asked to be a track host. So QCon London happened in end of March, beginning of April, and I had to start doing my like, my research and reaching out in September, October of 2024. so kind of had the themes, I could make of it what I would. And I was responsible for almost creating the story that I wanted to tell in the context of performance and sustainability through the speakers that I was selecting. There were some restrictions because budgetary reasons for conferences, like on geographies. And obviously, they're hosted in London. They want to see some folks that are based in that tech community. But otherwise, the conference was really great for track hosts like myself to find who we wanted and invite them in.Gael Duez (08:42)That's a pretty prestigious name. I guess when you reach out to someone, say, hey, would you consider talking to QCon and submitting a talk, usually the door doesn't slam on your face like, wow. Excellent. So that being said, what were the top trends you witnessed in green IT? within yourErica Pisani (08:53)I'm not gonna lie, it was very helpful to be able to say I was coming from CubeCon London.Gael Duez (09:11)Sustainability and performance track in QCon London, but also feel free to elaborate a bit on the bigger conference. It's just that I'm not 100 % sure that you had the time to actually enjoy the rest of the conference, so I don't want to push you out of your conference zone thinking, oh well, I read the program, but that's pretty much it.Erica Pisani (09:29)I know I honestly, I was very glad my track was the first day because after the first day I was zonked. I can't imagine doing two days of a conference and then having to host the track. I'll start with the general theme of, guess, the wider conference from what I was able to pick out. Obviously AI is the thing right now. A lot of people are talking about AI's impact on the tech world, on the wider world. There was...Gael Duez (09:34)Can you imagine? That's a different story.Erica Pisani (09:55)Someone who, if I remember correctly, was giving a keynote even just like on design and how design is kind of being impacted in positive and negative ways with AI. There was a significant number of talks that talked about AI and if it wasn't the main feature, it was at least touched on and referenced on how it was impacting the topic that was being discussed. But would say there was still a good variety of topics being spoken about at the conference. It wasn't so dominating that it was just like QCon have become an AI conference. was just it because it's playing such a large part in software right now and has been for a couple of years. is understandably taking a lot of space in people's minds and there's a lot of questions. And so there's a lot of speakers that are stepping to the plate to talk about how AI is affecting things in different ways.Gael Duez (10:28)Yeah, AI-con.Erica Pisani (10:47)In terms of the themes of the performance and sustainability track, one of the themes that I would say, so in terms of the talks that were selected, they covered different things in general. I want to kind of talk about how you advocate maybe for sustainability initiatives at a leadership level, because one of the common questions that would come up from audience members is how do you get buy-in from the wider organization? There's a lot of software developers who listen about, yes, this does matter. We know it's important, but we still have to tell business leaders something to be able to take the time to experiment with gathering metrics, understanding what metrics do we need to gather. ⁓ As Sarah has mentioned before, I think in one of your recent episodes for Green IO, sometimes it's not entirely precise and that can be difficult to get buy-in for if it's not like you have a hundred percent certainty that these metrics are going to give you a clear picture of, let's say the carbon emissions of your software stack. And so one theme was like, okay, how do you get, how at it as an organization leader or organizational leader, how do you get buy-in from the wider organization and start adopting more sustainability practices so that you can move in the direction that you want to move? Obviously I had an AI feature there, so had someone come and talk about how to develop AI in more resource constrained environments. AI most of the time is talking about developing big LLMs with massive amounts of data. And obviously it's well known about AI's energy consumption. So I wanted to have someone be able to speak to how do you make AI performant in a smaller scale, which means that it's more sustainable.Gael Duez (12:15)Yeah. Was the speaker, Okay?Erica Pisani (12:30)Jade Abbott. So she is the CTO of Lolata AI and she's based out of South Africa and as she talks, I know the talk isn't quite, it's not live to the public yet, but she talks a little bit about how South Africa has unique constraints environment-wise. Like you can't depend on constant running electricity to be running these big, or training these large language models ⁓ for let's say like, you know, two weeks straight. So it was a really interesting talk to hear how to build those things. And then local first software is not just within a sustainability perspective, but in general, it's becoming more interesting across the board because it's a very performant way to build software. ⁓ And so that was something that we were able to highlight in this track. And obviously Sarah was on the talk and talking about, or on the track and was talking about metrics and how to gather that information. That's also a question people often have is how do information to be able to take action on it because you can't act on something that you can't measure and move toward a better outcome.Gael Duez (13:37)Did she talk about the observability versus good old metrics debate?Erica Pisani (13:42)Yes, yes she did. Yes, a little bit. She got like a lot of great stuff in the 40 minutes that she had. ⁓ And I'm actually excited when the recordings come out to rewatch it again because obviously there's so much information you take in a conference.Gael Duez (14:00)So you mentioned the buy-in being one of the main topic. What would be the two, three, four main insights that you've got from these different talks? So Sarah's talk, ⁓ who else was actually talking about the buy-in, the C-level buy-in?Erica Pisani (14:16)Ludi. And I wanted Ludi's, yeah, because she had experienced decarbonizing tech stacks ⁓ at one of her companies whose name I forget at the moment.Gael Duez (14:20)Ludi, yeah, obviously Ludi, yeah. Loomi My daughter's got one so that's pretty easy. It's a story box.Erica Pisani (14:33)Okay. Thank you. Hahahaha! Okay. That's really cool. So yeah, that was like probably the largest theme. And from there, it's like how to have more sustainable AI, how to develop more sustainable software. those were, think that like the big themes that came out of that track and that there were often a lot of questions about.Gael Duez (14:57)Okay. So now I'm going back to my previous questions. How can we get some buy-in? What were the main insights shared by Ludy and Sarah and some other speakers? Do you recall some vivid examples of things to do or not to do, actually?Erica Pisani (15:17)Well in, in Sarah's talk, she, and I, I realize it's, ⁓ it can, it can sometimes be a bit of a challenge to do this, but be okay with accepting the use of proxy metrics that are perhaps not perfect. And I think even to ask business leaders to do this is obviously a bit of a, is a bit of a challenge or like organizational leaders is a bit of a challenge, but even as a, speaking as a software engineer to have to take metrics that I know are not completely accurate is a bit challenging even for me to sit with. I think she made a very good point that it's better to have at least something that's somewhat approximate and close to what we want, and at least be able to somewhat measure it and improve it over time than to be completely blind as to what the state of the software stack is in terms of our sustainability initiatives, if we have them, or if we have certain concrete ones in the organization. And for getting buy-in,Gael Duez (16:01)And measure the evolution.Erica Pisani (16:14)Ludie, think really accurately summed it up or one of her great points anyway, was that it is a business risk ⁓ to just gloss this over. The weather is becoming increasingly unpredictable. Data centers are not necessarily going to be safe from these massive, seemingly once in a generation storms that seem to be coming every year. And taking that seriously now, even starting to get in the mindset of we need to think about this. I think it's only a matter of time and I think there's some, can't necessarily quote the specific regulations and stuff like that, but governments are starting to make it a regulatory thing. so regulatory considerations are something every business pays attention to anyway. So if you're getting on the right foot now, it makes it far less painful in the future because this this is going to come.Gael Duez (17:06)Interesting this resiliency approach because it goes so much against our culture in the tech space at the moment which is like you know there is no limit sky is a limit which is actually true sky is limited it's called the greenhouse gas emissions in the sky is the the blood limit but that's a different yeah but that's a different that's a different issueErica Pisani (17:21)The literal limit,Gael Duez (17:31)I think it's good that we have these talks and people speaking up on these and maybe rebounding on what happens around us. Like what happened in Spain and Portugal should be a wake-up call to pretty much everyone running a 24-7 infrastructure because suddenly you can have no electricity. For the moment, backup generator are available for everyone, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, But hey, for how long and what is the cost actually to running all of this?Erica Pisani (18:00)Yeah, and at least closer to home for me, we had some terrible wildfires over the past number of years. Wildfire season starts increasingly earlier and earlier every year. ⁓ And I think probably the most memorable thing that happened with that wildfire season was a few years ago when the smoke from the wildfires in Canada were blanketing New York, and it seemed like an eerie Mars-like situation. ⁓Gael Duez (18:00)It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was crazy. And not so fun fact, I use in quite a lot of my public talks now, the white fire in Canada to get some proportion from people and I'll ask them what is the size of the country that is equivalent to the burnt area from these white fires? And people that don't imagine, proper answer is Nepal. then when you put it like, you know, the Nepal map on the average European country or the average even US state, it's pretty big. Suddenly, you're like, oh my god, this is insane. But the problem is it's often pushed back as some ecological concern, And the connection with our tech world is not made that much. This is why all this water stress, for data centers, or energy stress becomes that much important. And you mentioned another trend that you nurtured in your track, was efficiency, software efficiency, running software with less energy. I guess Holly Commons talked about cloud zombies, were there other insights also? And what did she mention also?Erica Pisani (19:30)Yeah. So obviously the zombie server thing is a good one. ⁓ Another one being that if I think that I'm gonna be paraphrasing here, but like efficiency is there's a limit to efficiency. There is a limit to how, and I think this is even worth noting in the sustainability context because we may take the idea that we may need to run fewer servers at a much higher degree of like utilization to help ensure that we reduce the amount of carbon emissions that we have. And there's a fine balance there where if you were to run servers maybe at too high of an efficiency, and the example that Holly had given was that of like a combustion engine, a car. There's a theoretical maximum efficiency that it has, but it's designed to run at far lower than that threshold because you don't want to wear the engine out. And similarly, that's something that we have to consider when we're trying to like resource capacity plan where we want to make sure we have enough servers to handle the amount of traffic, not as low as like, what was the quote that maybe like 12 to 18 percent of the capacity of a server's use that's obviously way too low. But we can't necessarily be at 90 to 100 percent because now we might be running the risk that our carbon emissions are related to the embodied carbon cost of having to replace our hardware frequently. And she also tied it back really well to just even like humans working way too hard all the time and needing to still take time to rest. And I think that's something that is important in a world like ours where we are trying to build more sustainable software in a world that is increasingly getting hotter. And it can sometimes feel like we need to work.at 100 % all the time to get closer to that. But I Holly's talk in that it also reminds you to rest a little bit, take care of yourself because you can't be running at 100 % all the time.Gael Duez (21:20)Do we need all of this? And all of this that far and that fast. That's super interesting what you've mentioned because it connects with two dots. first of all, what Holy Mansion is really literally backed by science and researches such as I know that I'm quoting him a lot, butErica Pisani (21:35)Yes.Gael Duez (21:52)Professor PS Lee in Singapore was like this big expert on water cooling and really study the impact on hardware of how you manage a data center in tropical area. He has provided me tons of feedback and that was one of his feedback. The hardware, it has some sort of a sweet spot for running operations. And even if it's not like the max capacity, sold by the hardware providers, actually, above a certain threshold, you're really as you say, you're significantly decreasing its lifespan. So obviously, increasing the emission via the embodied carbon, because you will have to replace sooner the gear. And so that was really connecting in my mind when you mentioned it.Erica Pisani (22:39)Yeah.Gael Duez (22:41)And it also connected to something else that we should be cautious about all this talk about how much energy we waste or how much server capacity we waste. know, in Green IO Singapore this year, we had this talk from, this AWS software engineer. He was showing this graph of how unused capacities on average you could find on a standard AWS server, And I think we should be very cautious about this theoretical number and it might be proven way lower in true operational condition. And back to the track itself, about?Erica Pisani (23:27)One of the, I think, things that was really exciting about the, like, just hosting the track too, is seeing, there seemed to be like this effect where as more people came to the different talks and people started hearing about the different topics that were in the track, there was increasingly higher amounts of people coming to the track as the day went on. And it seemed like a lot of folks...Gael Duez (23:41)Okay.Erica Pisani (23:53)We're really excited and really engaged. And I think that that's really encouraging to see that when folks are aware of the sustainability stuff that we can work on in tech that we have available to us, it seems like it's more we know what we want, we need to do, and we have some ideas of what we can do, and it's just a matter of executing on it. People are really excited to take that back to their organizations and start adopting it themselves. I know sometimes you see some talks where folks just don't know what to ask, but that's not what I saw at QCon. Everyone was super keen, which I love to see, and that made me really excited for my speakers as well, because I'm glad that they got to see just how excited people were about sustainable tech.Gael Duez (24:44)and having a lot of questions is always a very good sign for a speaker, that's for sure. And actually, it connects with a question I wanted to ask you, all this momentum and people showing up more and more over the day, because I was wondering, why did you choose to name your track Sustainably and Performance? And was it the only angle performance to attract devs attention? Was it like if you had mentioned only sustainly or green IT, was it not enough? What is your explanations for this choice?Erica Pisani (25:21)well, I have to admit, I didn't get to necessarily call the track that like it came in as performance and sustainability. I can make some tweaks to it, but for the most part, it was like, we have this idea that we would like this track to be this. do you feel comfortable playing together a track for this? And I think though, that it was well named because I think.Gael Duez (25:25)Okay. Okay.Erica Pisani (25:43)Like performance is something that a lot of software developers usually, that's often the stuff that they're running into in their day-to-day works and something that's very front of mind. They're dealing with like too slow of an application in this respect or ⁓ this database isn't responding well in this capacity. And so they're looking for solutions and ideas on how they can tackle the performance challenges that they maybe have and their organization, or they're anticipating that there will be challenges and want to know ahead of time. That being said, think sustainable technology is inherently performant for the most part. And I think that those two things actually they're pretty well associated with each other. And I thought I'd like, as I was building the track that angle I thought was very important to me because you the best of both worlds in this sense. You can look to build performance software and by looking to build performance software, you can work toward creating a more sustainable future with the tech that you're building. And I didn't want it to seem like you had to pick either or. There is a lot of opportunities for both. was also why I really doubled down on that title for the track.Gael Duez (26:56)Yeah, makes sense. Anyway, if this is a wording that would attract people, I think you made a really good choice to use it to make sure that your room is full and then they got exposed to great content. If the room is empty, mean, that's pointless to have like the most technical possible talk on sustainability in scope one and two and three and four and what not. I got your point.Erica Pisani (27:18)Yeah, but it is good even just to have a, almost like if you can envision the software that you ultimately have at the end of the day that happens to be sustainable and ultimately I want to see a sustainable future and so it's a little bit like I'm pulling that messaging in a bit. I think it makes it more real for people. It doesn't feel like an abstract theory.Gael Duez (27:26)I completely got it. I've got a question. I'm always curious about what is mentioned when people are talking about sustainability and planetary boundaries and the likes. Was it like mostly about carbon and energy or where other environmental impacts such as water, resource exhaustion, et cetera, et cetera, also mentioned?Erica Pisani (28:02)⁓ Water resources and stuff like that was mentioned in the talks themselves. Holly both called that out specifically in their talks. For the folks that were on the other side, the attendees, they tended to think more in terms of the energy.Gael Duez (28:09)Okay.Erica Pisani (28:18)Not to say that they weren't thinking also about the water usage and stuff like that, but I think usually when folks were asking questions, it was more like, want to reduce the energy consumption of my data center to reduce my emissions more than it's consuming X liters of water every day.Gael Duez (28:34)Which makes sense because this is their main proxy metrics to act like on day one. If you decide to migrate your cloud or even to do like carbon aware computing, it requires the DevOps and the Ops and sometimes the SysAdmin to be put in the loop and it's a longer game and QoCon being really focused on Dev and DevOps, starting with energy makes a lot of what you shared is very positive news because I remember that three years ago in main tech conference just talking about energy savings was really a Revolution and now if it goes beyond and some talks mention also water That's a very positive sign. OkayErica Pisani (29:16)Yeah, and even those metrics, like we're getting better at tracking them, but Ludie called out in her talk, like it can be difficult to get really concrete measurements sometimes on that alone. And so if we're looking to gather more information on, let's say, water usage, that's going to be something that we'll have to advocate for with our cloud providers to start giving us more information in that respect as well.Gael Duez (29:23)Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. makes lot of sense. Okay, so Erica, thanks a lot for the wrap-up of this five talks at QCon London. Can I ask you one last, maybe two last questions? What's next for you in the Sustainably Area, of course?Erica Pisani (29:48)Of course. There's a few different things I'd like to look at on the side for myself. I've had a few different ideas kicking in my head, partially inspired by some of the talks I'd seen at QCon and just from following other folks in the field. One of them being because I, in my role right now at the financial tech company, we use Django, which is like a framework that's been around for ages. And I can't remember who the person was on Blue Sky that kind of gave me this friendly nudge, but there was this whole discussion happening in a Django forum of people trying to figure out how to best measure like carbon emissions or energy usage of Django apps. And there wasn't necessarily some good consensus on it. And so that's something that I'm hoping to take a look at at some point with what free time I have. ⁓ And then otherwise I'm still just trying to learn from everyone else right now. And what I am learning and at least having some ideas about it and blogging about. So that's kind of what's next for me right now.Gael Duez (30:41)Okay, interesting sense. And you mentioned resources and stuff that you've learned. Would you like to share with the audience your main sources of information, except for QCon London, obviously, this year?Erica Pisani (31:11)Yeah, I really like following the folks at the Green Software Foundation. Sometimes I'll take a look at, they have working groups that are looking at like developing papers on let's say recently, I think they did a working group on AI and I'm just interested in seeing what they're thinking of in terms of developing more sustainable AI. I also like following, I don't know his last name, but his first name is Wilco and he's very active in. Yes. So he's someone that I follow and just like pay attention to as well as, yeah, and Sasha Luciani, even though I don't work in AI, I still love listening to, or not necessarily listening to, but what she writes, I tend to read as well. And then I listen to Green IO, which is also how I've been getting some of my information.Gael Duez (31:43)He's amazing. Yeah, thanks a lot. Okay, thanks a lot for this. And maybe to close the podcast on our usual positive piece of news, would you like to share something? I know that you're based in North America, so it's not that easy at the moment, but would you like to share a positive piece of news regarding sustainability or life in general? I don't know. ⁓Erica Pisani (32:12)Yeah, sure. Like I mentioned before, I got like really interested in edge computing. I like I've gone deep down that rival hole of understanding more about how people are investing it and how it's growing over the years. And I think something that's got me really excited, and that makes me like, I consider a wonderful piece of good news is that as more distributed computing, obviously distributed computing is a thing already, but as it gets more adopted in an edge computing sense, there's really cool opportunities for things like smaller edge data centers incorporated into maybe urban environments where the data centers can heat buildings. And by being able to be used in that way, we can actually significantly reduce carbon emissions of heating buildings, which is a major, major source of carbon emissions. And that, I don't know why I'm nerding out so much about that, but I think that's an amazing piece of news, especially being in a colder climate like Canada.Gael Duez (33:13)Yeah, I was about to say that in tropical area, that's kind of the opposite. what do you do with this extra heat? And, know, to bounce back on what you said, this edge computing and this CDN stuff and all of the likes is really something that I'm trying to investigate more and more because on one hand, yes, it can be the case at having, you know, less network to travel through, we can reduce somehow not the immediate environmental footprint of data because it has almost zero elasticity, but the would say midterm long term sizing of the overall network. it makes sense like to have computing capacity closer to the end user. But on the other end, if you look at how the world is decarbonizing, there are huge gaps. And I'm always wondering, if I'm going to try to take a North American example, but if I've got users based in Ohio, do I really want to do edge computing in Ohio far as I remember, the grid is pretty dirty there. Rather than hosting most of my server capacity in Quebec, where I think it's one of the lowest carbon electricity grid in North America. this trade-off, I think I've never seen any article, any research paper truly embracing it and trying to tackle it. So correct me if I'm wrong. And if any listener had some research paper, please send them my way. But yeah, that's a real challenge for me. And I'm curious to hear what you have to say because you're the edge expert. like, you know, talking about it, but I've got an expert. So I'm going to ask the question to the experts.Erica Pisani (35:09)No, don't worry. So the question is more like how to balance like having edge data centers, let's say in dirtier grids compared to just hosting in. Yeah, no, that's a very good question. And I think I would also be very interested in this research paper should it exist. I think that is one of those things that it's gonna be one of those.Gael Duez (35:22)HahahaErica Pisani (35:32)Design architectural decisions because to your point, if I'm in North America and I, you know, being based in Toronto, I have this wonderful data center that is one of the greenest in the grid, not that like a four hour drive away from me. I would rather use that data center and test whether hosting stuff at the edge in Toronto makes from the reduction in the distance traveled of the request, does that make a meaningful difference to host that stuff here where we may need to be burning in the middle of winter fossil fuels to be able to supply the electricity grid? Or is it better to just rely entirely on the data center? I don't have necessarily a good concrete answer for that, but I think that there would, I would love to see there be tests done on that because depending on, I guess, the fossil fuel that's being used in that particular grid, there can be a very meaningful difference to hosting everything on the data center, not leveraging the edge, versus leveraging the edge heavily and getting the reduction in emissions from not having the request travel as far.Gael Duez (36:41)Agree. If you ever want to resume your studies and do a PhD, you've got a research topic. But anyway, well, thanks a lot, Erica. That was cool to do this wrap up episode about QCon. I wonder if the listeners will enjoy it as well. So please feel free to comment.Erica Pisani (36:49)Yeah, I have lots of material now. Gael Duez (37:06)Because if so, we will do more. are other great tech conferences also that are focusing more and more on sustainability, but it was also great meeting you. I was not aware of how involved you were in the field, so I'm very glad that we connected now. So thanks a lot for joining the show.Erica Pisani (37:21)Thank you again so much for having me. This was a blast.Gael Duez (37:25)Low carbon blast. Talk to you soon, Erica.Erica Pisani (37:27)Low carbon blast, yes, always. You too, take care.Gaël Duez (37:39)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website greenio.tech. Now, if you enjoy this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with fellow software practitioners seems also a good idea, if they couldn't attend QCon this year. You got the point, being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board.In our next episode, we will welcome Rainer Karcher, a pillar of the SustainableIT.org association and a climate activist in a suit, as he likes to describe himself. We will talk about the importance of not deprioritizing future readiness, which is what is the current backlash against ESG doing, and what IT and digital has to do with it. Stay tuned.By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. New York was a blast last month and the next one is in Munich on July 2nd and 3rd. As a Green IO listener, you can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIPJust make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

Laetitia Bornes, a Doctor in Human-Computer Interaction and Systems Engineering, discusses the complexities of modeling in climate science, using Vinted's claims on avoided carbon emissions as a lens. She critiques oversimplified models and emphasizes the need for transparency and credibility in scientific research. The conversation also highlights the importance of systems thinking and the innovative concept of 'protopia,' advocating for realistic paths toward sustainability. Expect insights on how education and long-term thinking can reshape our approach to climate change.

In this insightful discussion, Laetitia Bornes, a researcher with a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction who specializes in sustainability, challenges the carbon-negative claims of platforms like Vinted. She dives into the complexities of rebound effects in tech, revealing how profitability often undermines sustainability goals. The talk exposes the methodological pitfalls in measuring avoided emissions and advocates for a systemic approach to designing environmentally-conscious tech that truly benefits society.

Description“It's always a case of fit for purpose, or what we call a proper engineering.”Some down-to-earth facts and analysis were coined by Pr PS Lee, one of the world's top experts in liquid cooling - and Pr. Heng Wang - a renowned expert in digital governance - while cross-analysing Singapore’s main challenges from an infrastructure and governance perspective of the ongoing AI Boom. Among the topics covered in this discussion with Gael Duez were: The lack of standards and the need for holistic approachesOur imperfect, incomplete and unpredictable knowledge on AIThe fit for purpose approach with the right mix of cooling solutionDealing with legacy datacenter infrastructureThe moratorium on new data center and the other tools used by the Singapore government to cap energy consumptionThe carrot and stick approach to manage the environmental impacts And much more!❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO next Conference is in New York on May 14th and 15th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 Learn more about our guest and connect: Pr. Poh Seng Lee's LinkedInPr. Heng Wang's LinkedInGreen IO website Green IO SlackGaël Duez's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Pr. Lee and Pr. Wang's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:𝘈𝘥𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘎𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘋𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘚𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning EngineersOpen Compute ProjectSingapore Green Data Center RoadmapTranscript (auto-generated)Prof PS Lee (00:01)It's always a case of fit for purpose, or what we call a proper engineering. I think for high-power AI workloads, then think going with liquid cooling, I think it's almost becoming the standard solution. But then not to forget, you also have storage, you have networking equipment. So these are actually typically the lower power,Gaël Duez (00:24)Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on the website greenio.tech. One last thing. This episode is a bit special because it was recorded live from Green IO Singapore two weeks ago. The sound quality isn't as good as you have been used to, but the quality of the guests is as good as ever. Enjoy the episode.Gael Duez (01:33)We’re live and we're doing this fire chat session at Green IO Singapore, second edition, and we're trying something new, which is recording live with all the technical hiccups that happened for the last 20 minutes. So my dear listeners, you didn't experience them, but the participants, did. And I'm delighted to be joined today by Professor P.S. Lee and Professor Heng Wang to discuss the environmental footprint of AI, but from a very hands-on perspective based on the city-state of Singapore, because both of them are experts, Professor PS Lee from an infrastructure perspective, Professor Heng from a governance perspective. So how does this rise in energy consumption, resource consumption caused by the AI boom is concretely impacting the infrastructure of Singapore and the way Singapore governs its digitalization. Without further notice, I would love to leave the ground to Professor Heng Wang. Can you briefly introduce yourself?Pr PS Lee (02:34)First, thanks for having me. I'm Poh Seng or PS Lee from both Energy Studies Institute as well as Mechanical Engineering from the National University of Singapore. So my personal research centers around data center liquid cooling. So I've been working on this for past three to five years. Liquid cooling is not new but associated with the demand for AI now becomes almost as a part of requirement in order to sort of unleash the AI performance. But I more importantly is that the switch from conventional air cooling to liquid cooling, it can actually result in very significant energy savings as well as carbon footprint reduction. So think that to me is actually the more important question, how do we actually take advantage of various technologies to manage the carbon footprint of the industry so that we can allow the growth in the most sustainable fashion. Gael Duez (03:30)Okay, thanks a lot. Professor Wang. Prof Heng Wang (03:38)Thank you for having me here. Singapore Management University, Newport House School of Law. Before that I was a professor at the University of South Wales in Sydney. I work on the governance of digitalisation and sustainability. So the issue is about how do we align digitalisation with sustainability and one of the core issues about how do we navigate through the uncertainties because we are not necessarily have all the knowledge about that. How do we use the regulation governance, different tools to align the two together. And also I contribute to World Economic Forum, governance alliance from the perspective of responsible users. Gaël Duez (04:10)Quite a lot to deal with. So without further notice, let's jump right into the main question. What is according to both of you the main issues, the main pitfalls with this current AI boom in your fields of expertise?Prof PS Lee (04:34)I think for the infrastructure side, the industry has been operating air-based systems for the longest time, the past three, four decades. So while liquid cooling is not new, think in general the industry does not actually have a lot of practitioners that are familiar with the design as well as the operations of liquid cooling infrastructure.So I think there will be a period whereby there's quite a bit of learning as well as training that's actually necessary so that we actually equip the industry practitioner with the necessary know-how as well as tools to solve design and operate the liquid cooling infrastructure. Then obviously one of the natural questions is actually what about the CAPEX indication? We also gained the switching from liquid cooling to air cooling the demand while it's picking up is certainly not at the same volume as airbase is now. So that's why it's still the perceived delta in terms of the CAPEX Then I think even the more challenging is actually existing infrastructure. How do we actually allow wind retrofit of your existing data centers in a cost-effective fashion. So I think these are some of the issues.the other is actually standards. think currently there is a lack of standards while there have been various guidelines, for example from ASHRAE, from OCP. But think there isn't a very well established standard when it comes to the new AI infrastructure. So I think it really needs to be a power-tracking of both the technical, the technology development as well as the governance including the standards.Pr. Heng Wang (06:20)I think I agree what you have said, standard is one issue. From governance perspective, or from knowledge perspective, I think we have a number of major issue. First, about knowledge. So if you use AI, AI is fast developing. have an issue about we have imperfect knowledge about AI, it's kind of beta version. And secondly, we do not have complete knowledge.because you you mentioned about cooling, mentioned about energy transition, know, e-waste, and different context, finance and other sectors, so you have silos. You knowledge are not really distributed as much as we want. Certainly also, it's also been an issue about unpredictability, so the social response to AI is an issue. If you think about AI will compete with your drinking water, the feedback to that will be different. So that's the knowledge side.imperfect knowledge, incomplete knowledge and unpredictability. From governance perspective, we have mismatches. Mismatches about one is if you look at horizontally, your short-term and long-term consideration. Short-term you want to roll out fast. You also have a bottom-up decision. You have the use cases long-term, you have a susceptibility. And also you look at the governance levels. have domestic ones, sub-national ones, to regional ones, to international ones, which has been pretty tricky nowadays.And also if you look at the issue of the silo solution earlier, you also have to break that. So that's come back to the issue, how do we build the knowledge? And how do we engage with stakeholders at different levels and to forge the standards and also to evolve over time?Gael Duez (07:58)two questions to dive a bit on what you say. First of all, Professor Lee, it seems to me that you made the assumption that liquid cooling was the de facto solution to solve maybe partially the energy crisis caused by AI, but is it the only one? mean, if you take a step back and you position yourself as like an almighty father of Singapore, of Singapore's infrastructure, would you say, okay,We need to go all in into liquid cooling, retrofit everything like this or is there different ways, different approaches that we should follow?Pr PS Lee (08:38)It's always a case of fit for purpose, or what we call a proper engineering. I think for high-power AI workloads, then think going with liquid cooling, I think it's almost becoming the standard solution. But then not to forget, you also have storage, you have networking equipment. So these are actually typically the lower power, so you don't really mix to go to link cooling.But even in AI, if you look at for example training versus inferencing, especially the later, inferencing you probably don't really require super high power chips. So in that regard, you can probably go with some of the air-based solutions, but maybe going from the conventional what we call the perimeter cooling involving crack-claw to a roll-based solution like in-roll coolers or rear door exchanger, which allows you to cool higher airflow rate.such an AI influencing hardware. So I think it's always a case of fit for purpose.Gael Duez (09:41)And in the case of, just for the listeners who are not super familiar with the wording, AB is air based cooling So, for a city like Singapore, did you manage to estimate the share of the current infrastructure that should be sort of retrofit toward liquid cooling and the share that should go as it is today?Pr PS Lee (10:04)I think Singapore is actually quite unique because we have a moratorium about three years ago because back then, data center industry is consuming 7 % of electricity, obviously it's 7 % so it's actually huge. The government actually has its net zero commitment and obviously it's also concerned about the energy demand so that's why a moratorium was actually put in place which was actually finally lifted.Thereafter, actually have a data center called for applications. But if you look at the licenses that were actually awarded, they are just averaging about 20 million. So I think for a mature data center market like Singapore, the reality or the fact is you have a bigger stock of existing data centers. Or you can call it legacy or ground-fuel data center. So I think the solutions that we should be looking at, whether or not you do liquid cooling or more efficient air-based solutions.will be quite different compared to example Malaysia in particular, Johor Bahru because there's a lot of new data centers that are coming online. So for them, I suppose right from day one, they can actually start by designing or incorporating the coolant into the infrastructure. But for a merchant market like Singapore, I think likely we'll have to do it in phases.without undue interruptions to ongoing operations, as well as undue delta in terms of the CAPEX But I feel that for mature data center markets like Singapore, the green retrofit data center, in fact, will be a lot more needle moving in terms of bringing down the carbon footprint compared to emerging markets like Malaysia.Gael Duez (11:53)That's interesting the connection with the governance issue when you mentioned the moratorium that happened three years ago. mean, what is today in your view, Professor Wang, the balance you mentioned like short term, long term, how do you believe that Singapore would position itself in this fast rhythm regarding AI adoption and even like investment in new infrastructure, retrofitting infrastructure and likePr. Heng Wang (12:21)That is a great question. It involves the issue about understanding the costs and benefits. So you have to actually, it's a trade-off, which is a very difficult one. So I think it's very important to understand the risks, to build the knowledge It's only in this way you can make the informed decision. So that would be very important for the government's arrangements to understand what's happening, what's likely to happen. And you need foresight.AI now is a landscape, move much faster. Like if you think of a highway in the past, you have 100 kilometers or 200 kilometers. Now it's 1,000, 20,000 depends on the speed of the development. So I think the first important step is actually we have to build a network of the stakeholders to understand risks and also the short-term and long-term considerations of that.specifically you probably need to take more concrete measures like the Carrot and stick to launch towards that. So for example, for understanding risks, whether you want to encourage disclosure, disclosure of CO2 emissions, water consumption, so e-waste and other things, or you want to...efficient labeling as we have done before you you utilize the adaptive existing tool for that or index or verification there could be also be industry use case for verification it's not only about the cost of money you can make money in a sense of it you can be as an ethical leader in that regard and those kind of things or you want to think of a monitoring forecast and also the early warning for exampleI looking at thinking also being, it's also about the technology side, which I looked at earlier, is that whether it's also useful to train the AI models with those kind of training principles. So in this way, actually even if you use a prompt answer to the prompts, bearing in mind those kind of issues. And also you should like, whether you're thinking of what something you can do now, like the tendering offering requirements. So if have a project, and you'refor energy efficiency, so you have raised to top instead of raised to bottom. So there are other things you can do. You think about whether regulate AOMs and others. So I think a coherent approach and engage with different stakeholders and use different tools will be very important to make that happen.Gael Duez (14:50)And if I can wrap up what you said, it's all about gathering the different stakeholders and using a mix of carrot and sticks. Could you maybe provide one or two examples of each in Singapore? Did the Singapore authority, maybe government, maybe governmental bodies, started to use the stick? I mean, they used a pretty big stick when they forbidden any new data center facilities three years ago.but it has been lifted now. But what sort of sticks do you from the Singapore government, and what sort of carrots?Pr. Heng Wang (15:27)I think that's actually as mentioned, you mentioned example the government may take measures about the developments of new data center, that's one example as you mentioned. But also that Singapore has a green data center roadmap. That's also been a way where they're trying to promote water and energy efficiency because actually if you have energy consumption over a certain threshold, then you are expected to have those kind of monitoring or the water usage of that.think that's maybe probably more things to be done because this is a very new area. that's the reason why, mentioned earlier, that you can't think of adapting existing tools for that. Instead, everything starts from scratch. So that's the issue about when you talk about carrot and stick, energy and that going as mentioned earlier will be one way where you can give a reward because consumers will know what it means. Or for large energy models, you never requirement things, taming what are the energy consumption of that. So consumers may choose which energy actually more environmentally friendly. So what I try to make is that actually we have to think creatively and adapt to that. But not necessarily everything will be able to do that. One example is environment impact assessment. This is a tool which is difficult to apply because it's, you know...So I just want to say that you have to adapt and risk one, but also think about developing new ones.Gael Duez (16:51)I think the Singapore green data center roadmap was mentioned earlier today by the IMDA representative Dr. Lawrence Wee But it has been something that has been existing prior to the AI boom. Is it correct?Pr PS Lee (17:09)There was an earlier version, I think they called it the Green Data Center Research Roadmap. So I think even back then, I think they mentioned things like liquid cooling, but I think the latest version which was actually launched last year is really about pushing for accelerated adoption of various solutions. I think like what Prof. mentioned, it really has to be done holistically. It's not just...one singular solution like liquid cooling. You also need to look at the details right, are you still end up rejecting the heat, are you still end up consuming a lot of water operating the wet cooling towels. So I think the Green Data Center roadmap the latest edition I think it actually sort of put up a holistic kind of framework right, so that operators as well as their so-called partners, vendors, equipment vendors.consultant can really adopt a holistic mindset in terms of looking at different aspects all the way from the procurement of your energy sources to the adoption of some of the latest energy-efficient solutions including liquid cooling to possibly recovering waste and actually putting it to productive end-use. So I see that as a progression.But I think for me the next step in my view is really to come up with a holistic green or sustainable data center standard. I think we have different pieces, including I think one of the new standards that me together with my colleagues among the audience that's developing essentially on the liquid cooling standard. But I think it's more than just liquid cooling. So I think really I look forward to Singapore showing the leadership to establish a holistic standard for green or sustainable data.Gael Duez (19:05)And just from our understanding, the roadmap as it is today, it's a set of best practices and things like that, but there is nothing compulsory at the moment. There is nothing sort of related to what the European Union did with the energy efficiency directive. But now, if you're above a certain power capacity for your data center, you need to waste heat as you mentioned, share of energy renewable. This sort of reporting, is it already in place in Singapore or not yet?Pr PS Lee (19:38)what it would extend that the EU is doing but I think what we can see is actually IMDA and EDB is actually tying for example the PCCF8 to for example the green data center roadmap as well as the green mark for data center 3G green and 4 version so I think it still serves the purpose of actually really compelling the industry to sort of be very intentional as well as be very theholistic in terms of assessing the different aspects that would actually lead to the more sustainable operation of the data centers.Gael Duez (20:14)And maybe to close this fire chat, can we reverse the question? What do you see both of you as the greatest opportunity leveraging AI for sustained purpose in Singapore?Pr. Heng Wang (20:30)Yeah, I just been seeing a lot of new ways that AI provides the possible way to do with that. So something I'm thinking of, you know, can use AI to simulate. So if you different governance or regulator arrangements, you could have agents. And then you can think about using AI to simulate what an outcome of that would be. So that probably will inform your decisions, you know, and also bring the different positions of actors into that.And of course, AI will be used in the allocation of the energy resources and even allocation of the human resources for free energy generation, so on and so forth. So many ways that we need to explore.Gael Duez (21:10)And just a side question because I didn't mention it in the introduction but you're an expert in blockchain techniques, not necessarily cryptocurrency but blockchain use. Do you see any related use between the AI boom which is a machine learning boom, now let's be honest, it's just a marketing trick to name it AI, and blockchain today or for you are there still two separate topics?Pr. Heng Wang (21:36)Yeah, I'm not sure about blockchain technology expert, but I think that actually blockchain will be one way that nowadays we're thinking of synergize or work with the AI. So people even in the area like finance, example, or FinTech areas also looking to the AI's more important use of that, including how do you leverage technologies to do the compliance, regulatory compliance, for example, if you have an environmental.regular requirements, whether we can use blockchain and other tools to make that happen, and AI to assist that process. So that's also been a possible way that we try to explore. But we have to see what are the rules by that. So for example, people may say we want regulation by design. So we require you to have the designer to build into your green stability in your AI or similar arrangements to make sure you comply with the requirements.Pr PS Lee (22:27)Pr Wang already mentioned that can obviously leverage on AI for the simulating performance, can use it for optimizing the operations of the data centers. But I think the other aspect which I think really the AI can be sort of leveraged on is actually to orchestrate your computing, your power and cooling. Currently it's done in silosBut if you are able to time the workload to match with the availability of green electrons, then obviously you can actually better reduce the operational carbon. So see AI has a lot of potential in various aspects. In fact, can even leverage on AI for the entire life cycle of the data center, all the way from design, operation to end of life.Gael Duez (23:15)Thanks a lot, of you. That was the first time we record live a podcast. I hope that, I mean, the sound obviously would not be studio quality sound, but I hope it will be understandable. Thanks a lot to the audience for attending. It was a great exercise. And yes, let's meet next year.Pr PS Lee (23:32)Thank you.Gaël Duez (23:36)Thank you for listening to this live episode from Green IO Singapore. Don't forget to share it on social media or directly with other data center practitioners. Our next episode will not be about the AI energy score. We had to postpone its recording, but with Letitia Bornes to talk about the avoided carbon emissions thanks to digital technologies. It will be based on a study she co- authored about Vinted, the massive second-hand platform. Stay tuned.By the way, we decided to open our Slack workspace to our listeners willing to get involved in the making and the promotion of the GreenIo Podcast and its newsletter. The link in the show notes and you're more than welcome to join. 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