Green IO

Holly Alpine, former head of Microsoft’s sustainability initiatives, and William Alpine, an AI product manager focused on eco-friendly practices, share their journey within Microsoft’s Azure division. They reveal the tension between tech expansion and sustainability, discussing their grassroots initiative that boasts over 10,000 employees. Topics include the complexities behind enabled emissions, the significance of community investments, and the challenge of aligning corporate goals with actionable sustainability objectives. Their insider perspective sheds light on the pressing need for transparency in big tech's environmental claims.

Today, we don’t have 1 or 2 guests but 12! In partnership with the YouTube channel Architect Tomorrow, we are glad to share with you snippets and interviews of the speakers who made the latest Green IO Conference in London a huge success last month. I have no idea if you have some appetite for this kind of content so feel free to come back to me at contact@greenio.tech or just comment on our posts on social media. One last thing, the audio quality is ok but not great because of the noise at the venue. If this episode gets some success, we will try to find a quieter place and better gear for the next editions of Green IO starting with Green IO Paris on December 4th and 5th. Still, I hope you’ll enjoy this episode as much as we enjoyed crafting Green IO London 2024 for its attendees. ❤️ 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. 

🔎 Green SEO? Not the most widespread concept in the sustainability field. Still, seasoned web designers and developers know it well: folks in charge of SEO often have the final say when it comes to content, design and even sometimes technical choices. And on top of this influence, SEO practices also carry their own environmental footprint being very data hungry. 🎙️ In this episode, Gaël DUEZ invites two seasoned SEO practitioners and pillars of BrightonSEO - one of the world’s top conferences on the topic - Stuart Davies, founder of the Ethical Agency Creative Bloom, and Natalie Arney, an SEO Consultant with a knack for sustainability to explore Green SEO.Some Takeaways:↔️ the transversality of SEO functions,💻 the alignment of the core web vitals with sustainability goals,🌐 The importance of choosing sustainable hosting providers,♻️ Practical sustainable SEO practices, and much more.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss our episode, every two Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here.  📣 Green IO Paris is on December 4th and 5th 2024 --> use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket! Learn more about our guest and connect: Nathalie Arney’s LinkedInStuart Davies' LinkedIn Green IO website Gaël's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Natalie and Stuart's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:Search Engine Land’s interesting study among SEO folksGreenSEOJean-Christophe Chouinard’s blog Core web vitalsGreen Web FoundationScreaming Frog SEO Spider Update – Version 20.0 GreenSEO Meet-Up Green SEOTranscript Gael Duez 00:00Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO! I’m Gael Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the Tech sector and beyond, to boost Digital Sustainability.And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform, and, of course, on our website greenio.tech. Green SEO, I had never heard the word before last year when I started discussing the topic with Jean-Christophe Chouinard who happened to be one of the thought leaders on this concept. He reminded me something that I actually experienced many many times in my past years as a CTO: folks in charge of S E O often have the final say when it comes to content, design and even sometimes technical choices. And on top of this influence, SEO practices also carry their own environmental footprint being very data hungry. Hence to investigate more this angle, I invited 2 pillars of BrightonSEO, one of the top conferences worldwide on the topic, who are also actively launching a fringe event called the GreenSEO Meet-Up on October 2nd Stuart Davies and Natalie Arney. Both are seasoned practitioners in the SEO industry with a more technical angle for Stuart, who Stu founded the Ethical Agency Creative Bloom in 2014 and is also a passionate surfer. And with a focus more on content for Natalie who has been freelancing for 5 years and is also a singer in the Brighton-based community choir. And I must admit this hit a soft spot for me having spent a wonderful year in Brighton when studying at the University of Sussex in … well shall I say this … in 1998. That's quite a long time ago. Hello, Natalie. Hello Stuart. It's great to have you on the show today.Stuart Davies 02:26Good morning.Natalie Arney 02:27Thanks for having us. Morning.Gael Duez 02:30So, as I said, I think I've never realized the pivotal role that SEO could have in enhancing green IT practices. I just wanted maybe to kickstart our discussion with a very simple question, why should we care about Green SEO at all? And maybe, Stuart, if you could share some ideas on it.Stuart Davies 02:54Okay, thanks. Thanks, Gael. It's great to be here. So, Green SEO, it's two funny words to put together. In 2012, I commissioned some of my team to do some research on to the impact of websites and digital content on the Internet, and I had an itch back then, the vocabulary sustainable net digital sustainability started to permeate a little bit towards me, but it hadn't quite resonated. Obviously, I run an ethical agency. I've always worked with the green and the good and the good local businesses. So it felt that by helping them with their mission, we were helping to do something positive, but we didn't really have a good handle on the impact that we were making. And I think that research to me was a real eye opener. It was a game changer, it was a significant impact. I think there was one stats which really blew my mind. I think at the time there was a study done by a gentleman and he calculated the carbon impact of the Internet to work out that currently he thinks it's a 7th. If it was a country, the Internet was a country, it would be the 7th largest emitter of carbon emissions on the planet and it's on track to be the second of the United States. So it's quite significant what we're doing. So it felt important that SEOs, because we often, I think, as you said, SEOs sit across the divide of digital often. So we sit against digital strategy, we sit against content, we sit against technical, there are many other facets and rings that we actually kind of sit against and we can help influence a much, many factors as well as SEO itself. So it felt like there was a space for a conversation and a space for learnings to be given and a space for open resource tool sets, and here's how to do your jobs. And that's the place that Green SEO is doing. So we're at the beginning of the discovery curve in terms of SEOs and digital sustainability. But that was the point of Green SEO. It started with three of us, initially in Brighton, and those three have grown to 30, of which Natalie Arney is one of our brilliant speakers in our April BrightonSEO meetup. And we're planning to make that 100 next time. That's our plan.Gael Duez 05:24That's a good, healthy, sustainable growth, the one we want. And what about you, Natalie? What brought you to this concept of Green SEO?Natalie Arney 05:35I think I've always been into making the world at a better place in lots of different ways. And obviously, as I've kind of changed my lifestyle to better suit the way that I do things in every part of my life, obviously, work is one of those things that I haven't always been able to control. But now, as a freelancer, I'm able to do that a lot more, from client choices to things like helping them improve the impact of their websites and their marketing activity on the rest of the web, so that we're able to be good examples for other people.Gael Duez 06:23Your clients, Natalie, are they aware of these topics? How do you bring the topic of, hey, I'm an SEO expert and I'd also like to discuss the sustainability angle. How do you kickstart the conversation with them?Natalie Arney 06:39So some of them have already got it on their KPI's and things. So a lot of the brands that I do work with will have targets. So, for example, at the moment, one of my clients actually is being audited to see by a graduate. They're being audited to check every element of their business because what they don't want to do is obviously promote and preach themselves as being a sustainable business and driving all of their activity without doing it in the best way that they can. Some of them, it's part of their brand, as in, we are an e-commerce site that sells things like sells products… It's an interesting one. For example, one of my clients is an e-commerce site, and they dissuade people from buying things.Gael Duez 07:40Wow.Natalie Arney 07:43So, yeah, so obviously it's being able to be a kind of, if you need something, if you really need something, buy it from them and buy the best option. But if you don't, just don't buy it. And it's funny, you know, having worked for agencies in the past where everything's like, “We've got to sell as much as possible and we've got to hit all of these targets.” And it's actually like, well, and I've had a couple of clients that have got this Simmons, like, the same attitude now. It's like, well, actually, we only really want people who really need the product. And rather than driving this kind of high consumption, we all know of Shein and Temu and those kinds of sites, but it's not just them heavy consumers that's obviously then driving waste, driving, overconsumption, driving unsustainable working practices, child labor, so many different things that the impact is beyond the world or beyond the environment is the world rather than just the environment. And, yeah, being able to kind of work with businesses like that is great, but we don't always have the choice to do so. So it's working with people like that when I can, and then when I'm not, it's looking to see, “Okay, what can I do with my brands to help them become better in terms of, you know, accessibility, security, site speed, anything.” And then a lot of the SEO best practices do then feed into, you know, best practices on the sustainability side. But, yeah, it's kind of slowly and surely with some brands and then with others, it's from day one, as soon as you have your kind of call with them, you know exactly what you're going to be doing with them. So it is quite varied. And not everyone has the benefit of being able to say yes or no, whether they're, you know, agency leaders like Stu or freelancers like myself, we both have a lot more control over who we can work with. Whereas if you're an exec and you're just starting out in your career or you're a couple of years in, you don't always have that ability to do that. So obviously taking, getting involved in maybe company projects and things like that, or seeing what you can do internally and attending meetups like GreenSEO can really help as well because you're skilling the team up on understanding and being able to communicate it. Because if you're working with B-Corps, if you're working with businesses that's got all these big goals, you're going to have to be able to work with them anyway and understand and feed it in and it can help get things signed off as well. It's always nice to get an extra thing, an extra ticket signed off just because it's got a green impact, as well as improving keyword rankings, for example.Gael Duez 10:41If we go a little more concrete now, I'd like both of you to explain what are, according to you, the techniques, the SEO techniques that help reduce the environmental footprint of a website, digital services, etcetera. And maybe a bit later we will talk about what is specifically related to SEO. But I mean, we've heard about the size of a website, image management, etcetera, but I'd like you to cover the different angles, not necessarily all of them, but with this extra question, is this aligned or not aligned with what Google expects from us… because eventually they are the big moneymaker here with their ranking.Stuart Davies 11:34As Natalie has touched on, I think that some of the core principles or the big ticket items that you could do for sustainability to make your site cleaner do align with the principles of, say, core web vitals and site speed and performance and up to date relevant content rather than content for content's sake. And these kind of big factors which can impact the website. How much of it is Google? I mean, it's quite interesting. During the last GreenSEO, we did post a post, a tweet, no, an x, as it is now, to all of the search engines asking would they consider applying sustainable digital factors in their ranking algorithms? We're yet to have a response, but we will be reminding them of that question again in October. So if, you know, one of probably the biggest things you could do is find an accredited renewable energy data host. Okay, so somewhere where your, your website is going to be, it's because that's the problem. It's energy use. And if you can, at least the minimum requirement I think, is if you can find, and you can find accredited green energy hosts on the greenfoundation.org website, there's some really good resources on there. You can find yourself a green energy host and you're moving, you know, from potentially a fossil fuel held data center to a potentially green energy accredited data center. I think that's one of the biggest things like the number one impact. Number one things that a lot of organizations can do. Whether or not that doesn't impact, that's not going to impact the front end of the website, the design or kind of the strategy. And this is just where the website is held. Obviously you need to be able to have the same requirements you need for your hosting and the developers will need to get around that. But that feels for me like a good win. If one thing that people would maybe take away from this, that they're not sure where to hit first, that's one of the big ticket items for me.Gael Duez 13:45First things first, make sure you are sustainably hosted. Now once we've got this basic layout, you mentioned that most of the best practices are aligned with the core web vitals. And by core web vitals I guess you refer to the set of best practices that has been pushed by Google as the best way to get good ranking because the information will be easily accessible and as transparent as possible.Stuart Davies 14:16It's also how the website loads, how the website renders, how it responds to people who are coming back, how the images are served, how the layout of the pages moves around with the user or doesn't, how certain features react on desktop and mobile. So all of this is starting to go into the world of design and user experience. The core web vitals does hit into that as well. How fast your website loads, obviously, and what's behind it and how that content actually loads to the users as well. So that's some of the core principles of core web vitals and SEO 101.Gael Duez 14:56And SEO experts will be fully aligned with sustainably or green IT experts on most of these vitals. Could you maybe name the top three top five that are the no-brainer that as an SEO expert, as someone taking care of the SEO ranking of the website because you don't necessarily hire experts all the time in every company. What will be the top three top five things to keep in mind to make sure that you've got both a good ranking and the lowest possible environmental footprint.Stuart Davies 15:35So with core web vitals again, I didn't come up with this word. We use a lot of jargon in our industry and I'm not a techie jargon. Some of the people who work for me and work with me, I call this “make the website quick”. So there, as I know there are three major, three major areas. One is called LCP, Largest Contentful Paint, and that's how quickly the most important content on the page loads. Okay, so you know the banner of the image, however, so you know developers can do things to make that quick. That should occur within 2.5 seconds. That's Google's recommendation for SEO ranking factors. And then that also creates a quickly loaded, presentable website. You then have something called First Input Delay, and that measures how long it takes for a site to respond to a user's first click. Again, these should be very quick metrics and these are some of the things that designers and developers can, can focus on. And then you've got something called CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift. So that measures the page's visual stability as well. So it's about reserving space for images, videos, iframes and optimizing fonts. LCP, Largest Contentful Paint, is all about how to look, how, how you prioritize loading resources, making files smaller, the host resources on the same server and feed. First Input Delay is about reducing the amount of JavaScript and where you can use web workers.Gael Duez 17:21And Natalie maybe more on the content side and the philosophy of searching data, are there any things that you'd like to add on these three biggest topics that Stu just covered?Natalie Arney 17:37So on the content side, I think a lot of it's to do with graphics when we talk about core web vitals, but also JavaScript. So a lot of people will use JavaScript to load menus and add little fun things to navigate content. And alongside that, some people might even just use JavaScript across their whole site. Now that can be really great in some ways. However, the web is still built on HTML and CSS and that's what search engines usually crawl. They have got better at crawling and rendering JavaScript. However, it's not always as efficient as it should be. So usually they go to the HTML first. So making sure that there's fallbacks is really, really important, not just from, from a search engine point of view and a search perspective and having an impact on the core web vitals, but again, like adding in additional layers to that is good for accessibility as well. So it allows people to navigate content, whether they're, no matter what device they're using, wherever they are, they're able to access that content. So rather than having JavaScript disabled on certain browsers, or just not wanting to have things load as fast, and some people will use stripped out browsers, for example, being able to actually access that content is so, so important. And yet not using as much JavaScript or at least having a fallback is super important because yeah, as Stu's mentioned before, not only is that load time having an impact on things like core web vitals, but it frustrates the user as well and then it increases bounce rate and decreases the value of the content and then there's, there's lots of other impact from there onwards.Gael Duez 19:33And so if I kind of gather your point of view, there is one aspect which is basically the size, size, size, size, which is very much aligned with the sustainability angle because the bigger, the more resources, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's a complex story. It's not linear, obviously. Absolutely not linear. But eventually, when we multiply by dozens more times the size of websites since a decade, as brilliantly proven in the Web Almanac Sustainably Chapter, I really encourage anyone to read this chapter because it's kind of mind blowing to see the average size of a web page just exponentially growing over just a decade. So it's really about reducing the size. But Natalie, what you'll see advocating, it's also a technical choice, like not using that much JavaScript. It's not just the question of size, but also some choices that could make this website more difficult to load or reduce user experience. And before I ask the elephant in the room question, I've got a final one which is regarding when everything is well aligned. Did you already see some website size decreasing? Like did you manage to reduce the size of web pages and websites? Or is it still very, very hard to reverse the trend that we are seeing in our industry at the moment?Natalie Arney 21:07Oh, from my point of view. So it's an interesting one because obviously from the content side of things, my talk when I spoke at BrightonSEO in April was all to do with how content audits can really play a massive part, not just on the SEO side, but environmentally as well because obviously there are so many sites and so many brands that are continuing to believe that the more content you have on your site, the better you're going to rank. And we see on a daily basis in the SEO world, people saying how they're going to scale the content on their website. And oh, we've seen these great exponential growth in all of these places and we've driven traffic so, so high now. Like, you know, we've ten x'ed it, we've hundred x'ed it, we've done all of this. And then it's like, well, is that, has that content got any use to the user? What is the environmental impact of that content? How much time and effort has that content made? If you've not got a team creating that content, how are you creating it? Are you using an LLM? And obviously then there's the impact of the use of LLMs from the environmental footprint side of things, but also from the ethical standpoint as well. And then we've also got the fact that you can have loads and loads of pieces of content that are just not getting any traffic or not getting any decent traffic. So although you might be driving a lot of traffic to your website, the pages might have high bounce rates, they might have, you know, really irrelevant keyword rankings, but obviously being able to use and target more detailed keywords, driving prospective customers rather than general browsers, that really is key for a lot of SEOs now. I guess it's a growing trend that people are like, well, we can make charts go up, we know how to do that, but it's going from driving traffic to driving valuable traffic from the commercial side, but also from the environmental side. And there was, I remember reading a case study a while back of a food waste company, and they basically created a new website. And by creating their new website design and kind of narrowing down the user journey and stripping back their content and ignoring those vanity metrics of increasing traffic, they were then able to save over 500 kilos of carbon emissions a year. So I think it was over two and a half thousand miles of air travel a year. Just by just giving their website a little bit of a sort out, running a content audit, really trimming down their design and making sure that it was just really fast, really simple, really impactful. And yeah, the content actually helped people rather than just driving lots of irrelevant traffic.Gael Duez 24:07I'd like to pause here and to share a personal anecdote. When I started my position as a CTO at Solojet, obviously I kind of self audited briefly the website just to understand what was on it. And I ended up discussing with the teams roughly, we've got between five and twelve main pages. Like the pages, like the homepage, the one describing an ad, et cetera, et cetera. But eventually I asked them the question, but how many pages do we have on the website for real? And the answer was more than 1 million and a half. Because for SEO purpose only that amount of pages was and maybe still is created because you basically have one page for every single address in France. Because it is a website based in France. But the same happened in Germany, Israel, Belgium, UK, wherever I worked with a property portal, the same drill and I was shocked like, wow, we are maintaining more than 1 million and a half page. What is the traffic on it? What is the use? I mean, we could get rid of it. Are you really sure? And the answer was always yes. But think about the long tail. It doesn't cost that much. And whenever someone will hit, you know, mostly what is the price for a property in this specific street, in this specific town, etcetera. We want our websites to be ranked super high if possible, number one. So we need to think about the long tail and we need to maintain then 1 million and a half in a highly automated way. And we were not even using LLM back in those days. So this is my personal feedback from a very wasteful behavior. But still, business wise, it makes sense. What would be both of you, your point of view on this? Do you really believe, or is it really the case that the long tail works that well and requires that amount of resources? Or is it a misconception or is it a way between, I would say.Stuart Davies 26:16I mean, with long tail content, I have an agreement with most of my clients, but my clients are the green and the good. These are people who are early adopters. The challenge is bringing some of these principles to the mass market. But we've got an agreement where we've got a one in, one out on the website. So it's okay, we'll put in, we'll put in a piece of content, but we're going to take some of it off. And that's how we manage our long tail content strategies. So yes, there is a place for it, because often you are answering useful information, a question that someone wants to ask about your product or service, that it is useful to have or to provide that on your website, but it can go so crazy. And what we found was it kept the size of the website lean and lo and behold, it also kept their content strategy lean and really did their rankings quite well. So that's how we've approached that particular thorny subject.Natalie Arney 27:13So I keep going back to it, but my bright and SEO talk, so basically the name of my talk was “Reduce, reuse, recycle your way to content success.” And basically what that involves is obviously content audits. And I really believe in having really impactful, useful content audits on a regular basis, I would say at least every year. And from that side of things, you always need to keep a grasp on which pieces of content are driving traffic and which are getting good engagements. Like I said, with a case study, having that impactful content that drives conversions, that drives kind of meaningful traffic, rather than just making the graph go up, is so, so important. I think looking at what you can consolidate and what you can improve in terms of content is so important. You might have some really useful content from years ago that just needs a refresh. That could drive a lot more traffic through better keyword rankings. It could be that you have got some outdated information, for example, on an article, and you can just go in and tweak it rather than creating a whole new article. Or it might be that you go back and you've been working on a client for a couple of years and you find some content from about five to ten years ago that could be relevant to you now. And instead of creating a whole brand new article in your content calendar, you could consolidate all of that content together and get rid of additional pages and put everything in one new piece of content. And it's making sure that your content strategy isn't just creating more content and targeting the long tail, it's being able to do it in an effective way. And that's not just from an environmental point of view, but also from an SEO point of view. Years ago, people would create pages upon pages to answer every single query. And obviously, because Google's semantic, it groups content together. Well, in theory, it groups content together by theme and by topic anyway, so you might have pieces of content that might not mention a keyword or a theme, but are related to that keyword or a theme, then ranking for those related terms. And it's like, well, they might be ranking low, but Google and Bing can see that you're trying to kind of target that. It's almost giving you hints when you look at it and go, oh, well, actually, I could work that into that article. And it's looking at that content and saying, well, actually, what have we got now? What do we need? And can we fulfill what we need with what we've already got? And then moving on to creating that new content. So you might have articles, you might have landing pages, and see what you can consolidate, what you can improve before then going on and making brand new content. If it's more kind of on an evergreen side, if it's more trend led, then obviously it's creating that content there and then being able to do that. But where you specifically got really kind of evergreen content, it is so, so important to have your regular content audits, content refreshes and it can work. I had a client last year and it's one piece of content. It was getting less than 300 visits a month and we basically went through, gave some recommendations. It was a couple of paragraphs worth of text that needed to be added and a few headings that needed to be moved around. Within six months, that content was getting over 3000 visits a month. Just for that one piece of content. It was the top piece of content on the site. So it's really, really important to refresh that content because you never know what you might be missing out on and obviously who you're missing out on as well, without then having to create lots and lots of new content, which then has the impact on the hosting, this page, speed and everything else.Gael Duez 31:06And if I'm following you there, what I hear is two main messages, which are first of all, chase the right metrics, get rid of vanity metrics. After all, even if you're an e-commerce website, you don't want people to spend 1 hour on your website, you want them to spend 10 seconds and then, you know, live their life after having buy your items, obviously. And the second one is the issue is more about stewardship, about caring about your content, recycling your content than just adding new one.Stuart Davies 31:40There's another issue here as well, Gael, and this might segue us nicely into SEO specific green SEO strategies and tactics. This applies certainly for bigger websites, those with thousands, tens of thousands, some have hundreds of thousands, some have millions of pages and it's managing the bots or managing the crawlers. So out there you've got lots of web crawlers, you've got Google, you've got Bing, you've got so many different kinds of SEO tools. You've got ChatGPT coming into websites now and all of the various permutations of AI tools coming in, there's a lot of malicious stuff coming in the spam. There's a huge amount of now that creates resources as well, that creates resource drain and energy use as well every time a crawler comes into your website. And what SEOs can do specifically is they can use the robots txt file. So it's a file where we can instruct website crawlers what to do and what part of the website to look at. So, you know, if we think at scale, we've got a huge, huge, massive website with lots of archive material. I know Will Barnes from Reed Pop. He works for a gaming company. So they have lots and lots and lots and lots of archive website material which they want to keep but not rank. So they will use their robots txt file to say, this is just our archive. We might pull out some of them. But I don't want you to come in and crawl this anymore because you're, you know, I want you to focus on the bit of the site I want you to do. Or you could have lots of FAQs sections on your site which are just for readers. It's not useful for search because you might just have one FAQ page. You can also block the search engine from using that. So on a one page basis it might not feel like much. But when you start adding this stuff at scale, it does become important and it creates less load on the servers. We can also block AI, ChatGPT. It's yet to be quantified. What the impact of that is on website loads, but I imagine it is quite significant. But what we're doing at GreenSEO is we are going to produce a file SEOs and digital marketers can use to put on their robots txt files. That's the file that controls the search engine which blocks all of the bad bots. So it's saying these are definitely ones which will come into your website that you do not want anywhere near it. And then again, sir, that's going to be open source on the greenseo.org website. And that's really going to help with the server load and the resource use on websites as well.Gael Duez 34:30Yeah, because obviously it drains resources. It creates data which has to be stored and analyzed sometimes, et cetera, et cetera. But it also drains resources from the owner of the website because they need to enter these bots. Okay, got it.Stuart Davies 34:45So it's like we're all littering and someone's coming up to your property and leaving their litter and you didn't ask them to.Gael Duez 34:53I think it's a great example and I love the idea of creating some sort of open source community where everyone will share. Okay, bad bots file, like the Dark Web Foundation repository, like you've got the Green Web Foundation, like not dark web, maybe gray Web, whatever. Yeah, that's definitely a great idea. And something that I didn't consider because I was more considering the robot text.Stuart Davies 35:22The robots that text.Gael Duez 35:23Yeah. As you know, something that you don't want data to be produced when it's not needed. But actually, yes, obviously it can drain a lot of resources from your own hosting solutions.Stuart Davies 35:37It's a good place to start, especially for big websites, websites at scale, e-commerce websites, anyone with a huge footprint, again, that can really help.Gael Duez 35:46And as an SEO expert, or not expert necessarily, but an SEO practitioner, do I have things to change specifically in the way I work or new tools to embrace to help me with having a more sustainable way of working?Stuart Davies 36:02So the GreenSEO website, greenseo.org, is a repository and a toolset and it has the playbooks of here are the things that can help you do your job, here are the tools that you can use to address speed, page weight design, here are the other people who are talking about it, such as sustainable design resources, such as pointing to whole grain, digital, Green Web Foundation and a sustainable web, all of those resources as well. And we've also put on there from our learnings some of the playbooks in terms of how you can go about introducing a sustainable web into a large organization that doesn't necessarily have it at the core of its values. And we expect that to grow. It's going to be open source and it's for anyone who's got a story, anyone who's done something to contribute to this. The whole thing about it is just getting it out and saying, “Here you go, here are tools to do your job and here are some of the learnings and here's what we've done and here's what's worked.” So that's a good place to start.Natalie Arney 37:05So one of the things that most SEOs have got in our toolkits is a crawler. And the two main crawlers that I use are Screaming Frog and Sitebulb. And one of the things that Stu's managed to and the GreenSEO team have managed to arrange with Screaming Frog is that in the Screaming Frog crawlers now you can get the carbon impact of certain pages and elements in the auditing tool, which is fantastic. So when you are auditing a site and if you want to add in as part of your website auditing process or a separate process altogether, it might be, say, feeding into a consultant like one of my clients has got at the moment where they're auditing everything on the site and not everything to do with the business is, yeah, you can use that and that's fantastic. And thank you to Screaming Frog for doing that because it's going to help a lot of us do our job a little bit more effectively. And then obviously when you're using your crawlers, you can switch them into dark mode as well, which is always handy too. So yeah, always switch your crawlers into dark mode.Gael Duez 38:13I reckoned integrated the CO2 GS library to calculate the website carbon. Am I right or is it something to check?Stuart Davies 38:23Yes, I believe that is correct. Yes.Gael Duez 38:27And actually, Natalie, you touched upon something interesting as well, which is the amount of data that is produced by each SEO practitioner. That sounds to be quite significant. When you crawl and crawl and crawl over, is there anything also that you, or Stu, you want to tell us in terms of best practices and how to reduce our own environmental footprint?Natalie Arney 38:54Go on, Stu, I think you're fair.Stuart Davies 38:57Okay. Right. So I'll go first. So yes, SEOs and digital marketers use a lot of analytics tools and we use a lot of software for SEO for conversion rate optimization, for UX, for example. Heat mapping is a very good example. So they'll get used on 1% of the website, on a project that might run over one month and they'll put scripts and recordings onto the website. And then generally tools like that are then left to run. Also all of the various kinds of plugins that are active on browsers. And so things like this, again, it's our own kind of personal imprint as well. So what digital marketers and SEOs can do is make sure that if they're using any analytics tools and crawlers as well, like setting regular crawls and all of those things is take the scripts off of the website once they've been used or make sure that you're not littering. Make sure you're only using things and switching things on when you need to use them. I think there's like so many software tools that go into people's websites and crawling because someone set off a project on a website crawler at some point and it's just sitting there doing it, it's not being used and it's just taking data and things like that. So we personally can do that. So I'd say that someone would want to check what's running on their website and also personally, what have you got running in the background on your own machine that's on all the time or not on all the time, and think very carefully about, you know, what tools you use and also maybe check out the credentials of the tools that you're using. You know, you could run their website through a carbon metric and see how that stacks up. Or you could even better write to them and ask them and introduce the conversation to them. So there's definitely things that we can do individually.Gael Duez 40:51Yeah, I think Holly Cummins that coined the word cloud zombie, you know, in the DevOps words that you kick start an instance or a server, et cetera, and you don't pay attention because it costs not that much money because the load is so low, et cetera. So maybe in the SEO world there is something like crawl zombies or optimizing tool zombies that we should pay attention to. But that's so true. I mean, I've audited websites and some pages where I had countless ads on that were not used anymore. And a bit of JavaScript here and a bit of JavaScript there and oh, it used to be for this media campaign that we ran like one year ago. I was like, what the hell? We don't need that anymore. But we tend to forget. Yeah, that's absolutely true. So we covered a lot of techniques and how to make SEO practices greener. Maybe one of you could share a practical example. I mean, do you have a client, even if you cannot name it, who actively embraced a GreenSEO approach and where you could share what worked well, what didn't work that well, what are the main pain points? Like if someone wants to kickstart a conversation in his or her company or clients, what should be the best first steps based on these use cases that one of you could share?Stuart Davies 42:28I'm happy to share one. I can't name the company. What I can do is say that one of the Co-Founders of GreenSEO is involved with this company and it is an extremely large international global tech firm with an extremely large footprint and extremely complex change management IT barriers, getting things done. So this was very example, so this is an example of a super huge company, super huge corporation, and then somebody trying to introduce some of the principles of GreenSEO digital web and what we call this is planting seeds, I think, and this is the right lot, people can take this away is this is a big subject, but what you can do is plant a seed and watch it grow. And so what the person did is he decided to go after dark mode. Okay, so wanted to do something. Dark mode reduces the energy use of the person, browsing the screen on the load, et cetera, et cetera. And so you wanted to introduce dark mode on the sustainability section of the website. Okay, got there. So what he had to do initially was get buy-in. So he went and tapped on the shoulder of the sustainability person and he also got user polls. He did user polls internal and external to get some stats behind the change as well. So he was starting to push out. But what is really important is you've got to contextualize the argument. So what this person did was measure the carbon weight of the pages and then say, measure it what it would be like in dark mode and say, well, this could be the impact. And wouldn't this be great as part of our CSR reporting that we've actually done something to actually clean our own pages? Okay. So the sustainability team got really interested. Okay. He then actually, then spoke to some of the developers, got buy-in from his management. He had to do a presentation, internal presentation. He had to get find some friends and they all went for it. And so he had the development team in there, he had the change team, the branding team. Everybody loved it. That was kind of the key learning here. Everybody loved it and nobody put in a barrier of obstacles. The only thing they asked for is that the dark mode would be a toggle that users could switch on and off just to satisfy any kind of jittery stuff. And then the DevOps team just put it through. They just went, oh yeah, we've just put it, we've just done it. So they didn't have to go through the big change stack as well. So this was like immediately there was one page and then suddenly a week or so later, the sustainability team from one of the other countries got in touch saying, what have you done there? Can we get that as well? And then suddenly other sections from the website, because it's quite siloed, start getting in touch saying, what have you done there? Can we do this? And then as a result of that, one of the sub-sites of this massive technology firm, which has a footprint of say, 100,000 pages, it's going to do the entire subdomain on dark mode toggle. So that's, that's how and that's extremely impactful. So that's going to save a huge amount of carbon. I haven't quantified it, but that just shows you how you plant one seed and you can start small, can suddenly grow off and take mode and, you know, it's what we call marginal gains. You know, there is a marginal gains strategy to SEO and there is a lot of… can't talk about it, but also marginal gains to sustainability because it is such a big subject and it can be quite scary for large organizations to do something which is going to impact their strategies. But these kinds of small seeds that can be planted seem to sprout. So I think that was a really good, really good case.Gael Duez 46:12At least on my island, you can see quite often that a plant will break a rock after just a few years. So at the pore of seed, definitely. Maybe, Natalie, from your perspective, going the absolute opposite direction with a very small company, if you had to advertise like a small or medium sized company running a basic website, maybe a small e-commerce activity, or, I don't know, a small media activity like greenio.tech, which is not optimized for SEO as well. I know I need to pay attention to it, but I didn't have time. So anyway, what will be the main steps? Knowing that it's less a question of seeds that I guess budget and having the time to start something?Natalie Arney 47:04Yeah, I think as you mentioned earlier, I think it's really important to think about your hosting, first of all, because it has so much of an impact. Obviously, my talk at GreenSEO is about greenwashing and there are hosts that do greenwash. So it's really, really important not just for the environment, but also for your brand reputation, is to work with partners that don't greenwash and that actually, you know, that work really well. And there are some really great companies out there that do some great, great things on top of having a greener hosting and legitimately greener hosting. So I would say start there. Always think about from an SEO point of view, but also from a sustainability point of view, think about the value and the use of the content that you're creating. Really, really important. And do you always need that extra bit of JavaScript or is it just to make the user or the client and not even impress the user? Is it there to impress your boss or the client, or is it there to be actually helpful for the user? Because obviously at the end of the day, everything that we're doing is for the user, whether that's to make their web experience better or to make sure that their children and grandchildren have got a nice place to live in a few years time. So it's kind of encompassing all of that together, I would say, yeah, if you've got a small website, think about the hosting, double check kind of sense check what you're doing to the site. And yeah, see if you can get, if you're say, on WordPress, it's pretty easy to get your core web vitals scores as close to 100% as possible. Obviously using different technologies is a little more difficult, especially out of the box. And obviously a lot of SMEs use things out of the box like Wix and Squarespace and things like that. But yeah, and then I think, yeah, I think about hosting, think about platform, think about content, think about load speed, and they're there. The fundamentals, not just from the environmental point of view, but it's SEO best practices as well.Gael Duez 49:20And maybe before we close the session, is there a situation where what Google expects from us is not aligned with a more sustainable approach?Natalie Arney 49:36I guess it depends on what your position is about SEO tactics, because there's a lot of different types of people in the SEO world. There are people who will flood the Internet with garbage and obviously that floods the environment with garbage and they don't care about that. And then there are people who care about good quality content that actually serves the user's needs. And without going into too much detail and discussion about Google and the changes that have happened in the last few years in particular, at the end of the day, Google wants to be able to serve the best results for the user and to keep people on their platform as much as possible. So it's thinking about what is going to be useful for you and your users, because depending on what happens with all kinds of monopoly, breakups and business related corporation things to do with the search engines and to do with potential competition on the horizon from other companies that may or may not be just doing it to inflate their stock prices and investments, it's really, really important to think that obviously we don't just get traffic from search or we don't just get traffic from Google. People are moving away slightly, maybe using alternatives for lots of different reasons. But yeah, I think it depends on what… I hate being as SEO and saying it depends, but it does depend on what kind of SEO you are, whether you're one that kind of cares and does kind of as best practice as possible, whether that's against Google's conditions or not. It's what impacts you and your site and your users, or whether you just don't care and you're just going to continue to flood the Internet. We've got absolute, and I mean garbage. There are other terms that I did use in my brain, SEO talk about that. And you know, Ed Zitron and Co will talk about that a lot more in their kind of publications and podcasts about the changes that have been made, particularly at Google. But I think, yes, it's important to kind of consider what kind of SEOs people are first and then go from there.Gael Duez 52:07Got it about the garbage. I think we've all experienced this kind of website or content.Stuart Davies 52:13I mean, I thoroughly believe that the principles of GreenSEO are aligned to good SEO. So there's nothing in there at all that I would see that is going to impact your rankings. It might upset some brand designers when it's kind of, you're starting to sort of move into the design things when you talk about fonts and images and videos and sort of things like this. But there's nothing I have seen so far in terms of tactics for GreenSEO or green web that I think would significantly impact rankings. In fact, I think it really complements it in most cases.Gael Duez 52:53Okay, so not such a hard sell to do with clients or executives.Stuart Davies 53:00The hard sell is around behavior. It's ingrained behavior. It's ingrained behavior that this is how our website needs to look. It's ingrained behavior that this is how the marketing team creates content and churns it out. It's those ingrained behaviors like, oh, this is how we know this weird digital environment works. You know, we have our big glossy websites with lots of resources on and we know that works. And we know if we produce lots of content, we know that worked. And what we're saying is we're starting to see case studies where that's not the case, but it's those behaviors and that's the cell and because the data is still coming out, which is why it's very important to contextualize the debate and maybe to start small. So we go actually, well, we're going to tackle one section of the website. Let me try this one section of the website and we'll see what happens with it. So that's how I think people can start to make inroads into that ingrained behavior.Gael Duez 53:58Okay, thanks a lot, both of you. Before we close the podcast, you mentioned it several times, but do you want to pitch one last time the GreenSEO Meetup in Brighton? Why should people attend and what kind of people should attend?Stuart Davies 54:20Well, you should attend because it's hosted by us and we're really lovely people. And it's a community starting to come together of digital marketers and SEOs who care about the environment and have either a story to tell or have done something or have found some way to help clean up the environment or help them do their job. And it's part of BrightonSEO, which is one of the world's biggest search marketing conferences, I think. And they're really, really great and they've given us the platform as part of their conference to be able to have this fringe side event really focused on sustainability. We've got Screaming Frog as our sponsor. They are demonstrable impact in helping SEOs do their job to be able to do carbon audits. And we've got three great speakers lined up as well, which Nat was one of ours in the last time. It's free. There's going to be drinks, soft and other types of drinks as well. Just 2 hours. So if anyone is in Brighton and you're there as part of the BrightonSEO conference, just pop in the GreenSEO BrightonSEO event and you can just sign up for a ticket and come straight along. It's just a couple of hours and we will most probably go to a pub afterwards. There we go. Sold it.Stuart Davies 55:46We like a good pub called Gael.Stuart Davies 55:57Now we're going to the pub.Stuart Davies 56:03I know, I know, I know.Gael Duez 56:14Okay, great. It was really great to have both of you on the podcast. Best wishes for GreenSEO Brighton and hope to see you maybe in Green IO London as well. Thanks again for joining. Have a nice day.Natalie Arney 56:27Thank you.Stuart Davies 56:28Thank you very much.Gael Duez 56:30Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode! If you enjoyed it, share it, and give us 5 stars on Apple or Spotify. It will make a lot of difference to help us find new responsible technologists.In our next episode, we will welcome the Bonnie and Clyde of Azure to talk about Microsoft Cloud Solution, its carbon footprint and the dilemma cloud providers face when it comes to sustainability choices. Holy and William Alpine will tell us more about their past experiences as Azure employees and the quite harsh articles they recently wrote about it. Stay tuned.  Green IO is a podcast and much more, so visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. The next one is in Paris on December 4th and 5th. And you can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP, just make sure to have one before they’re all gone. I’m looking forward to meeting you there, to help you - fellow responsible technologists - build a greener digital world. Roxane One byte at a time ❤️ Never miss an episode! 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In the early 2020s, companies started facing a big question: how could they be more responsible in the digital world? Could something similar to CSR exist for this virtual and yet highly materialized world? Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) was coined to offer some much-needed guidance.🎙️ To explore its ramification, Gaël DUEZ chats with two renowned experts in CDR: Aiste Rugeviciute, co-author of “B.A.-BA du Numérique Responsable” and now pursuing a PhD in the socio-ecological impacts of CDR strategies, and Rob Price, a key player in developing an international CDR framework. Rob also hosts the “A New Responsibility” podcast, diving deep into CDR's role in business.Some Takeaways:    🔑 the CDR framework in a nutshell,   🌿 the importance of embracing a balanced approach to CDR in most companies, and   🛠️ a sneak peek to the newly-released CDR maturity model.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss our episode, every two Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here.  📣 Green IO Paris is on December 4th and 5th 2024 --> use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket! Learn more about our guest and connect: Aiste's LinkedInRob’s LinkedInGreen IO website Gaël's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Aiste and Rob's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:CDR ManifestoB.A.-BA du Numérique ResponsableA New ResponsibilityMaturity ModelEthos FoundationGlobal action plan for a sustainable planet in the digital ageTranscriptIntro 00:00To change, we have to think about how organizations or governments incentivize change in an economy and how that helps businesses to do the things that need to be done better.Gael Duez 00:25Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO with Gael Duez - that’s me! In this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the Tech sector and beyond, to boost Digital Sustainability.One of my more esteemed peers in Digital Sustainability, and a good friend, who’s now CSO of a large digital tech company used to work before in the garment industry. Sometimes, well quite often, she goes ballistic about the infant level of the digital industry in sustainability compared to other industries. The very idea that digital technology produces products as does the garment industry with clothes and that these products have a footprint both environmental and societal is not that widespread. And when Tech executives become aware of it they often lack the frameworks, the best practices and the metrics to steer the sustainability angle of their company. And answer this pivotal question in an industry, which has just a touch of ego and hubris: how good am I compared with others? And eventually, how good am I with keeping our planet habitable for the human race. Am I being too sarcastic here? Well let’s go back to a more action-drive mindset then. Since the beginning of the 20’s, a concept has started to emerge embracing these questions and providing some framework for companies with a significant use of digital technology: the idea of their CDR. Full disclosure, I am using this approach with clients when I do consulting gigs so I might be a bit biased. As usual, question and double check everything that is said in this episode. All the references will be put in the show notes on greenio.tech and on your favorite podcast platform. Transparency and Accessibility remain in the DNA of the Green IO podcast. To deep dive in CDR, I have the pleasure to welcome 2 of the best experts we can find on the topic. Aiste Rugeviciute who graduated in both computer sciences and Sustainable Development and Social Business and has worked for several years on the intersection of Tech and sustainability, she co-wrote the hands-on book "B.A.-BA du Numérique Responsable" in French and she is now doing a PhD on Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) strategies and their socio-ecological impacts. Rob Price is one of the core members of the international group of academics, corporate practitioners and published authors who collaborated in 2021 to aggregate their existing body of work into a single, international definition of the set of principles supporting Corporate Digital Responsibility. He’s also a fellow podcaster with the “A new responsibility” podcast which covered during 5 seasons the use of CDR in companies. He gave a much listened talk to Green IO London last year. And btw this year Aiste will be the one giving a talk on her CDR Maturity Matrix. So make sure to get your tickets for this great gathering of responsible technologists on September 19th. And without further notice, Welcome Aiste and Rob. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.Rob Price 03:55Thank you.Aiste Rugeviciute 03:56Hi, thanks for having us.Gael Duez 03:59You're more than welcome, both of you. I have a terribly complicated question to start. Could you define CDR in two sentences maximum?Aiste Rugeviciute 04:12Well, it is a complicated question because there is actually no one definition, at least between the academics. Everybody comes up with their own definitions. But in a nutshell, I would say there are two main ideas. So the first idea is, of course, about responsibility. So what are companies' responsibilities with respect to digitalization, or the way they use digitalization? And the second one is trying to maximize the positive effects of digitalization while reducing the negative ones. So that's kind of the two main ideas combined. Rob, what do you think?Rob Price 04:57Well, I mean, it goes back to the introduction, really, doesn't it? So in 2021, that was the question we asked ourselves, and we wanted one sentence that described CDR in the context of all the definitions that the variety of us had created at the time. So, I mean, reading that corporate digital responsibility is a set of practices and behaviors that help an organization use data and digital technologies in ways that are perceived as socially, economically, and environmentally responsible. I think the key thing for us was, at the time, trying to think of something that provided a framework and guidance to help organizations be aware of the consequential impact of the things that they were doing. And no doubt, through the conversation, we'll talk more about finding the right balance in terms of framework versus measurement criteria versus a method, if you like, in terms of organizations doing those things.Aiste Rugeviciute 05:57I think also one of the key things, what Rob just said, it's about the perceived value. What's in line with the so-called reference points in the society. That's kind of a key thing when corporations, organizations think in general about their responsibilities, and when it comes to digitalization, aligning with societal social expectations and all the idea, you know, if it's contributing to reducing climate change or any other negative impact, it's all about in line with what right? In line with what expectations and whose expectations. That's where the question of responsibility comes in place.Rob Price 06:48And can I build on that very briefly, which is, I'm very conscious of talking about CDR in multiple countries around the world. I think it's very difficult to be really tightly defined, because you have to be conscious that different countries, different political systems, different cultures, there would be pushback if you kind of introduced CDR as a mechanism that you had to follow. Literally. It's important to be conscious of the environment in which you're asking organizations and governments to think about the way in which they operate. Even if they take some of those aspects, that's better than all of those or none of those.Gael Duez 07:31So it's really a question of contextualizing the approach, and still we reach some kind of agreement around the world and I guess some principles, some guidelines, as both of you mentioned. Could you maybe elaborate what are the main guidelines, the main items that have reached some sort of consensus that, yes, we should pay attention to this aspect and this aspect and this aspect.Rob Price 08:02So, in a sense, the blank sheet of paper that we did start with in the past was probably between about 2016 and 2020. A number of definitions of CDR did appear. Some of those were written from business points of view, or government points of view, or academic points of view. But when we did an analysis of them, I would say that 80% of them were pretty similar. Maybe some were focused more around sustainability, some were more focused around trust and inclusion, but 80% was common. And the purpose of the work that we did at that time, with all of those parties bringing together those definitions, was to try and find a common framework that actually was inclusive of everything. So we defined a framework of three intersecting circles, which gave us seven principles. If you think of each of those sections, at the heart of everything was trust and purpose was beginning to be talked about more commonly. So, purpose and trust, fair and equitable access for all. So that's around equity, diversity, inclusion, and more societal well being. Thinking about the impact on people, one of the things that I almost enjoy is when I'm talking to organizations asking if their products and services are predicated on addiction to drive advertising rates, it's always an uncomfortable question. But nonetheless, thinking about the impact on people, considering some of the economic impact, I think is interesting. The fourth principle, economic and societal impact, and probably one of the hard ones. But it's beginning to think about some of the things around algorithms, fair share of outcomes, of benefits, the way in which you value things that you're delivering through digital technologies. Talk about the impact economy in principle five. So, thinking around, or beginning to think about that intersection with the economic and the sustainable side of things, and goes into more detail about supply chain and green tech, and some of the ways in which you can use digital services to directly impact, innovate around sustainability. And the final two, very much focused around sustainability. I'll start with seven. Seven, reducing the tech impact on the climate. You're thinking about what is happening with my data centers. Am I using renewable energy? Is it really renewable energy? Etcetera? And then six, we talked very briefly at the start around innovation, thinking about how I can use these technologies to innovate and solve the world's biggest problems, especially around sustainability. So I think this is a really important one. I want to explore it later. We talk a lot around impact of AI, for example, which clearly has massive energy use, massive water use, in terms of data centers. That's something to measure principle seven. But it's really important to think about principle six in terms of how I can use that technology to create positive impact and benefit on those very things that I'm worried about negatively impacting. And it's a balanced scale. So those are the seven principles. They go into far more detail through the manifesto. There have been other definitions that have emerged since, but I can track them all back to those seven principles. I haven't yet seen something appear that's new, a new concept that doesn't fit into that framework. And of course, we do continue to look at those definitions to determine how we continue to evolve, because I don't think any of us said when we created this back in 21, right. That's it. We've cracked it. Nobody could ever improve on that. It's always evolving, always a living thing, and then it's how people bring that to life, which is probably a perfect position to hand over to Aiste, in terms of the work that you've been doing.Aiste Rugeviciute 12:05Yeah. If I might just add or more generalize. So those seven principles, they are a little bit in more detail, but if we take a step back, basically, we can summarize that it's about the environmental and social side. So we have both sides, and that's what Rob was talking about. Right. So there are social, societal questions and there are environmental questions at the same place. Why I'm underlying it, because sometimes especially, I don't know why, especially in Germany, when they used to speak about corporate digital responsibilities, they completely ignored, or they tend to ignore the environmental side. So they tend to look only on the social, societal side and especially concentrate on the data questions. Now, it's shifting a little bit, but at the beginning, I remember when I was reading it, I was surprised to find it because it was completely the other way around. In France, everybody, whenever they were talking, they were talking only about environmental questions. And the social societal questions were put aside and that was being dealt with by more, way more engaged people or very niche, niche people in certain NGOs. Currently, I can see that the discourse is becoming more balanced, which is nice. So it takes into account two sides. So as I said, the environmental and social, societal side. But it's also the question of technologies perceived as a solution or as a problem. So that's we have both technology or digitalization. So we have to generalize two dimensions. So there is one environmental, social, societal side, and then is it good or bad, or again, it should be balanced discourse, but that's the attitude as well.Gael Duez 14:09And I have one small question just to clarify. The principle number seven, which is the impact on. Rob, you mentioned impact on climate. Is it only climate or is it all kind of environmental footprint?Rob Price 14:25Yeah, no, it's reduced tech. Impact on climate and the environment is the actual words that it says. So it is that consequential impact on everything that you have directly or in the supply chain, on the climate and the environment, planet, etcetera. And I think I wanted to just add something to the thing, the description ack, because it is absolutely about people, communities, society, planet in its entirety. I don't want to forget what I think is probably the hardest part of it to think about sometimes, which is the economic kind of angle, if it changes. We have to think about how organizations or governments incentivize change in an economy, in their geography, in their region of responsibility, if you like, and how that helps businesses to do the things that need to be done better, whether through incentive or whether through regulation. So it's that intersection of all aspects of that. I think it's complex. It's not easy. I mean, we've seen that over the past few years. Many organizations that I speak to, they're not trying to solve everything. At the same time, that's not realistic. It's about understanding the consequence of the things they're doing and honing in on some things that would make a difference, that are important because it positively impacts what they're doing or the way in which they're seen in the market, the respect they're given, if you like, the ability to better place product or service because of those things that they're doing. So it is a finely tuned thing engine that you need to kind of understand how we can nudge it in the right direction to be better in terms of the impact it has on the environment and everything around that. If we were talking seven for example.Gael Duez 16:26And now that we kind of lay the ground with the main concepts and the subtle equilibrium between them in the intersection and the kind of systemic interaction that we can see between the seven of them. If I'm listening to this episode, and I'm convinced that, ooh, this framework sounds very interesting, how do I go from the academic and conceptual approach that helps me to better understand what I should pay attention to, to something a bit more concrete for me or actionable for me? And my main question actually will be, Aiste, do you believe that the CDF principles can become actionable?Aiste Rugeviciute 17:12I would very much hope so.Aiste Rugeviciute 17:17There are different steps before they become concretely actionable. Right. So the first question is, I think to ask, why do you want to do that? And then to ask, what do you want to do? So why? I think it's an important question, which, especially in the organization corporation environment, sometimes it's forgotten by the practitioners and then they are being asked by their managers, you know, and they're like, yeah, but why? What's the purpose? Right. So the question why is very important because most of the time the response is money, is to make profit, to respond to the stakeholders. Right, sorry, shareholders actually. But beyond that, we have other requirements. And that's where I come back to the same notion of responsibility. So the why could be because there are legal requirements, there are risks associated, there are opportunities, there are myriad of stakeholders who suddenly have shifted expectations. So your direct clients, it might be your B2B clients, right? It might be the societal legitimacy for you to stay active in a region, in a state, in a country. It might be simple because you want to benchmark yourself with others, so there are reputational damages, et cetera, et cetera. So the first question is, actually why do you want to do that? Is it because you want to go back to reduce risks, take some opportunity, go beyond your legal requirements and so on. Once you kind of clarify the idea why you want to engage in the CDR, it's going to be way easier going forward to structure your actions and approach towards these guidelines. So let's imagine that you are B Corp, for example, and your idea that you want to do CDR because you want actually to contribute to creating a better society. And you consider that yourself as an organization corporation. That's one of your responsibilities.Gael Duez 19:55By B Corp, you mean the label that some companies get.Aiste Rugeviciute 20:00Yeah, sorry, I put the label because I know that in the US, when you get a B Corp label, it's much easier to act in line with societal expectations, and not only with your shareholders, because in the US there's a lot of shareholder pressure to get profits, monetary profits. But once you have a B Corp label, they change status in their corporation, legal, something with legal things that in that case, corporations are expected or are allowed way more freedom in order to act in accordance with societal expectations.Gael Duez 20:48Thanks for the clarification. And let's go back to what you were saying previously.Aiste Rugeviciute 20:55Yes. So once the company decides why they want to do that, the next stage is to understand where they are now, right? So maybe you are already doing very well and your corporate digital responsibilities. So once you clarify your responsibilities, the question is, okay, what is our current state? And once we evaluate the current state, once we reflect on what we are doing now, then we can look at how we can improve ourselves, where we can go in order to go to our objectives as well. A question is, objectives, is it a continuous objective? Is it very concrete that you want to, I don't know, reduce your CO2 consumption by your information systems, or you want to reduce the digital divide in the society? So digital divide in the society, you know, you can have very concrete milestones, but it's a continuous action, right? It's not going to be at some point completely achieved over. So that's basically the three steps. So the first question is why you want to do it. Second one is analysis, understanding where you are now. And the third one is putting the milestones, objectives, priorities. Because as Rob mentioned, you can't do everything at the same time, especially as an organization, you have so many things on your plate. So, you know, you have those seven principles which Rob mentioned, but between the seven principles, maybe some of them have higher priority because of where you work, because of your industry, because of your stakeholders, because of the whole context.Rob Price 22:42Completely agree with that. And just, it's a really important point, I don't think, when everyone who fed into that work was never saying there was an equal balance, or needed to be equal investment to address and mitigate each of those separate principles. It's a framework, and the framework is then applied to the organization. I think very few times has an organization ever come to me and said, we've decided we want to implement CDR, how do we do that? Most times it will be they're worried about reputational damage, or they know that they need to improve something around their impact on the environment, or how do they get trust, because they're worried about reputational damage. So it's more around applying it as a framework to help that organization resolve the concern. Or maybe there's been an incident that's highlighted a problem that is perceived across that organization, and it's how they begin to find a pathway to make an improvement that improves the thing that they're concerned about.Aiste Rugeviciute 23:52Always some kind of entry point towards that CDR, as Rob said. So it might be reputational, it might be very often a regulation, currently at least what we observe in France. So you have regulations which ask you to reduce your electricity consumption, energy consumption, and reduce your CO2. So that's an entry point. So companies say, oh, I need to reduce my CO2 somehow. So let's try to find all possible leverages. And then when they start looking and they say, okay, well, I might reduce my CO2, for example, or environmental footprint by reducing the number of screens we have per collaborator. So my overall footprint, environmental footprint is going to go reduced, but then that's going to affect productivity levels of my collaborators. So wait a second, that's kind of related to something else, right? And then it might still mean, oh, it's very complicated, the digitalization as a problem itself, it's a systematic problem, and there are different impacts which are very much linked with each other and they're not necessarily going in the same direction. If you reduce one, it can be at the cost of the other. And I think that's where the structured approach of CDR, reflecting on it, allows organizations to take into consideration more things which are more important to them and their stakeholders and the challenges they are trying to respond to.Gael Duez 25:29Rob Aiste just shared a very concrete example on this kind of trade off and multidimensional approach. Could you share an example of a client? You can name it or not. You might be under an NDA that started with you. A journey, I would say, toward CDR, and to see the few steps that were taken and how a bit more concretely than some actions were taken.Rob Price 25:58I'll use a couple of examples that are not my clients, but they're well discussed, well documented, and in the public domain, if that works, which is probably, and they're both, well, both international organizations. So the first one is Merck and the work of Dr. Jean Enno Charton, who's head of bioethics and digital ethics at Merck. And I think, why do I start with that? A large organization, I think 60,000 people, something of that order around the world, but working in a space that's clearly got strong insight around regulation and controls because of the nature of what they do already. So there's almost a lot they would be, I think, one of the first types of organizations to start thinking about broader CDR and digital ethics in the wider round. And therefore they've focused in and put people and built a small team to build out a framework that takes the best in terms of some of the guidance that's around and early thinking around digital ethics boards and mechanisms and frameworks, and created something that they believe is right in their organization. And I've seen that build and progress. I've presented with Jean Enno in the past, and it is a very thorough process that they've gone through. The last conversation I had with him was interesting because having got that framework in place, that's right for them, it's then how do you communicate it across multiple countries, thousands of people, and effectively get that complete change on boarded and maybe enabling people to say, hey, this, this thing that I've spotted over here, the other side of the world, is something that's different. And maybe that's my introduction to the leader and the work that they did, which again, is one of the early pieces of work, as far as I was concerned, around CDR and led by Jakob Versner. And again, he put in place an explicit CDR. They had CDR principles that they defined for them. I think there were 14 separate areas that they identified. It was driven around digital transformation. So their starting point was every project that has a business case to progress anywhere across the business, we're going to interject, and this is the framework by which we'll analyze the consequential impact and look across the supply chain, very focused around sustainability and local community impact in terms of the societies, the farms, kind of in whichever countries, in whichever parts of the supply chain. And one of the things that I loved about that was that whistleblowing aspect. It was saying, look, there is no problem with being able to say, hey, I've spotted something we need to look at this. And I think that's such an important part of culture and maybe going back to the early conversation of transparency, giving people the confidence in an organization to feel that they have a voice. And I know we've put in this kind of marketing kind of brochure that we're net zero and compliant, but actually kind of, actually the proof points that we think we're quoting aren't quite right. I think it's important for people to be able to say that. So, I mean, there are many other organizations and much work that's been done, but I think both of those two examples are the ones that I'd give as well established on their journey using CDR and digital principles and continuing to evolve and build out over the last several years, rather than somebody just starting today.Aiste Rugeviciute 30:05If you are a smaller company, if you do not have 40,000 people and a lot of experts who can contribute with their knowledge and plan how CDR is relevant for you, that's a different challenge, right? For the smaller companies when they want to do something, but they don't know how to get going there. And currently, unfortunately, we are lacking tools or there's not that many frameworks which can provide. I emphasize a structured approach because let's be honest, people like to be structured. You know, they like to think in terms of some kind of systems and being clear about the steps which they need to do in order to get to the next stage.Gael Duez 30:54As you said, in a big company, you can indulge yourself to have a dedicated team working on this topic and elaborating fine tuned principles, thinking about how to deploy it, and bringing the leaders. But if you're a medium sized company, mostly it's a one person show most of the time and it's not even a full time job. So having a structured approach will definitely help. And this is exactly why I was very much interested in your maturity model. So the floor is entirely yours now to talk about it.Aiste Rugeviciute 31:32Yes. So CDR maturity models. So it's a proposition. It's not a normative thing, but it's a proposition which is a result of academic collaboration and work with different people, different organizations. And thank you, Gael and Rob, you were part of that for all the disclosure, as much as there were others around. In total, I would say 30 people who were involved in contributing with their knowledge, ideas, giving feedback at the different stages. So the maturity model, what I'm talking about, it's fully available online. There's an academic paper I still need to write, actually a more down to earth paper, practical explaining, because I understand that academic papers are not very easily readable by most people, especially those who want to go just quickly and apply it. But the idea of this CDR maturity model is actually very simple. It's a model which allows at the current stage, to look into the scope or help to define the scope at which an organization should look in order to analyze their CDR strategy or analyze their actions, currently, actions being taken inside of the organization. The model, as I said, currently is descriptive, so it's not very normative. It does have six maturity levels. So the idea is that you go from nothing at all. There are no actions being taken up to the six, which if you're exceeding, you are the innovator. You are at the front of this whole CDR movement. There are five dimensions, and within five dimensions we have 18 sub dimensions or 18 focus areas. So we have CDR governance that kind of stands itself clear and underlying there are three sub dimensions. And to be honest, CDR governance, it was one of the most easier dimensions to get consensus on. Almost everybody, all the participants, you know, they were, we do need that. We need actions, rules against the CDR, governments and strategy and all the planning. So that's the first dimension. The second dimension is the ecosystems, which means that as an organization, you should be doing something to contribute to the wider discussions of CDR or in general, digital sustainability. It could be through your relationships with your suppliers, it could be through participation in different external think tanks, groups, open source projects, etcetera. Then we have a workplace and culture. So that digitalization is implying, well, very rarely we will have an organization currently without technology in place, without having their collaborators being exposed to technology, and collaborators can be empowered with the technology. So one of the examples, you know, generative AI, it has a lot of potential to empower people, but it also comes with risks. So that's the whole coming back to the principles that technology can bring positive and negative impact. So I have a workplace and culture, you know, at what point people recognize the risks and opportunities and do they know how to act upon them? Then the fourth one is digital services or solutions. So it's all about dev teams. So internally, what kind of applications we're using, how we're developing, what are the processes in place, if it's relevant for a given organization. And then the fifth one, which is the most difficult, I would say, and this one still needs to be, I think, further developed, is infrastructure or IT assets. So everybody agrees that we do need to think about how we are dealing with data centers. What about our equipment? So IT assets are very much thinking about concrete hardware. But, and that's where the more complicated discussions. Cloud, for example, where does that fit in? Is it fitting in your infrastructure? Is it a more digital solution? Or is it an ecosystem? Because it's actually your provider? Right? So currently it's put in the model. It's under infrastructure, but the model is supposed to be a living model. So the model is there helping, hopefully helping practitioners, helping academics to structure the conversations about CDR. What's the scope? How do we evaluate the current state of our actions, in what areas? So they can be called capability areas. But we don't really give in to that model. We don't really give advice on how to reach the next level. So that would be a more normative model. So I hope that somebody will take it, you know, and as I said, it's a living model. It's supposed to be criticized, it's supposed to be, you know, people should hopefully engage with that model, propose next steps, evolutions, how we can apply it in order to plan the strategies more effectively.Gael Duez 37:45Okay, thanks a lot. And I must admit that I'm happy that the cloud was kept in infrastructure because I was a strong advocate of it and I had the opportunity to use it with a client. And actually I was kind of exactly what you've described. It's not necessarily super normative, but it was at the very early stage of consulting on green IT strategy. That was how it was labeled. And I remember I needed something to provide them structured feedback on the, I think it was 20 or 30 interviews I ran with their key actors. And it was pretty useful just to drop the visual representation and say, you know, as far as I understood with those discussions, here is where the main impacts are today. So it makes total sense because you're building digital services to pay attention here and here and that, etcetera. And it was a very loose assessment. It was not super structured with the metrics, etcetera. But still, it went straight to the point with my clients and the executives, like, okay, we got the big picture and then let's investigate a bit more on it. Which actually leads me to another aspect that both of you, you've been advocating quite a lot, is talking versus acting. I think it's very easy to get lost with a high level of conceptualization. And the CDR approach can help actually to get lost somehow if you deep dive into the details and you say, okay, and we should structure like this, and then create a substructure and then another substructure, and for each substructure we should get metrics and goals, etc, etcetera. And like ten years later, you've got a beautiful paper, maybe a white paper or an academic paper, but not that much action being done. And I know that both of you have got strong opinions about it. Maybe, Rob, you wanted to start, like, how do you use the CDR principles and the CDR approach to literally drive actions rather than discussion?Rob Price 39:48I think it's fascinating to actually kind of look at what is different, what is happening around the world and to understand relatively kind of the way in which change happens. I mean, the thing that I would say is organizations love to measure things. I mean, can they love to measure things from a financial point of view. But actually just over the last 20 years, I think many organizations, unless you can measure it, you can't possibly then do anything to change it. So I think it's really important to have some sort of model that enables organizations to assess where they might be. I just don't think that the answer is that everything needs to be 100. It comes back to choosing where to make the impact, because you've seen an assessment and a chart that suggests that there's weaknesses in certain areas and then for what you do about them, if I can talk briefly about the approach that I see in Switzerland. So Ethos, who were kind of involved in one of the early definitions back in 2020, I mean, they started measuring the top hundred or whatever number it is of Swiss businesses on a CDR index that they've defined. And of course, the first time they did it, everyone scored appallingly because it was a new concept. It wasn't the way that they'd been managing their business, if you like, but when somebody with a voice, and in the Ethos case, because of their involvement in pension funds and they've got a financial voice, if you like, in Switzerland, then organizations then think, well, we don't want to be scoring so badly next time, so how can we do some things to ensure that the score is better? So the first point is, measurement's key because that's what organizations get. Understanding the influence for change, whether it's government regulation, whether it's consumer behavior, whether it's somebody who's got an involvement in the investment decisions, in your long term sustainability as an organization, Ethos, as an example, there are different patterns as to why people choose to change, but then the question is, what do you do? And the answer in terms of what you do is in many cases do the things that are in the discrete area. I mean, if we're talking about the technology in a data center or in cloud CDR isn't inventing some different path that changes what you do? I mean, that's straightforward digital transformation. It's just trying to shine a light on is it being done in the right way? And I'm sure if, I mean, Gael, I remember Mark's session at the conference last year where he was talking about what is your true energy source? So it's about shining a light on you might have thought you were doing things in a way, but had you considered X, Y and Z? Because they're negative, consequential impacts that you just weren't thinking about, because you were just looking at it through the lens of head of IT, or head of compliance or GDPR, legal perspective, whichever one it is. But in each of those areas, there are things that can be done. So I almost see CDR as a pane of glass that you put across your organization that enables you to think about all that in connectivity between the things that are being done. Because what I see in organizations is people don't do that. People focus on the thing that they are responsible for, they know about, their passion is about, rather than that holistic view.Aiste Rugeviciute 43:35And I think that holistic view is also coming to the obsession with the measurement or the lack of holistic view is obsession with a measurement. Well, you gave a lot of different cultural examples, Rob. I come from France, or my current experience is very much in France, and here the measurement is very much obsessed, being a thing of people involved in IT. And I think it's almost a characteristic trait, you know, oh, we can measure how much cpu usage is this, we can measure how much this code is more effective than the other code. And all that measurement ends up being some kind of performance indicator, right? We can express the measurement in terms of money, we can express measurement in terms of energy consumption, in terms of maybe how many people we trained on CDR issues. But what actual value do those performances generate? That's the question which is often missing from the discussion. And I think that's exactly when you talk about the holistic view, we often forget that measurement or performance is not equal to the value. And what exactly we're talking to whom, you know, the value. So the value to the collaborators, the value to the future generations, value to your clients or your shareholders is not necessarily the same either.Rob Price 45:11I had a conversation a couple of years ago with an initiative that had put a framework and measurement in place. It wasn't a CDR, but it was very close to it. And I asked the question of how it is actually measured then? And the answer was a four month audit. And an organization is not going to do that as in what we're trying to do here. We're trying to impact the planet. We want every business, every organization, every government to be conscious about the way in which they use digital technologies. It can't be complex for every organization if we want everybody to do it, to do it. So how can we use it? I mean, I'm going to go back, maybe I am wearing my technologist hat here at this point, but finding ways to automate the measurement of those things that we're looking to assess. So that something can be done almost immediately with confidence as opposed to kind of misreporting, I think is critical to any of these succeeding.Gael Duez 46:20And is it also a question of accepting proxy metrics instead of final metrics?Aiste Rugeviciute 46:27This is the key, you know, to what granularity you need to measure things, right? Because you can get so obsessed and so you know what you're going to do with 400 KPI's. At the end of the day, you can measure very precisely how, how much of the resources your code uses. But if you do know that your code is creating, I don't know, negative impacts or creating addiction on a larger scale, well, all those metrics, they're not going to help you to actually make an impact or achieve something different, right? So I think sometimes we forget that experts or people working in the company can very quickly and for a pretty low price, I would say evaluate or estimate the impacts themselves. You know, they can. You just, you do need to provide some certain framework, you do need some certain performance indicators because otherwise people love it, you know, and that's how they measure the success of their company. So it could be a proxy used as money is often used as a proxy for any kind of indicators. But in order to act, well, you need to know priorities, you need to know the magnitude of the problem, but you don't need to know the exact numbers. If you know that you're using thousands of computers, but you don't develop or, you know, your website is just very rarely used, but clearly that the impact is more of your hardware, of the usage of the computers, instead of concentrating on eco design of your website. If it's not used by anybody or if it doesn't bring a lot of value, neither to your collaborators nor to your clients. And you don't need a very precise indicator for these to take action in this respect.Gael Duez 48:30That's why I love using the OKR framework because I think it sets two different levels and I use it almost all the time in sustainability consulting. Remember, what are the goals? Like the kind of medium term aspirational goals and this is really what you want to do. And then, yeah, well, you've got key results, but you can try to track them over a longer period to see if you're aiming in the right direction. But first have several of them, because unambitious goals usually should be measured in several different ways. And not, please do not use a north star, that is the worst possible thing to do, like having just one metric to understand the world, how stupid this is. And then and then also acknowledge, exactly as you did Aiste that, yeah, at some point we might drop a metric to keep another one and not end up with 20 or 30 different key results or KPI, to try to understand actually the real true goal that we have. We could be reducing carbons, we could be reducing water consumption, we could be having a positive impact on some kind of very significant social issues, etcetera, etcetera. But yeah, the question of measuring, and I know that it's especially true in France, but to be honest, it's quite also a very strong cultural trait in the US as well. And they love measurement. Just watch a basketball game and you will have statistics on everything. I'd like to drift a bit away from the implementation itself of CDR and to put on the table the topic of innovation. Because if we go back to the definitions that both of you gave at the very beginning, it was really the definition of CDR, I mean, it was really this idea of trade off that we need to know how much we impact the world, to know how much good net we bring to the world, and not just saying we're saving the world. So let us build ten data centers per week. But that's connected also with the fact that most of the time, with digitalization comes some sort of innovation. So what would be your stance on innovation and sustainability? Are they opposite most of the time opposite or are they complementary or is it a bit more complex?Rob Price 51:03I think something that a number of us were involved in, which was the Codes Initiative and the 22 report global action plan for a sustainable planet in the digital age. And the very simple part of that was it talked about three shifts that were important. I think the thing that was so important to me in the code conversations was that there was such synergy between everything that people were talking about there and CDR. It wasn't called CDR. I mean, CDR is in the report, but actually the conversations were the same and the three shifts put the enablers in place. So collect the data, collect the information, understand the impacts that we're going to be having. Protecting. Second, protect from harms, mitigate negative effects. Third one was to innovate to solve the world's biggest problems. In essence, those were the three things. Now, why have I said that, organizations, in my experience, don't like being told not to do something, and when they are told not to do something, then they don't want to spend any money on not doing that thing or to do something in a way that they're supposed to, as opposed to the way that they do do. And it comes back to if your model is based on addiction to maximize advertising revenue, because that's your entire kind of way in which you operate and live, then you're not going to suddenly stop that, are you? I mean, it's just not going to be there. So I think one of the things I hear a lot at the moment, and I'm firmly at the heart of the generative AI world and using those technologies is people focused around obsessing about quite recently harms, native facts. It is just doing things not very helpful or impacting people's jobs, etcetera, but forgetting about, because they obsess about that, forgetting about the potential power of those technologies, generative AI, AI machine learning, data science, etc, to solve the world's biggest problem. And we need that. The world has lots of problems at the moment. I mean, it's not just climate change, but finding a way to, I mean, just aging demographics is going to be a problem in terms of long term sustainability of organizations. I mean, sustainability in the largest sense. People can't get access to the people they need, etcetera. So we have to innovate. We need to innovate with a very conscious focus around minimizing negative effects and being aware of harms and all those things. But let's try and focus on positive impact. And I know from experience, impact measuring impact on people and communities is notoriously difficult to do. But let's be conscious of those things and absolutely focus on innovating because we have to. But with that consciousness about doing it in the right way, consistent with regulations, consistent in terms of, or thinking about the impact on people. But I am very firmly, I mean, you mentioned, I think at one point, Gael, that you've seen maybe an evolution in my thinking over the last two years, and I have, I am firmly in the, we have to use these technologies to innovate to solve some of the biggest problems that we've got, but with a very conscious awareness of some of the harms that could be caused. And yes, to think about how we kind of mitigate those.Aiste Rugeviciute 54:40I think this is the biggest challenge, how to innovate thinking about the system, about the global system, about the whole other potential impacts. Because if you look at the current strategist policy strategies or even within companies, right. All the strategies about sustainability, sustainable development, right. They are made in one line and then digitalization strategies are made in the other line and they're not really talking with each other. If you look, honestly, if even, I think the newest UNEP report on digitalization, they all talk how digital technology is going to empower and allow to achieve the digital development, sustainable development goals for sustainable development, you know, reduce some problems and so on, but they do not really talk about the potential negative effects that come with a digitalization. So currently in a lot of discourse, and that's what was really underlined in a digital reset paper report, which was published, I think, at last, in 2022. The policies do not talk with each other, and we need them to talk with each other. We need to ensure that digital transformations are aligned with sustainable development goals of sustainable development trajectories. And one of the things they are talking about in their report is exactly that. System innovations. That's what Rob was mentioning. So, innovations, first of all, I don't think that innovation should replace the word progress, which currently often is used instead of the progress we are using innovation. We used to talk a lot about advancing some progress and so on within the companies, and now it somehow got replaced by innovation, which is not exactly the same thing. Right? Whereas innovation, if we're using it as a definition, in order to come up with something new, in order to respond to the global challenges and global crisis, and we have a lot of those crisis currently. And I do believe as well, that technology has a lot of power, but it does have a lot of risks, associated risks. And we need to develop that capacity on different levels, on politics, on corporations, on individual levels, recognizing that technology is not neutral. We've been told, you know, oh, the technology is not neutral. No, it's not. Technology comes by itself with a negative environmental impact. I think one of the good examples is that because of the big data, because of the development in the algorithms, we have way more accelerated our knowledge of climate change. We actually can model things. We can understand it better because of the advances in it. So that's a positive thing. But now we know the problem is there. Now we understand very clearly where we are going. So it's time to shift and to use it differently and not to continue running huge calculations on something which we're not able or we don't have capacities to act upon. So I think that it's a very difficult change in mindset, because we don't like to think on a global scale. Right. It's difficult, I think, for us to think about positive and negative impacts at the same time.Rob Price 58:3920 25 years, nearly ago, I did some research around disruptive innovation, and I seem to remember a definition from that time that innovation was invention through commercialization. So innovation was nothing unless you found a way to make money from the thing that was being invented. And maybe we need to add with purpose or with an eye on doing it the right way to that definition. So it's not just invention through commercialization, but it's invention through commercialization with purpose.Gael Duez 59:13That's a beautiful definition. Well, thanks a lot, both of you. That was a very, very interesting discussion, especially at the end around innovation. I think we could have done another episode entirely on this topic, but I need to let you go to your regular life. So thanks a lot for joining. Thanks a lot for highlighting this very multiple aspect of a CDR. So thanks a lot and hope to see you in London in a few weeks.Aiste Rugeviciute 59:45Thank you.Rob Price 59:46Great. Thanks.Gael Duez 59:49Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it and give us five stars on Apple or Spotify. We are an independent media relying solely on you to get more listeners. In our next episode we will talk about SEO, Search Engine Optimization and Sustainability. Does it sound like a long stretch? But I discovered Jean-Christophe Chouinard’s work 2 years ago and more recently the Green SEO meetup - a fringe event of the huge global convention BrightonSEO which seems to be to the SEO industry what Cannes festival is to the movie industry. It must be something related to the seashore… Anyway, I jumped on the occasion and invited 2 pillars of this Green SEO community Stuart Davies and Nathalie Arney. And I got great insights on how SEO practitioners should incorporate sustainability in their day to day job. Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter and share the conferences we organize across the globe. The next one is this Thursday, September 19th in London. The 250 available tickets are sold out. 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💭Fueled by the ongoing artificial intelligence boom, data centers are popping up around the world like mushrooms after a good rain raising serious sustainability concerns. Hence a pressing question: can the data center industry become circular? 🎙️To get some answers, Gaël Duez welcomes a veteran in Circular Economy and Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment, Prof. Deborah Andrews, from London South Bank University, the founder and academic lead for CEDaCI. Some Takeaways:💡 how the CEDaCI Compass tool can help data center being equipped more sustainably,♻️ current inadequacies in recycling infrastructure for electronic waste, and⚡ concerns about the rapid development of AI and its energy demands❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss our episode, every two Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here.  📣 Green IO London is on September 19th 2024 --> use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket! Learn more about our guest and connect: Deborah's LinkedInGreen IO website Gaël's website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Deborah's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:CEDaCI Project CEDaCI CompassInvestment in clean energy this year is set to be twice the amount going to fossil fuelsDeforestation-free supply chainsLife Cycle Assessment (LCA) – Everything you need to knowTantalum is mined in Central Africa, mainly in DRCInterreg NWEEuropean Regional Development FundTranscriptIntro 00:00There's a real need to shift thinking and business models and possibly, rather than selling it, equipment actually to sell services. So companies own equipment, so then they're responsible for maintenance and for what happens, either for extending life, which would be very much to their advantage, or for recycling, ending life.Gael Duez 00:37Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO with Gael Duez - that’s me! In this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the Tech sector and beyond, to boost Digital Sustainability.And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform, and, of course, on our website greenio.tech.Can the data center industry become circular? Simple question, very complex answers.Fueled by the ongoing artificial intelligence boom, data centers are popping up around the world like mushrooms after a good rain. For an industry which is more and more under scrutiny due to its environmental footprint, the sustainability angle cannot be overlooked anymore. Still, the main hurdle remains data, as many guests already stated in this podcast. Hence, my wish today to get insights from the program leader of an initiative which has managed to build high quality primary data on the data center industry. The CEDaCI project sounds like a Dan Brown book title, CEDaCI code to unveil all the mysterious power beneath our almighty data center industry. And to some extent, it's quite the plot. But I will let Deborah Andrews, Professor at London South Bank University and a two decades long veteran in Circular Economy and Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment reveal all of it. Hi, Deborah. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.Deborah Andrews 02:32Thank you very much for inviting me.Gael Duez 02:35It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. And I have a very direct question to ask you to kick start our discussion. Did you start the CEDaCI project out of frustration somehow?Deborah Andrews 02:49Okay, well, first of all, thank you for calling CEDaCI. That's the Italian interpretation. We normally describe it as CEDaCI, but hey ho, it's an acronym for the Circular Economy for the Data Center Industry. And yes, there was an element of frustration. I had worked with researchers and operators and so forth in the data center industry on a number of research projects from about 2010, 2012, and was acutely aware that the sector was very fragmented. There was the most phenomenal amount of expertise in the sector, but people worked in silos and didn't connect with each other. And consequently, there wasn't a sort of whole systems approach to the challenge of sustainability. And the industry experts in each of the sectors were doing the best that they could for their particular sub sector, but there was no consideration of the impact that those actions had in their sector. What the impact on other parts of the industry were? So it was absolutely apparent that there was a need for a whole systems approach. And it was very timely in, you know, having spoken to people who subsequently became partners in the project, that they were also acutely aware of this challenge. But being in academia, I was very lucky, being sort of slightly outside the industry, to be able to bring various representatives, stakeholders, etcetera, from the sub sectors together without having any bias.Gael Duez 04:38And Deborah just could you illustrate, maybe with a few examples, what silos are you referring to?Deborah Andrews 04:45So, one of the first things that we did in the project was to carry out a very critical appraisal of the state of the art. In other words, we did a scoping review of what was going on in the industry, and we identified eleven key sub sectors, key players within the industry, starting with suppliers and then going through design, manufacturing, etcetera. But what we did was linked the silos, or found evidence that these silos actually were related to all the different lifecycle stages of data center equipment. Now, we focused on electrical and electronic equipment, because based on prior studies with a very extensive PhD that we ran in conjunction with HP, we found that the hotspot, if you like, the environmental hotspot, and this was looking at a whole data center. So the building or the services, M&E, etcetera. The key area of environmental impact was IT equipment, partly because of the embodied materials, the energy consumption, but also the short life of products, and in particular of servers. We found that they have ordered center equipment, and this was also reflected in a big EU report that informed lot nine that servers had the highest environmental impact. So that was the focus of the CEDaCI project. But coming back to the life cycle stages and so forth, and the various silos, then we have the installation phase. And use, of course, is incredibly important. Operational energy transport, taking stuff to and from data centers, perhaps taking to secondary market operators or recycling plants. Then we have data destruction, which could be through mechanical means, shredding, etcetera, or it could be more digital with software. And then ultimately we move on to the end of life. And we could say end of first Life, which leads to secondary market and reuse. This includes refurbishment and remanufacture. Ultimately, though, whether you send your equipment to secondary market suppliers or straight on for recycling, eventually all equipment ends up with end of life processes. Now, ideally as much of the product should be recycled as possible. But what tends to happen is that the low hanging fruit, things like the casings and so forth, as their steel and obviously external, those recycled and the majority of the PCBs aren't, they end up in landfill. There's a real need for a shift in thinking practice to manage end of life equipment. In this CEDaCI project, one of the key things, one of our USPs, was to bring together representatives, stakeholders from these various subsectors. But one of the points that came up, because we organized co-creation workshops as part of the project, to identify what stakeholders felt they wanted, whether what they wanted was in line with what we felt would benefit them, which was a tool to aid decision making about to help with the sustainability profiling companies and so forth. But one of the USPs brought together these people, and then invariably they commented how much they had learned through the co-creation workshops, because they didn't talk to people who worked in other sub sectors. So this, again, you know, from a sort of academic or life cycle thinking perspective, you need an absolutely whole systems approach to the challenge of whatever industry you're working in to develop a circular economy. Because every action at every life cycle stage, etcetera, has caused an effect. It has an impact on all other life cycle stages.Gael Duez 09:27Okay, so there are so many things to unpack here from systemic thinking and your systemic approach, like the benefits of co-creation, and also what you've mentioned on e-waste. And if you, if you indulge me, I'd like to deep dive about this end of life differentiation that you just made. The first end of life, and then the second and eventually the final end of life, which is when the electronic equipment becomes e-waste. It's very important because I see today in sustainability criteria applied for RFP or bid, etcetera, or auditing the data center industry, or auditing hyperscalers, that more and more they kind of tick the box of all servers are donated to charity. All servers go to the second hand market. And so we're good, job done. I think it's a bit more complicated than that, because if the server is donated, but one year later, it ends up in a landfill somewhere in Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, or even Europe, that's not really a solution to the problem. So my question is, how important is this distinction between the first end of life and second end of life? And is it today enough taken into consideration on how to assess the sustainability of the data center industry?Deborah Andrews 11:02Okay, so let's think about equipment, and in particular, servers, which I've said have the highest embodied impact of data or data center equipment. And the technology, obviously, whether it's memory, processing speed, whatever, is developing incredibly rapidly. We won't even mention AI at the minute, but the sub-technical change means that an awful lot of equipment is replaced while it is still working. You know, it's functioning very, very well. Can understand, in a way, why hyperscalers and other bodies may want to have the latest, fastest, best memory, etc, equipment. But what on earth happens to the stuff that comes out of hyperscale and other centers when it's still working? Why would you want to recycle anything, take something out of service, recycle it when it still functions very well? So there's obviously a very key concern is memory and disks, be they hard drives or solid state drives. What happens to the data? We'll come back to that in a minute. But there are initiatives to encourage use of second life products, products that are still very serviceable. I mean, that's, I suppose, quite a nice analogy, in a way is, and let's assume they're all electric vehicles rather than fossil fuel driven. But, you know, maybe the hyperscalers want Ferraris, when actually many other industries would… something like Fiat Cinquecento or VW Polo will meet their transport needs. Okay, so there are drives. And certainly, I know in the UK, government and organizations like the NHS are really encouraged to use secondary market products, which one of our partners, Techbuyer, a company that is linked to them, interactive, they did a massive amount of research for their own business, but also the research fed into the CEDaCI project, they found that there were a lot of myths around the performance, particularly to do with operational energy, the performance of old, within three years old, and brand new products. If the equipment is set up correctly, then the difference in energy consumption is negligible. Obviously, it depends what compute activities you're engaged in, but like for like, energy consumption, the level is negligible. The OEMs, of course, want everybody to buy new equipment, so they're always saying, “Oh, it's better, you know, it's faster, it's more efficient, blah, blah, blah.” So coming back to the car analogy, an awful lot of public bodies in the UK, and probably in the EU as well, are being encouraged to use second life products which meet their technical needs without any problem whatsoever. But the good thing about this is the secondary market, we should have the products there, and this is a key element within the circular economy as well, of course, because it's not just about recycling at the end of life, it's about extending product life. As I said previously, why would you want to take a product out of service that is still functioning and can fulfill somebody's requirements? I think the key statement around reuse is keeping something in service for as long as technically and economically viable. That's really, really important. So the secondary market is various companies have been set up to collaborate with big hyperscale operators or smaller operators and are promoting good practice, I think, in terms of circularity and economics and resource efficiency, there are some challenges there to do with legislation and ensuring that second life products have the same warranties and so forth, and also to do with data security. Ideally, we should simply wipe drives, be they solid state or hard disk whatever, and reuse them. But there's a lot of anxiety about data security. So organizations like banks, for example, insist that drives are shredded on premise. They don't leave the bank once they're there, they come in as new products and they end up leaving as bags of tiny little bits of metal. They're shredded on site to ensure data security. But I think, and again, there are a number of really good research projects ongoing looking at data security and performance of either software wiping, whatever, so that hardware, HDDs and SDDs, SSDs can be reused.Gael Duez 16:25Are you optimistic about the fact that even for highly secured working environments like banks or even the military, software wiping will prevail at some point?Deborah Andrews 16:38I'd like to think so. I mean, I'm not an expert in this, but I would like to think so. And I think the more really robust and empirical research that can be carried out to reassure end users that software wiping or equivalent is safe as shredding, the better, really. So, yeah, fingers crossed.Gael Duez 17:05And Deborah, you were mentioning that there are a number of companies that have been set up to meet this new market. Could you share with us some trends? Is it still marginal, or are we witnessing a boom in the second hand market of professional IT equipment?Deborah Andrews 17:23It's really interesting. I think it depends very much on time, place, circumstance, etcetera. So it was interesting. During COVID for example, there was a marked increase in demand for second life products, partly because of the increase in demand for data center industry services due to homeschooling and home working, for example, but also because there were supply chain issues. And if you remember, there were all sorts of problems with chips, etcetera. So once we got over Covid and the industry really kicked off again, back to normal business as usual practices. I'll give you a little anecdote here. Okay. There was a bit of an issue around the secondary market because some manufacturers had lots of new equipment in stock before COVID but they hadn't, for various reasons sold it on.So when there was a sort of shift in business practice generally around the world, a lot of the big manufacturers suddenly decided to flood the market with new equipment. And the price difference between that and reused equipment was negligible. So of course people wanted all purchasers, procurement teams wanted new equipment. So that had a really adverse impact on the secondary market for some companies. I'm not saying all, and it ist anecdotal, but I think it looks as though new and secondary markets are very subject to influence from external factors. You know, they're not as consistent, as stable as certainly the secondary market as we would like it to be.Gael Duez 19:28Did you explore with the CEDaCI project, the potential lifespan of servers if the second hand market were to be a very well functioning market? Because I've seen some colocation service providers starting to claim, and I congratulate them for this, that they keep their server for seven, sometimes eight, sometimes even nine years. But can we do better? Can we imagine a world where a server would last for 20 or 30 years? Or would it make any sense?Deborah Andrews 20:04First of all, if your server, and it's like, you know, your car, your Polo, your Fiat Cinquecento, whatever, even your Ferrari, if it's working well, then you should be able to keep it in service, in life or operation for a long time. The big challenge is when things, parts start to wear out or break, for whatever reason, they fail, you need to replace them. And a lot of manufacturers don't keep parts. In fact, I think legislation at the moment stipulates that manufacturers only have to supply parts for up to eight years. So if you have a ten year old server, where are you going to get the parts? It could be that you go to, say, a secondary market supplier and they have parts, but it becomes increasingly difficult over time to replace components. So that's a big challenge. The other thing is looking at changes in compute capability. We know that, for instance, there's all sorts of issues around whether you go for air cooling, to go for liquid cooling, is liquid cooling more efficient, etcetera. And AI increases the operating temperature of components. So that may well mean that we have to redesign service to manage factors like that. As compute changes, we actually need to reconfigure either layout, or if you are going for air cooling, then the number and type of fans that you have or you switch to liquid, whatever is most appropriate. So in theory, if we had modular servers that you could take out certain components of and replace with upgraded components that had common connectors and, you know, the box, the space required to house them was the same, then it seems you should be able to keep servers. You know, even if you end up with everything, all the internals, the guts of the server being replaced, the chassis, you should in theory, be able to keep reusing that for perpetuity. But whether that's feasible or not, because of changes in shift from expert liquid cooling, whatever is, we need to think about that.Gael Duez 22:40And before talking about the main results of the CEDaCI project, and as you mentioned, what all the stakeholders learned from each other, I've got one final clarification question. Because you were very assertive that the embodied environmental footprint within equipment is by far the biggest share of the overall environmental footprint of a data center. And if this position is not a debate at all when it comes to end user equipment or devices at home, whether it's laptop, smartphone, etcetera, etcetera, I heard some different opinions where it's more like 50-50, because professional equipment lasts longer. Some people advocate that actually the use phase, and especially the energy consumption during the use phase is far from being negligible. And for some of them, it's even the majority of the environmental footprint. So maybe could you clarify whether you were mentioning only the carbon or other environmental impacts, or even maybe the carbon. Your calculations make it clear that embodied carbon is even bigger than energy consumption, GHG emission. I was looking for a bit of a clarification here where you stand on this debate.Deborah Andrews 23:59Okay. So when we said that in our calculations that the largest impact in the data center was the IT equipment, when we said that the largest impact was the IT equipment, we based our model on a data center that lasted for 60 years. The actual infrastructure, the building, some of the M&E, was replaced after 20 years, etcetera. But the IT product life was based on three to five years, okay? And that's for hyperscalers, that's a long, long time. Although Google now says that they're going to keep servers in life for five years, we'll see about that. So coming back to... So i if you decide to pull your data center down after 20 years and build a new one, then that ratio of impact from IT to building will change. But just be clear about that, okay. The second thing to be really, really clear about is the kind of metrics you use when you are looking at impact. So carbon, obviously, and carbon equivalent, it could be methane or other hydrocarbons. Carbon is only one metric, carbon and carbon equivalents. And you exclude a whole array in fact, thousands of other impacts and outputs, inputs, etc. And impacts, when you only look at carbon and carbon equivalent. So you're not thinking about the impact of water, the impact of gold mining, for example, which is incredibly toxic, the tailings can be, may have one of the highest environmental impacts, etcetera. And the impact is not just environmental impact, it can be very detrimental to ecosystems. So toxic substances, mercury, arsenic, etcetera, used in mining processes will obviously have an impact on people living in the area if they get into the water supply and into soil and so forth. So if you're looking at carbon, you exclude all of those factors. I'm not 100% against carbon assessment. I just think we have to think about it in relation to everything else. It was really, it was the original sort of metric linked to life cycle assessment dating from the 1960s. So when LCA first began, it just considered energy, be it operational or embodied. And that's where the linked carbon assessment comes from. It's incredibly important when we're thinking about climate change. We can't underestimate its significance. However, we do need to think about all the other impacts as well. So we carried out some studies of exactly the same piece of equipment, one looking at carbon, operational and embodied carbon, and the other looking at a comprehensive life cycle assessment, which looked at and included thousands of inputs and outputs. But just on a carbon study, we found that operational energy, when you're looking at lifespan, let's say five years, operational energy accounted for 85% of impact, or the carbon in the operational energy, 85% of impact, and embodied in energy was only 15. Okay, so with the newer equipment, that ratio shifted a bit and the sort of makeup shifted to 20% for embodied impact, and 80% for operational impact over a five year life. So it's no wonder that when the data center industry is being guided by, you know, the need to reduce carbon, be it embodied, operational, it's no wonder that you focus, the industry focused on operational energy initially, and also I think it's easier to manage to make change. So now we see, you know, more use of renewables, etcetera. And also improved operating efficiency of equipment itself. When we look at comprehensive life cycle assessment, we've got a couple of surprises. We didn't think that the difference between carbon and full LCA would be so significant. So the same piece of equipment or two pieces of equipment. The first was, as I said, a really old server, and the ratio of operational to embodied impact was about 80:20 for carbon assessment, and again, it was lower. It was, I can't remember something like 75:25. But what, this is the really, really, really key finding. When we looked at the comparatively new piece of equipment, which was from about 2017, we found that the embodied and operational impacts were about the same. It was about a 50:50 split. So that was really, that means, that was a real surprise. And it really highlights the necessity of examining, measuring, monitoring, you know, improving the physical resource efficiency, increasing use of recycled materials, increasing recycling processes, and building a decent infrastructure to do that, changing practice with things like encouraging, if you can't reuse a whole piece of equipment, can we harvest components and reuse a individual components, etcetera. So that was a very revelationary, very revealing study.Gael Duez 30:15This shift from 80:20 to 50:50 was mostly due to energy savings, energy optimization of newer equipment, or was it also, as you said, because of lower cost of building equipment, thanks to the use of recycling materials, etcetera, etcetera.Deborah Andrews 30:36Okay, so this 50:50 split, it was a lot to do with improved operational energy. When you're looking at the full life cycle assessment, you are considering things like what happens during mining processes. It's not just the energy or the toxicity, etcetera, and also things like what percentage. Well, now we should be thinking about the percentage of recycled materials included, that, in theory, should reduce environmental impact.Gael Duez 31:14So now that we laid the ground for a better understanding of all this environmental footprint, etcetera, let's go back to the actual findings of the CEDaCI project, both for the stakeholders, but also for an average, I would say, data center operator. What are the findings he or she should be aware of? And what about this tool that you developed called the compass?Deborah Andrews 31:38The CEDaCI Compass, the circular data center compass. That was a key output from the CEDaCI project. And the majority of the research that we did underpinned the development of this digital tool. It's free to use. You can find it, access it via the project website at cedaci.org. The idea was that we wanted to help people working in the industry to make informed decisions about how to support their transition to sustainability and circularity. And one of the things that we are very keen to do well, apart from being absolutely objective, it's completely non judgmental. We don't offer any, you know, this is right, this is wrong. We just present the results. One of the things that we did as well was to separate out the three sorts of tenets or pillars of sustainability. So you put your information into the tool, or you select various criteria, and then when you see the results, comparing two different servers, you can compare the environmental impact, the social impact, the economic impact, so that, you know, it could be, as an operator, you're more concerned about social factors than environmental, so you base your decision on that. Or I would imagine most people think about economics as their priority driver. But, you know, being aware of the other criteria is really important. If you lump together, you know, these three key tenets of sustainability, you get slightly inaccurate results, you know, you don't know what I mean. It could be the social impact of one server is very high, but its environmental, adverse environmental impact is very low, or the other way around. So that's why we separated those points out. The other thing that we included was a criticality indicator. Now the EU and, well, UK to a certain extent, but certainly the EU has become increasingly conscious of resource efficiency and has identified, now, 30 materials that are what they define as critical. This is because of the amount of resource that is as yet unmined in the surface, the amount of material that is currently recycled. And I would like to include as well the possibility of substitution. But the other really, really important is the geopolitical factors, where on earth is the material located? Because that has a very significant impact on availability. So the critical raw materials are basically defined as those that are of major technical and economic significance to the EU and UK. So we included a criticality indicator to raise awareness of these materials. The use of these materials in data center equipment, all electronic equipment, uses some critical raw materials of some type. We cannot make, for example, mobile phones without tantalum, which is essential for capacitors. Tantalum is mined in Central Africa, mainly in DRC, Congo, where mining practices are eye wateringly horrific. They are environmentally and socially damaging. So we wanted to raise awareness of those sort of issues as well, to encourage better practice. So the compass was developed. As I said, it's a free to access online tool. And it was basically to inform potential end users about the impact of their choices. The other thing that was really, really important at the moment, we don't have anything like the scale of recycling infrastructure that we need to manage all the equipment that's currently in circulation, let alone all the electrical and electronic equipment that will come into the waste stream imminently. We've got a huge problem with this. There's a collection globally and it does depend where you are based globally and as does reuse. Incidentally, people with less expendable income tend to be more frugal by necessity rather than intent, I think or wish. Overall, the collection rate of e-waste is less than 20% globally. And that includes consumer as well as commercial products. But we don't have anything like the infrastructure that we need to recycle this anyway. The recycling processes at the moment, they focus on anything with iron in it. So steel, copper, aluminum, and gold. And there's not very much gold, you know, by mass, it's comparatively little gold in electronic equipment. But of course, its inherent economic value makes it attractive to recycle it. So there are masses and masses of materials, many of which are critical on the critical raw materials list, which aren't recycled. Unless we get our act together and develop a proper recycling infrastructure, there's significant potential for disruption to supply chains.Gael Duez 38:54But do you believe it is possible? My understanding of the chipmaking industry, or even slightly less complicated part of the IT industry, the design itself is so complicated, is so… the different metals are melted together to create alloy. You've got ceramic, etcetera, that I don't even know if it's feasible to recycle the way I would say the average John do understands it, which is we will extract to reuse it the same way. And it's more down cycling or it's even. I mean, I honestly wonder if recycling is really the way forward. So don't get me wrong, instead of being able to reuse for super long period of time, as you previously mentioned, having components that are interoperable on open standard etcetera, and saying, okay, you know, this memory card might be 20 years old, so it's ridiculous the amount of data you've got. But hey, I've still got half a billion of them. And if I've put them in some racks, it's still a decent, you know, decent enough, or whatever. But my point is, I think we are fighting an uphill battle if we really want to recycle, like extracting the tantalum you were mentioning, or the cobalt or whatever, rather than redesigning our industrial process and making also sure that the warranty period is so big that so long, that actually we shift the burden of recycling to producer, which are eventually, ultimately responsible for putting things on the market that are absolutely not recyclable. And that would end up being e-waste in a matter of years rather than decades. And when you see the environmental footprint of everything that you describe, we should talk in decades rather than in years. But that's a personal opinion. Sorry, but my point. What do you think about the feasibility of recycling? Or are we talking about a slightly different approach in the recycling industry for the IT equipment?Deborah Andrews 41:05I think we need to have all of those things, really. I don't think there's not one size fits all solution. I think there are some really massive challenges with electronic components, for example, because of the way that they function. You're looking at atomic levels, the way that if you're creating signals, etcetera, the way that atoms and the subatomic particles behave. So that is obviously going to limit the way in which components are designed and manufactured at the moment. Maybe in the future they will discover different approaches to data transfer or signaling, switching, whatever it may be. I don't know too much about quantum, and I don't know how this is going to change things, if at all, if we exchange one set of problems for another. I don't know, but I'd certainly like to find out an awful lot more about it. But coming back to your question about end of life and so forth, I absolutely agree that we need a different approach to the manufacture of many products. I think we need to really focus on the things that can be upgraded, swapped, repaired, etcetera. Again, most or many electronic components, it's nothing. You know, they're so tiny, it's impossible to repair them. So focus on the stuff that we can repair and upgrade and keep in service for as long as possible. The other stuff, we need to certainly develop better recycling capability. But there's an argument that's put forward that some of the materials, the economic value is fine if you have a kilo of stuff, but by mass per component, the mass in individual components and in servers as a whole is very low. So the economic value of any particular materials reclaimed from the server will be low. So we need critical mass to make development of recycling and reclamation technologies for particular materials economically viable. That's going to be the driver. The other big challenge we've got with recycling is sometimes the processes, and we're not. You know, there are lots of ways of doing this. One of the partners in this CEDaCI project, a company called TND or Terra Nova Developments, they developed some new recycling processes to reclaim materials that aren't commonly reclaimed. And they use a mix of thermal and chemical processes. And because you're using more than one process, of course, that increases cost. But, you know, if you have critical mass of stuff coming through the system, it does become economically viable eventually.Deborah Andrews 44:23One of the big challenges is very often, but if you have a printed circuit board with a huge number of materials, embodied materials, you're processing to reclaim one or two or three, those processes can damage other materials, and so you can't reclaim those. So, you know, I think at the moment, it's impossible to reclaim all of the materials in PCBs, which are the biggest challenge for recycling. So I think we need to think about when we're designing, not just designing for here now and in use to design, thinking about how can these things be easily disassembled to facilitate, if not, you know, chucking the material into a smelter to recycle it, but actually being able to reuse the materials in the… as soon as we take them off one product, we can put them on another.Gael Duez 45:22Do IT equipment manufacturers today start to tackle the issue? Or are they still mostly in the business as usual approach and not at all incorporating, as you said, a repairability aspect when the design sinks, even a bit of a recycling aspect?Deborah Andrews 45:45I think there's, and I'm not going to highlight particular companies, but I think there's quite a lot of smoke and mirrors and greenwashing. And this, again, it's anecdotal from personal experience of, you know, I worked through this CEDaCI project. They all still want to sell new equipment, and certain companies say that they have a kind of closed loop, but it's a very open closed loop, shall we say? They're not responsible. They do take equipment, but then they sell it onto secondary market agencies. They're no longer responsible for that equipment once they've sold it on. There's a real need to shift thinking and business models and possibly, rather than selling IT equipment actually to sell services. So, you know, you rent, I don't know whether you do it by compute capability or operating time or whatever. So then they're responsible for maintenance and for what happens, either for extending life, which would be very much to their advantage, or for recycling at the end of life.Gael Duez 47:00Which is what is slightly happening with the big three hyperscalers because they've started designing their own servers. And I could bet that they thought about the fact that even from a financial perspective, the longer you keep this equipment, which is on your own cost base, the better it is for your bottom line. And I have a final question for you, because you're privileged witness of the data center industry for almost a decade, two decades almost now, and there is a bit of an elephant in the room that you actually, you teased us several times during the interview about AI and more generally, I would say, about the trends. And I would like to share with you an anecdote while I was recording this very enlightening episode with Professor PS Lee in Singapore, who's one of the best experts in the water cooling techniques and more generally on building energy efficient data centers, especially in tropical climates. We had a really fruitful discussion, and he's a big advocate of technical optimization, and he knows a lot about these topics, etcetera. And at some point in our discussion, he posed, and he had this kind of overwhelmed moment, you know, when you've got just too much weight on your shoulders. He was like, but you know, Gael, at some point we will have to ask also the question of the level of consumption of compute that we want in our society. Because despite all the efforts that I'm doing to reduce energy consumption, the current trends, and especially the AI boom, I don't see how I can make it. And it was this kind of face, like, I simply don't know how I will be able to manage such an exponential consumption in energy, even if overnight all data centers in the world would switch to water cooling, super efficient water cooling techniques and whatnot. And it kind of struck me like even someone within the tech industry and such a strong advocate of technical optimization saying, wow, but the trend is really worrisome. Is it something that you're aligned on, or are you a bit more optimistic about the current trend in the data center industry?Deborah Andrews 49:29I think it's really scary. Forget about the ethics and what AI can and can't do. Forget about that. I think it's really scary because it seems that the industry is racing, racing forwards to develop either new data centers, new equipment to manage AI, etcetera. But my feeling is that some of the, what we've learned, good practice, etcetera, is forgotten in that race. So it's a business as usual approach. Build, install, run, replace, run. It's very worrying because the physical resources and energy required to manage AI operate, even the simplest operation, the demand for energy, is astronomical. So there are arguments saying, oh, well, AI is going to measure this, that and the other, and improve, you know, this, that and the other, but, or improve the operational efficiency of this, that and the other. But I don't think we've done any kind of calculations at all to see whether the benefits of running an AI software or, you know, program activity, whatever, to assess resource efficiency, whether the benefits achieved through the resource efficiency or more significant than the impact of running the AI operation. We need to really, and it's not going to happen, but it would be great to pause for a year and just to sort of examine some of these factors and to see where the benefits of AI really lie. So if we do carry on business as usual, and I know there are various regulations coming in from, you know, digital sustainability and so forth in the EU, but I don't think they're going to have a massive impact on, certainly the speed of development of AI is far faster than the implementation of these new regulations. But the other thing that's worrying, if there are constraints of operating in the EU, for example, does it simply mean that providers will go elsewhere, they'll build in locations where the regulations don't apply. And so we move our problems to another part of the world. In effect, you know, more buildings in Africa, Asia, South America.Gael Duez 52:05And from a cold financial perspective, do you think that the current trend of building data centers everywhere in increasing compute capacity is sustainable? Or do you foresee some bottleneck or even some forced pose because of resource exhaustion?Deborah Andrews 52:25There may be a quantity crunch, unless we think about extending product life, as we've already mentioned, and recycling, reclaiming more materials, changing business practice, business thinking. I think that there's potential for quantity crunch, but whether operators will start to charge for access to digital services. I mean, at the moment, you know, you buy your phone, you have a package, and you can contact anywhere in the world whenever you want. Okay, you pay for apps and so forth, but actually you're not really paying very much for the digital services that enable those apps to function. And a lot of things are free anyway. So will we have to pay for digital services? Is that one way of monitoring or constraining digital activity or not? That's one question. But the other thing is, is it ethical? You know, if we think we're in a luxurious position in Western Europe in terms of economics, although there are people in digital poverty, but, you know, generally, as a child or a university student, if you don't have computing equipment at home, you can go to your study institution and access digital technology there. But that's not the case in many populations in developing countries where digital tech is a luxury for the upper echelons of society. And yet we can see how access to a phone, not smartphone, just an ordinary old fashioned phone, has empowered women, for example, helping them to set up businesses and so forth. Is it right to charge them for data or do we make data charging… is it sort of socially stratified or according to income bracket? I don't know. I think we need to be a lot more visionary, look forwards and be proactive and anticipate problems and design them out before they happen. Now, whether that's… I think that's possible with some equipment, but whether it's possible for, you know, in terms of human behaviour and so forth, there's a whole other matter altogether.Gael Duez 54:18It makes total sense. Thanks a lot, Deborah, for joining. That was very enlightening and a unique perspective on the data center industry, environmental footprint and what could be done to reduce it. So thanks a lot. Once again, it was a pleasure to see you and hope to see you to Green IO London as well.Deborah Andrews 54:36Thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.Outro 54:42Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it via email, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Twitter, if you are still there. We are an independent media and word of mouth is the only way to get more listeners. I don't ask you to rate it five stars on Spotify or Apple Podcasts because of course you already did it, didnt you?It's time for you to grab a book or enjoy a good article. And guess what? You can find many ideas in the latest edition of the Green IO monthly newsletter. And don't forget to book your ticket for the next Green IO conference in London on September 19. Good news for your holiday budget. You can still get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. Just make sure to have one before they're all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you back in six weeks to help you, fellow responsible technologists build a queener digital world.Roxanne 55:40One 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. 

Trista Bridges and Paul Beddie discuss IT sustainability in Japan, highlighting stakeholder-oriented society, emerging startups, and regulatory roles. Insights on the country's journey towards net zero emissions and the challenges of transitioning to renewable energy and reducing plastic waste. Stay connected for more sustainability discussions and upcoming Green IO conferences.

💭Decarbonizing tech stacks and platforms? This is the challenge many CTO face these days. 🎙️In our 42th episode, 2 CTOs with different backgrounds and operating in different lines of business cross share their experience in reducing the environmental footprint of their operations. Ludi Akue, former Lunii’s CTO, and Owen Rogers, .eco’s CTO meet Gael Duez to share their insights and reflect on each other journeys in sustainability.Some Takeaways:🌐 pro and con of migrating infrastructure to a lower carbon region,⚙️ how to leverage technical debt to boost decarbonization,💰 when does optimization pay for decarbonization,⚠️ the pitfall of creating a separate program to steer sustainability,and much more!❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss our episode, every two Tuesday!📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 📣 Green IO London is on September 19th 2024 --> use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket! Learn more about our guest and connect: Ludi's LinkedInOwen’s LinkedInGaël's website Green IO website 📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Ludi and Owen's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:Putting our websites on a low carbon diet Lunii.ecoCarboSustainable Development GoalsUN Global CompactNot the End of the WorldLucie 26000Transcript Intro 00:00With regard to organizations prioritizing sustainability goals, a big part of that, in my opinion, is ensuring that those goals are publicly stated so that there is an element of accountability around that.Gael Duez 00:24Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO with Gael Duez - that’s me! - Green IO is the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the Tech sector and beyond, to boost Digital Sustainability.And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform, and, of course, on our website greenio.tech. Decarbonizing a tech stack, or a platform, or a full information system. This is the challenge many CTO face these days. And beyond carbon, more environmental indicators are taken into consideration. Far from being just a few technical choices to make, it often implies multiple decisions at multiple levels with multiple stakeholders to succeed. Hence, this episode where I wanted CTOs to share and exchange about the strategy they choose to achieve the sustainability goals their company committed to. 2 CTO with different backgrounds and operating in different lines of business are welcome today. Ludi was CTO at Lunii for three years, a highly successful toy maker in France, and she's now digital CTO at Bpifrance. But she's also part of a vibrant community, tech.rocks which gathers French CTO in Paris and beyond. Owen is CTO at Dot ECo, a company operating the registry ECO and has successfully run decarbonization of its tech stack. And he's also part of the climate action tech community. And this is where I've had the pleasure to meet him. Ludi Owen, thanks a lot for joining Green IO today. It's a pleasure to have both of you in different time zones making the effort to be in the show at the very same time. So thanks a lot and welcome to the show.Ludi Akue 02:41Happy to be here. Thanks for the invitation, Gael.Owen Rogers 02:44Thanks for the intro, Gael.Gael Duez 02:48So without further notice, I would like to ask both of you the same question, and it's a highly complicated one. What was the impact, or in another word, what were the goals you were aiming to achieve when you started to reduce the environmental footprint of your technical operations or your tech stack? Maybe, Ludi, you want to start?Ludi Akue 03:16Yeah. Thank you for the question. So the goal was pretty big. It was, we need to change the way we produce everything. So it's a big, hairy goal. Not clear at all. That was the goal I had in the beginning, knowing that the company Lunii was a toy maker. So as you said, a hardware toy maker. And I managed both the hardware teams and the software teams. So the challenge was just clear. Very clear that we need to change things. We need to be impactful, but we don't have a clue about the KPI's to get there.Gael Duez 03:59It was kind of top down. It was like a big strategic enterprise goal and in a very sort of OKR approach, like we've got something very ambitious to achieve, I guess not in a single year. Make something with it. Am I correct here?Ludi Akue 04:19Yeah, I think it's much more subtle than that. There were some key results, let's say more on the supply and the manufacturing side. The first model of the toy was made in China and brought back the manufacturing to France. For example, you have big goals but after those goals, when coming to the tech stack, everything about the tech operations, architecture, there was a blank page. Like, I needed to build a plan with my teams, of course, to measure and to reach the goal of changing, be more responsible.Gael Duez 05:05I guess this is a moment where I have to admit that, a) my daughter has bot histoire, b) actually, I know this because the one my daughter has has been made in France on top of it, but the one my nephew has, which is one year older as still made in China. So I was like, oh, my God, they made it. Congratulations.Ludi Akue 05:31But, yeah, I just want to add something very quick. I was really impressed by the vision of the founders. It's like they wanted to change things as they are growing a growing company. They now have a working business model. I can share some figures. At that time, there were about more than half a million customers, more than a million of toys sold all over the world, in France, in Europe, North America. So they had this strategic vision to say, we need to measure and change our impact. I was really impressed by that.Gael Duez 06:15And what about you, Owen? What were the goals when you started this sustainably journey at .eco?Owen Rogers 06:23So I would say for us it was pretty different in as much as it was more bottom up instead of top down. And we are purely virtual. We just deal with digital products, so there's nothing physical for us to have to worry about optimizing. So my job, I think, was probably significantly easier than Ludi's in that regard. So for us, we operate the .eco top level domain in partnership with the global environmental community in the face of increasingly dire climate effects that we are seeing in the world around us. We were feeling like there had to be something more that we could do some way that we could have an impact ourselves. But it wasn't totally clear how we could do that. Being a company that focuses strictly on digital products, we started to learn about the climate effects of technology and realizing that there was in fact, a lot that we could start to do to reduce our impact. So we wanted to understand what was our carbon footprint. None of us had any expertise in doing carbon life cycle analysis and carbon footprint calculations. So we went and spoke to a number of auditors that will evaluate the carbon footprint of organizations. And the response that we got for most of them was, we're super busy right now, and perhaps there's some work that you can do on your own in order to understand your own footprint, compile the data, and then perhaps we can come and assist you later. So we started to do that ourselves. We started to work with our vendors, with our partners, and pull together whatever data we could to understand our own carbon footprint and realize pretty quickly that this is not complicated. Doing basic carbon calculations is not a hard thing. It's certainly something that you're doing some pretty rudimentary mathematics, and it's something that most software engineers should have no trouble with. And so that enabled us to calculate the carbon footprint of our company, and that served as a basis for optimization. So we did our first carbon footprint calculations in 2020, and we established a goal of reducing our overall, that's our Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3, carbon footprint by 4% for our 2022 fiscal year. And a lot of that was through optimizing our digital services.Gael Duez 09:23But just for clarification, Owen, your goal was to reduce by 4% in two years.Owen Rogers 09:29Within one year. So that was for our 2022 fiscal year. We were quite close to achieving that objective. We managed to reduce our overall carbon footprint by 3.7%. And we have a similar target for our 2023 fiscal year. We actually have no Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions because of the fact that we're a purely virtual organization. So during COVID we gave up our office space, so we work entirely remotely. We also don't ourselves run any data centers. We don't have any office space. So everything for us is Scope 3 emissions. So we've tried to be fairly broad in terms of including as much as we can within our Scope 3 footprint. So one of the things that we account for is 100% of the energy used in the homes of our employees within our footprint, which actually is quite a significant portion of our footprint. But the recognition being that's where work is happening right now. And so we should account for that footprint. And our employees are not otherwise attempting to account for their home. Any emissions associated with energy use in their home.Gael Duez 11:09Fair point. By the way, Ludi, did you have the same approach? And what can you tell us about the carbon footprint of a toy maker?Ludi Akue 11:23Yeah, that's a very interesting question. Yes. We had the approach of measuring the carbon footprint. And for Lunii at that time, we have the three contributors that we have. The first one is everything related to supply logistics. So transportation, production, and manufacturing. So it's big. If we need to address only one point, we need to address that. So the first contributor, I think it's something about maybe 40%, I think. I don't have my figures. I don't have the figures here. And the second one is the operations like customer service. And the third contributor was the tech. So they take about 6%. I remember the figure because it was 6% of the whole. So as a hardware company, the real job is to tame the production before the other one.Gael Duez 12:32Right. That's true that you're a CTO, but you're a CTO not only in the way you were a CTO at Lunii, but not only in the way we think about it in the digital sector or in the IT industry, because you are in charge of the IT infrastructure, obviously, and we will talk about it. But you were also in charge of the entire designing and building of the toys itself.Ludi Akue 13:00So the first thing is to measure. So we have these carbon footprints measurements with the leader in France. It's Carbo, hellocarbo. So we found out that our… So we have pretty much more Scope 1 than everything else. Even if we needed to help our suppliers to comply with our mission, our goal said. So we had a supplier code of conduct to do that. And the key results were bottom up. So we had this high goal. We have this big result, like relocating in France, co-designing the product, and for the rest… So the operational teams come with the key results they need to address, they need to tackle. So you had all the production team, the production is supply and everything. The real job here is to tackle the Scope 1 carbon emissions. So the production teams managed to has the carbon emissions. So it was a great win that we can have carbon emission.Gael Duez 14:18That's very interesting that you say that actually the IT itself was only 6%, because that's, I guess, a challenge that many CTO and CIO, they face, that they don't weigh that much within an organization, but if we gather all of us together, we weight sometimes as much as the ROT freight transport worldwide. So that's quite significant. And that's what I call the green IT curse, which is you're small within an organization, but eventually you're super big at that global level. So if we focus on this more IT side of things, Ludi, you mentioned at the beginning that you had a very aspirational goal. How did you manage for IT operation and also the firmware, as you mentioned, to make it something tangible, something actionable.Ludi Akue 15:13The first thing to do is once we have the measurements, like the carbon footprint, we have something to reduce. You have a goal, you have something to reduce, like a salesperson, let's go differently. And how we tackle that is to identify where we are not very good. Like for example, something that I want to stress here is imagine it's a fastly growing company. It's a scale up. So the scale up, as every scale up has some technical depths. And so here the technical depth is an opportunity to think differently. We need to rebuild something, so how can we rebuild it? For example, let's go mobile first to reduce, to optimize the web pages. Some indices were like, let's move into the cloud. So I decided to move into the cloud and to use managed services and to benefit from the calculation. Even if the calculators are not really reliable, they can show you some trends. So that's interesting. You can measure that. Let's be simple in the way we move to the cloud too. Taming technical labs is when we had an existing microservice architecture, but we don't really need a microservice architecture. So it's like, it's to say like the vision, technical vision is to go back to a modular monolith, for example. It was a strong choice. Our job is pretty simple. So for the scale, everything was homemade. Like you have an e-commerce platform that is homemade on a microservice architecture. Lunii also has a mobile application for the usage of parents and kids can recall their own stories as well. And you also have an application, a usage application, I will call that, that you can download stories, you can buy stories, you can download stories, manage your toy. Right? So the technical vision here is, okay, everything was built for growth. Right now, what is the company’s job? The company's job is to make toys and audio stories. So we don't need to continue to build an in house e-commerce platform. So a strong decision was like, we need to stop building the e-commerce platforms and buy an e-commerce platform like Shopify. This was a strong decision, so we don't, don't need the whole infrastructure that comes with building an e-commerce website.Gael Duez 18:13And that's super interesting, because to make sure I understand it well, your main point here is leverage technical debt, because you were in a scale up company, so you had the opportunity to redo things and you, like, technical debt becomes an opportunity to rethink everything and rebuild everything in a more sustainable way. And the way you did it was a bit counter intuitive regarding state of the art architecture, etcetera. It was more… So, obviously, you had like, let's try to eco-design, let's try to move to the cloud. I will have one question about it, but it's maybe we were too ambitious with our architecture and a good old fashioned modular monolith. And buying more off the shelf stuff will actually help us to reduce environmental footprint.Ludi Akue 19:05Yes, absolutely. It's like, it's just technical debt was the leverage we needed to do things differently. It is simplicity [and] optimization, simplicity and automation.Gael Duez 19:21And just for the sake of understanding this e-commerce platform that you've chosen, was the sustainability criteria taken into consideration?Ludi Akue 19:33I think that, no, we didn't include that. Maybe we did, because we have a supplier code of conduct. I'm sure we have those because we have a companion wide supplier code of conduct. It was a matter of simplicity. So I think the first thing is simplicity and automation. Yeah.Gael Duez 19:54And what about you, Owen? What were the technological choices you made to achieve the -4% reduction? Was it cloud migration or anything related or a very different approach?Owen Rogers 20:10So, like Ludi, our digital services accounted for only 10% of our overall Scope 3 emissions. So not too far off from the 6% at Lunii. The 4% reduction target was going to be entirely achieved by optimizing the efficiency of our digital services. So really what that meant was we were looking to reduce the carbon footprint of our digital services by upwards of 40%. So for us, we are running entirely in the cloud. So it didn't entail a migration from physical data centers to a cloud environment. We were already there. But one of the key things that we did was moving our infrastructure from one region to a lower carbon region. So we ended up migrating our entire stack to Quebec, Canada. Electricity in Quebec is entirely generated through hydropower. It has one of the lowest carbon emission intensities in the world. So that was definitely a positive move in reducing our footprint. Otherwise, we did quite a bit of work in terms of optimizing the footprint of our website and services similar to what Ludi was talking about doing work around optimizing images, JavaScript, CSS. Our sites are currently already static. Not entirely, but most of them are already static. And that's definitely a huge win because you're not running any servers or we're not running any servers on the back end. But my approach architecturally is actually a little bit different from the solution that Ludi was suggesting. I can definitely understand why with a microservices architecture you may end up with a very large fleet of instances depending on how you distribute that work, cross compute. But our focus is more on trying to eliminate servers altogether and ensure that everything that we're building can run through serverless. Serverless is, I think, the current end state or optimum for virtualization within cloud providers. It enables them to maximize multi-tenancy so that you can have the most compute being run through the fewest possible instances. So that's the direction that we're moving, at least for the parts of the tech stack that we have under our control. We were already using serverless and we're continuing to use serverless, but in terms of architectural direction, that's where we're headed. Anything new that we're building, we're trying to make it serverless first and move away from having to deal with any infrastructure that we need to manage ourselves.Gael Duez 23:10Did you use a specific tool to measure the carbon footprint of your tech stack or how did you tool up? And maybe the answer is not at all. We didn't need to.Ludi Akue 23:22We used a tool, Carbo. Carbo is a French tool. I think it's hellocarbo.com. It's a bit of calculation and declarative, also measure. We also use the cloud calculators. So you have a lot of calculators with the major cloud providers so you can have an estimation of your carbon footprint. Something that works great at Lunii is we build external accountability. How do you do that? Is like we sign the global compact. So the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN we signed that we needed to provide every year some reporting on how we are advancing the mission. We are also signed with a collaborating company, Lucie. So Lucie 26000, we needed to have a clear goal in our OKR to have a Lucy label by 2022. So we build external accountability to make it work like it's not just us with our OKR, but we need to report to the UN that we measure everything that we build this, we build that, so this helps us move forward.Gael Duez 24:48But as far as I know, hellocarbo is a generalistic carbon accounting tool. So you didn't have the need to tool up specifically to measure anything regarding your IT stack except the data provided by the cloud providers, as you mentioned. And what about you, Owen? Did you use any specific tool or not that much?Owen Rogers 25:14So for us, we followed the sustainable web design methodology as the foundation for our carbon footprint calculation. For our digital services, that methodology uses data transfer as a proxy for calculating energy consumption, and then on the basis of that can be converted into carbon. It certainly is not perfect, and unfortunately, there aren't really perfect measures at this point in time in the cases where you don't own the infrastructure. But it does have the benefit of relying on data, data transfer that is relatively easy to obtain. So what we did for our digital services was look at data transfer, whether that be transiting via the content delivery networks that we were using, or load balancers, etcetera, and estimated our footprint on that basis. So that's the tooling that we used. It's not a specific third party tool. A lot of this data was just aggregated in spreadsheets, and then the calculations were being performed there.Gael Duez 26:33And there is nothing wrong intrinsically with using proxy metrics, as long as we don't claim that it helps us understand absolute values. And for anyone following Gerry McGovern's work, I think using data as a proxy, it's far from perfect. There is a question of embedded carbon, etcetera, etcetera, but it doesn't lead people in the wrong direction. That is simply not true. Maybe we will have better metrics, better tools, as you say, Owen, but a company strongly engaged in reducing the amount of data produced they manipulate the exchange is not going in the wrong direction when it comes to reducing our environmental impact. Now I'm fully convinced of it.Owen Rogers 27:23Well, in general, data transfer is correlated with energy consumption. But if you look at most organizations in terms of how they're calculating their carbon footprint, especially for their Scope 3 emissions, it's almost entirely based on spend. So whatever their expenses are, they're using some sort of a general metric that is converting dollars spent for this category of product into carbon intensity. And personally, I think the data transfer is going to, at least within the technology space, be better correlated with energy use than spend. And spend also gives me nothing. I mean, I can try and optimize my spend, but it may point me in the wrong direction, like what we were talking about before. I could move all my infrastructure to a high carbon intensity region, reducing my cloud spend and therefore, under that basis of calculation, reduce my overall carbon footprint. I mean, it's just crazy. It leads to the wrong types of outcome, at least with data transfer. Plus, one of the nice things about the sustainable web design methodology is that it is somewhat component oriented. In cases like for my infrastructure, I have a better way to calculate the footprint because I know the number of instances that are running and I can estimate the infrastructure and I know what the carbon intensity is of where that infrastructure is running, I can get a better estimate for that component. But if I want to have a broad scope that includes emissions associated with the use of our products, so the energy drain on end users devices as a result of using our digital services, I can still estimate that under the umbrella of the same methodology and use data transfer as a proxy for that. I'm hoping there's going to be a revision to the sustainable web design methodology. The better accounts for what we're learning now about the energy use associated with the various components involved in the end to end journey for digital services, so as to better discount the network component. But I do want to underscore the importance of something that Ludi was talking about, which is with regard to organizations prioritizing sustainability goals. A big part of that, in my opinion, is ensuring that those goals are publicly stated so that there is an element of accountability around that. So Ludi was talking about the UN Global Compact as establishing a requirement for a public report around sustainability. Similarly for us, we publish our Annual Impact Report and part of our impact report is setting targets for the upcoming fiscal year around sustainability and impact. And so that means that you have an element of accountability there to your customers, to the community you serve, to the general public. And I recognize that that is hard, especially in cases where we're relying on data that we know isn't perfect like there… I know that the sustainable web design methodology has flaws associated with it and that I'm sure in a couple of years we will come up with some sort of more comprehensive methodology that will enable us to produce more accurate carbon footprints. But I don't want to let the imperfect be the enemy of the good. I think it's much better for us to try and get in front of this and be transparent about what we're doing with the data that's available. Recognizing that at some point later we're going to have to say, okay, we're going to need to revise these estimates of our footprint and our impact, because this is where the state of the art is now.Gael Duez 31:35Ludi, Owen mentioned not the cloud migration, like you had to do at Lunii, but relocating within the cloud operators in Quebec, which has tremendously low carbon electricity, even if we include embedded carbon from the hydropower. When you talked about the migration you did to the cloud, did you consider the region that you wanted your services to be hosted to make sure that actually you might not migrate from a very old data center with a PUE of 2 to a brand shiny cloud providers with a PUE of 1.2, even a bit less if you listen to their marketing communications, but hosted in an area where the average carbon intensity of the electricity will be at time five or six higher, which is very classical case with a very famous three letters hyperscaler. But I will stop here. So my question, sorry, I'm rambling a bit, but my question is, did you have the opportunity to consider the intensity, the carbon intensity of the electricity grid from the region where you relocated your cloud activities.Ludi Akue 32:56Not directly. We were on a pass before. We didn't pass. Like I said, we had this microservice architecture, and it was really ineffective in terms of management, in terms of billing, bills were very expensive and ineffective. Like, we cannot really measure things in fine-grained speaking. So the first thing is we consider green goals when moving to the cloud. This was really clear. We work with a provider that helps us migrate because they're green objectives while moving to the cloud. We also consider GDPR goals when moving to the club. So we were more like, we want to stay close to our customers. And at the same time, our customers were kind of everywhere. But our big, you know, huge base of customers were located in Europe, and we chose to locate our clouds in Europe. So privacy was first, the closeness to our customer base was second, and then ended in green objectives.Owen Rogers 34:24For us, we migrated from Ohio to Quebec. And so Ohio, the grid in Ohio is largely powered by coal and by gas, and so there's a 200 times difference in carbon intensity between Ohio and Quebec, so it's significant. And Ohio is not the worst in terms of carbon intensity within the United States. So there are much worse places to be and many of those places operate large data centers. So I think it's absolutely something that technologists should be taking into account when they're considering a cloud migration or when they're looking at ways to reduce their carbon footprint.Gael Duez 35:14And just a side note, that's something really to pay attention to, because unfortunately, sometimes carbon incentives and financial incentives are not well aligned in the hyperscaler industry. And that's really a shame, because obviously, the dirtiest place should be the most expensive. And that's not always the case. And sometimes a CTO faces a very difficult challenge to explain that he wants an increase in 5, 10, 15% of his or her bill, because that is to achieve a target of decarbonization, and that shouldn't be the case. But that's okay. So that's something to pay a lot of attention to.Owen Rogers 35:50Well, it did increase our bill by moving to Quebec. It is a more expensive region for us to operate in, but not significantly so. So that was a price that we felt like we were quite comfortable to pay. But to both your point and to Ludi's point, as a CTO, it's essential to find alignment between overall business objectives and your environmental objectives. Now, fortunately, in many cases there is alignment. There are ancillary benefits that can be achieved as a result of reducing carbon. So specifically, a low carbon intensity website is generally going to be a higher performing website. So you're able to pitch this type of an initiative under the guise of performance improvement, which will boost user experience, hopefully boost retention in sales. So there are these ancillary benefits. Similarly, a low carbon intensity infrastructure, so relying on serverless or higher levels of virtualization, is generally going to be more cost effective. So often there is alignment between an infrastructure cost reduction program and reducing carbon intensity. At the very least, you can find it if you look for it. It's not to say that reducing spend within the cloud is always going to lead to lower carbon, but you can find and make the case for where those two things are going to be aligned, and then that gives you a lever to push on.Gael Duez 37:30And what a wonderful transition. Because I wanted to ask both of you the question of process and strategy, like how you connect, how you align with the business strategy, and what were the process, what was the organization that you set up to achieve these goals? Because we discussed quite a lot the technical side of things, but it's more a human thing than a technical thing. So maybe, Ludi, you want to share also how you actually created something from the wide statement. And of course, how did you manage to align them, as Owen just said, with the overall business goals?Ludi Akue 38:11My context was easy, because you have these big goals for the company, so everyone is aware it's a strategic goal. And I recommend that green initiatives should be taken at a strategic level for everybody to be aligned. Right. So once you have that, the fact is, as you are a growing company, you scale up, don't have time, do not really have time… the tech team didn't have really the time to build the product, ship the product, take a technical debt and also take into account something to reduce the carbon footprint. So for a long time, it was kind of a failure to add some green initiatives to the backlog. Something I learned is adding some green initiatives to the backlog is the failing mode. You should be able to initiative into the existing backlog. And the first thing is to work with the teams is to come up with the optimizations. So optimizations pay for the business. That's the first thing. So if you have optimizations, if you have your website that respects the providers, for example, it's good for the SEO, it's good for the user conversion. So you can show the business your optimization strategies. Link to the ARR of the subscription number of the user that will convert it to buy a product, to use your service more so you can showcase that your optimization is aligned with the business. Right. When taking the example of the cloud migration, for example, is to show that the existing is very complicated, it is costing us. So the hidden cost that we have with the existing systems and to show the return of investment with the migration to the cloud. So it is the same thing. And it is to make the business case of when you can make the business case and for the rest, as it's the whole company initiative, to show that you are working towards the goal of reducing carbon footprint.Gael Duez 40:42If I understand well here, there are two main takeaways of what you've just shared with us. One is optimization will pay for decarbonization. And I would love to comment on this one. And the second one was do not try to create a separate track, a separate program about sustainability. Just add it as a new criteria in the definition of dawn or a new type of task or sprints in your backlog. But do not try to run something separately, which is, as far as I know, kind of now a state of the art approach. Also, when it comes to cybersecurity or accessibility, for instance, don't try to create things on their own. So same applies to sustainability, am I right?Ludi Akue 41:33Yeah, you are correct. You need to shift left on sustainability.Gael Duez 41:39When Ludi mentioned in our previous talk that there is a sustainability manager, or at least a sustainably reference at Lunii, was it the way you were organized at .eco? Did you have someone kind of running the show? Or did you have some sustainable reference in the different teams? How did you make sure that the key results, we're not talking about the overall strategy, but the day to day operations embedded in the sustainability goals.Owen Rogers 42:13We're a small organization, so there's not the same level of challenge associated with communicating and disseminating these types of objectives throughout the organization. In general, we have a set of KPIs around impact that are pretty well broadly understood. We review them on a monthly basis, along with how we're tracking towards our other goals for the organization. So I think it's pretty front and center for our team.Gael Duez 42:45Would you be able to share this KPI? Not the numbers, but what they are?Owen Rogers 42:50Well, I think the main one in terms of climate impact is our overall carbon footprint reduction target for our fiscal year. So again, we're aiming for another 4% reduction from our baseline target. We also have an objective to register through SBTI. And one thing that we have achieved recently, which is not directly related to climate, but all kinds of plays together, is that we are now B Corp Certified. We will be certified as a B Corp. And that touches on a lot of different pillars around sustainability.Gael Duez 43:29So if I understand it well, it was a very bottom up approach. You're a small team, so the communication was pretty straightforward the moment you had the right goals and not that much of an issue on how to incentivize people. Ludi, if I get it right, it was more a top down approach and your organization was scaling at the time where you were trying to reduce your environmental footprint. So what about the human side of this? Did you face challenges to get the sustainable angle adopted? How did you convince people to join?Ludi Akue 44:10Yeah, so we have these goals, these top down goals, but I think in the same test, even if you have 100 people, you have the people who were at the company at that moment were really aligned in terms of their own values. So you have these top down goals, but you also have a bottom of approach. Like the teams were responsible for their key results and their key initiatives that should align with the goal, like, because they are doing the work, so they know where to look at. And something that really works, in my opinion, is having a sustainability manager reference. I think it's something really powerful because she did a lot of training. So first, the whole organization has champions into the teams. So every department has sustainable champions. And the champions help spread the world, spread the culture, spread the training, the information. The challenge was not on the human side, the challenge was on the workload side. Picture, scale up, growing fast. We need to build 10,000 things in parallel. And we want teams to focus on sustainability. That's not going to happen.Gael Duez 45:41And how did you manage to get some positive arbitrage towards sustainability.Ludi Akue 45:47We learned to make it right at the executive committee level. We needed to come up with priorities first to tell the teams that, okay, now we don't have 10,000 priorities to chase. You have five ones. And sustainability is one of them. So make room for that. So when we started to have those ok in place and to have these priority likes, every executive committee member has the priority to make sustainability happen.Gael Duez 46:22I've got one last question. What about the trend that you see in our industry? And for that, it's very interesting to see that you've got two different perspectives. Because, Ludi, now you don't work for Lunii anymore, you're at Bpifrance and you see dozens of different startups, scale ups, companies, and you've still got this sustainable young angle at heart. So I'd like to ask you the question first. What is the trend that you see today regarding digital sustainability?Ludi Akue 46:55What I'm saying is sustainability is not anymore an option. It's not. I can build my company and I will figure out that later.Gael Duez 47:08Can I borrow your statement that sustainability is no longer an option? To make it the title of the episode?Ludi Akue 47:18With great pleasure.Gael Duez 47:21And what about you, Owen? You're in the heart of the web hosting industry in particular. More generally, is the digital technology sector sustainably an option?Owen Rogers 47:35I think that for the time being, it is an important consideration for anybody looking to get into the technology space, whether they're launching a new business or an organization, is to think about how they can do so in the most sustainable way possible. At a certain point in time, I don't think it's going to matter. I think that with the rapid decarbonization of our electricity grid that we're not too far away from a scenario where most data centers are going to be powered using renewable energy, or at least low carbon energy. But I think that we have a role to accelerate that transition as much as possible by helping to educate the general public that their choices matter and that there are options out there that will reduce their climate impact and it won't cost the earth that there are cost effective solutions out there. One of the KPIs that I didn't talk about earlier that we have established for ourselves is the proportion of people using eco domains that are using sustainable web hosting. So on an annual basis we go and evaluate every .eco website and run it against the green web, check from Green Web Foundation to see whether or not they're using sustainable hosting. And what we're seeing is year over year growth pretty significantly. I believe that last year we saw an increase from 33% to 40%. Now, some of that is hopefully due to our education, but I think a lot of it is actually due to the changes that are happening in the overall industry where more and more hosts and data centers are working on ensuring that they offer a sustainable solution to their customers.Gael Duez 49:43So that's excellent news, because once we will have achieved decarbonizing the data centers on the energy consumption angle, we will have to open the even more complex and complicated question of embedded carbon and making sure that we use equipment as long as we can and not change them every five or six years. But that's a different debate.Ludi Akue 50:10Yeah, but it is the... I think that it's... When we are looking at the statistics, it's the huge problem ahead. It's a huge problem you need to tackle. Like, we went talking about community, we also have. We are also responsible not to like having heavy websites, heaven applications that will need people to change their mobile phone, for example. So we have many things to do on that side too. And for me, the end device is where the problem meets the core problem. It is something we need to fix what we can fix, the decarbonization, like you are talking about, Owen, to move to the real problem. The real problem is there. The end devices and the raw materials also. I mean, together.Gael Duez 51:16Yeah, agree. And that's true that with your angle of being someone who also had to produce hardware, you've got this, I would say some awareness about the fact that end user equipment still accounts for the largest part of the overall digital sector, carbon footprint. It's true that with an episode with a CTO, we tend to focus on how to decarbonize a tech stack, and how to actually reduce the environmental footprint of the tech stack. But if you look at the entire digital sector, the data centers and networks are not the places where the majority of the impacts happen. It's still a very significant chunk of these impacts. But the end user equipment is even worse, that's for sure.Owen Rogers 52:08I'm optimistic that that's what's coming next is that we'll see a real revolution in terms of e-waste management and like a cradle to grave approach with regard to electronics manufacturing because of the fact that they're. They're full of valuable minerals and it's... At a certain point it's going to be a lot more cost effective to reuse those minerals than it is to continue to extract it. I'm on a bit of an optimistic kick right now because I've been reading Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie, who I think would be a fantastic person for you to invite on the podcast. I know she's been doing a bit of the podcast tour lately, but I think it is important for us to ensure that we're also telling positive and optimistic stories about our future because it's too easy to get drawn into some of the fear and negativity around climate change.Gael Duez 53:11So two fun facts when I'm seriously considering, but I don't know if I can afford her, but to have Hannah Ritchie as a keynote speaker, or at least as maybe a keynote speaker. I would like to thank you again, both of you, to join, to make the effort to find a way to accommodate our different time zones and to be that precise when it comes to the goals, what you did and what you didn't do, and the process and the the human side of things as well. So thanks a lot for joining. It was a pleasure to have you on the show.Ludi Akue 53:51Thank you, Gael.Owen Rogers 53:52Thank you and thank you both. Thank you, Ludi. Great to meet you.Ludi Akue 53:55Yeah, great to meet you too.Gael Duez 53:59Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode! If you enjoyed it, please share it on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Twitter (if you are still there)! We are an independent media and word of mouth is the only way to get more listeners. I don’t ask you to rate it 5 stars on Spotify or Apple podcast because of course you already did it, didn’t you?  In our next episode we will talk about Japan, not because the country used to be super dear to my heart. Yes, before the K-pop wave, another generation - mine - discovered Japanese animation and was crazy about it. Anyway, we won’t talk about manga but how a super techno-centric country is now considering sustainability and the potential limits that the ongoing ecological crises might create to our digital world. A fascinating discussion with 2 experts who have been living there for ages: Paul Beddie and Trista Bridges.Stay tuned.  BTW, Green IO is a podcast and much more, so visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. The next one is in London on September 19th. Early bird tickets are not available anymore but … you can still get one of the 90 free tickets for Green IO listeners using the voucher GREENIOVIP. I’m looking forward to meeting you there, to help you - fellow responsible technologists - build a greener digital world, one byte at a time [Roxane’s voice]❤️ 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. 

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