The Lean Green Tech Machine - How can software companies reduce their carbon footprint?

Reducing carbon emissions and being totally 'green' is no easy feat in the tech industry. From hardware to servers — there are many emitters that we just can't remove.

However, that doesn't mean that achieving net-zero is impossible. In this episode, we chat with one of our Technical Architects, Angus Goldsmith, on how tech businesses can go about reducing their emissions and giving something back to the environment.

We'll find out:
✔ If tech is really that bad for the environment?
✔ Steps companies can be taking to reduce their emissions - both online and offline
✔ Insights into the future of tech and its impact on the world around us

Interviewer: Amy Burchill  https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-burchill-64b53361/

Guest speaker: Angus Goldsmith  https://www.linkedin.com/in/angus-goldsmith-1567b3105/

Podcast produced by Let’s Talk Video Production: https://letstalkvideoproduction.com

Transcript

Hello, and another warm welcome to the Big Bright Podcast. Thank you to everyone who has been listening so far, we reached 25 episodes a couple of weeks ago, we plan to just keep on going. So do subscribe. And if you fancy it, give us a review. It helps more people find our podcasts and gives them the opportunity to learn more about marketing, design tech and everything in between.

So today, I'm delighted to welcome our very own Angus Goldsmith, who is a technical architect for Dash. He's been with us for a few years now, and recently has been looking into how our company can reduce emissions and become more eco-friendly. This is no easy task in the tech industry. But considering the news we've been hearing recently, and the pressures on businesses to reduce their environmental impact, we thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss the issues and give software companies tips on what they can be doing to reduce their CO2 and more.

So welcome, Angus!

Hello. Nice to be here.

Thank you so much for joining me today. So to begin, tell our listeners a little bit about your journey into tech and how you became to be a technical architect at Bright.

Both my parents were into this kind of job. As a child growing up, you play games, you just want to make them do what you want to do. And it turns out, the best way of doing that is by programming. Before you know it, you're doing a career in it. So I ended up at Bright. I've been here for about six years now. I've done lots of different things in Bright, we've got a few different products. Over the years, I've become more interested in the higher-level things, not just programming on the floor, but also things like the environmental factors, other high-level concerns that you kind of have to think about when you're in this architect position.
 
And what exactly is a technical architect?

Someone who is responsible for the various strategic technical aspects, of could be software, it could be other things. So things like security, environmental impact, just anything that isn't quite in the nitty-gritty of how a solution works, that kind of thing you need to be thinking about as well, someone needs to think of the long term. So in five years, is the stuff we're doing now going to put us in good stead?

So climate change is incredibly prominent right now, what does the tech landscape look like at the moment in terms of stepping up to the challenges?

I think at the moment, the tech industry is responsible for maybe about 4% of emissions, and there is a lot of worry around tech. Is tech going to cause tonnes of global warming? And the good news is they it hasn't really been rising. So even though there have been more tech that has actually enabled some efficiencies, that means that the kind of consumption of energy of tech hasn't increased as much. It's not a massive problem. But obviously, everyone needs to do their bit. I'm sure you have seen recently there's everyone's really on this green game. I walked down the street yesterday to a guitar lesson. I saw two adverts, so Sky was one of them is obviously kind of a tech company, they employ a lot of developers, it was literally about being green and saving the planet, all that kind of thing. So these companies are really starting to take it into account now and start focusing on it. Whether it's just their marketing, or whether they're actually doing anything I don't know, but they're clearly thinking about it.
So what are the biggest emitters of co2 in the tech industry?

For tech companies like ours, which is a digital company, we don't have any physical products, which a lot of tech companies don't. Actually, most of the emissions are kind of overheads in terms of employees, office space, so all the energy usage and commuting is a massive one, I think I read a statistic where the average person commuting to work emits 3.2 tonnes of co2, it's quite a lot. And in comparison, we're looking at server emissions. So that's the obvious thing where tech companies have lots of servers, a big server might emit 160 kilograms a year. So, for example, the number of servers we have on Dash is probably emitting less than one person's average commute. Obviously, at the moment, people aren't commuting, which is great.

So for digital companies, the majority of emissions are going to be stuff that is not tech company-specific. Every office company is going to have these sorts of emissions. Obviously, for stuff like techs, like phones or the actual hardware, then there's going to be emissions from production of that as well. So all the way through from extracting the resources up to the factory, there's going to be a lot more. Thankfully, we just have to worry about our servers and the people in our office.

Going back to commuting. Obviously during pandemic, and as a result of that, more companies are doing this hybrid working thing. How much do you think it will affect the emissions that businesses are giving out?

For businesses like ours and other digital businesses, one of the biggest factors is people's travel. Obviously, different countries, different locations have better travel links. Obviously, public transport is better than driving. In places like America, it's going to be really high where they drive everywhere, and they have big commutes. Whereas if you've got people taking the training, that's going to be better. But just having less people in offices is kind of one of the biggest things that a lot of companies can do, which they've been forced to do. And now are thinking more actively about doing even when they don't need to. So it's going to make a good difference.

What about zoom calls and stuff? Does that directly link back to co2 emissions?

Obviously, when you're using zoom, you're connecting to a server that's doing its processing, and that will be using electricity. The fact that the servers exist, they've had emissions go into their production, so that will very, very slightly increase emissions. But obviously, if you consider what people were doing before that, where they were taking a train to different locations, even flying to different countries, probably the net effect of people realising that actually, you can do remote calls and not need to travel to places probably outweighs the kind of people doing zoom, when before they would have been in person. And especially because if they're in the office, then they will be using energy. And they'll be commuting. It massively is outweighed by the amount that's been saved and kind of other areas.

So let's get into what software companies can be doing to reduce their emissions.

Again, specifically for software companies and people that run servers, the first thing is, obviously, the less servers you have, the less emissions you're going to have. And you want that anyway, because it's tied to financial reward or costs, as in, the more servers you have, the more it costs you. So a lot of companies obviously already be trying to reduce their number of servers or keep it to a minimum because it costs them more money to have more.

Hopefully, a lot of companies will be kind of doing this already by default. But then within that, there's actually a big difference between on-premise servers versus cloud servers. If you have your own servers, basically due to efficiencies of energy and also utilisation, they're going to basically account for emissions because a big cloud provider, they can use energy much more efficiently for a start. And then secondly because of the way kind of virtualization works, and the cloud works, when their servers sat there, it's actually something like 65% utilisation, which is quite high, whereas the statistic I saw for on-premise servers is about 13%. So that means that you've got this thing there, and you've paid the cost of all the emissions to create it and to run it, but you're actually only using 13% of its potential, whereas in a cloud environment because they can pull everything together. And they can split up usage and get multiple people using the same machine, they can get 65% out of it. So the emissions are about half according to one research paper that I read, that's obviously really good. There are some cases where you can't be in the cloud and doesn't make sense to do so. But if you're not in the cloud and you can be, there's just another reason to do it.

In what instances, would it not be a good idea to go to the cloud?

There are some specialists use cases where you might have specialist hardware that cloud providers don't have. In the past, and things like regulatory requirements that a lot of the cloud providers now have their own special thing. So if you need to fit some regulations, they will have a version of their cloud that fits that. There are less and less reasons every day not to do it.

I think it's technically cheaper on paper to have your own server. You pay for it once, and you have it for let's say, five years, if you have that server on the cloud for five years, it could cost more, but obviously then you're managing it, you have to pay a person then to manage this thing. But yeah, some companies will have worked out their usage. And they might have extreme usage so that it makes sense for them for a financial point of view, at least. But yeah, it will be greener to use the clouds. And actually, most of the cloud providers run on fully green energy. So you actually can be happy that while servers are running, they're not causing any emissions. You can't do anything about the fact that creating hardware emits things. And that's the eternal ethical problem of tech. And the same for consumer tech. You might be into ethically buying things. But as soon as you buy tech, it uses a lot of emissions, it's probably done in not very good conditions and all that kind of thing. You can't get away from that. But at least Google, Microsoft, a lot of the Amazon regions, (not of them) are run on green energy, so you can kind of be happy about that as well.

What other things can companies be doing? Particularly if they have to use hardware? What can they be doing to balance that out a bit?

Yeah, so specifically, with the usage of satellite servers. It coming back to this utilisation thing we're talking about, try and get as much utilisation as possible, which is good for your bottom line as well. Don't have your servers sat around doing nothing. There are various modern things like auto-scaling, basically only filling up servers when you need them either based on kind of usage patterns that you know, so you might know Friday's busy. So rather than having servers around all the time that can handle the amount of traffic you got on a Friday, you can automate it so that the servers only get put on Friday. You're only paying the financial cost and the carbon costs on Friday. There's also stuff like on-demand computing now. So stuff like function as a service, Amazon lambda where there's nothing happening until someone makes a request. You're only paying the financial and the carbon cost when you exactly need to.
Obviously, there's buying locally and stuff like that, do you have any other ideas for what they could be doing to reduce their co2 emissions.

One of the biggest things, and what a lot of people doing now is the remote thing. Reducing commuting and the same for business transport, trying to cut that down and using zoom.

Having less people in the office, I guess, uses less energy from the office, but more at home. So you could kind of argue that that's maybe a moot point. And then there's all sorts of other things.

So we've got things as you mentioned buying locally, that's a kind of an interesting one, where you would imagine like, oh, it has less distance to travel, so it must be greener. But due to economies of scale, the amount of energy used to produce something locally is often a lot higher, because they don't get those massive efficiencies. Let's take farming, for example, maybe you've got this massive, massive farm in somewhere that's not in the country, and then you're doing like a local small-batch farming. The amount of energy per tonne of produce is going to be so much higher for the local one. And also then the kind of distribution networks obviously really optimised for these large companies. So in lot of cases, from a purely green standpoint, buying local is not actually better. But there are a lot of other ethical reasons to buy local, the obvious case of Amazon where they you know, Jeff Bezos makes tonnes of money, the workers not treated very well.

So you probably don't want to buy for Amazon for ethical reasons. I'm not saying don't buy locally, but just if you're looking at from a purely green perspective, it's not a clear-cut, obvious thing where it's definitely always better. 

Yeah, that makes sense. And I know another thing that we do here at Bright, in particular, is we offer different sorts of pensions. I know that we do have a green pension scheme.

With all this stuff, that the report, one of the main bits of advice is kind of where you put your money. If you've got lots of money, and it's all in a bank that invest in fossil fuels, then obviously, you're indirectly contributing to that. So yeah, as you say, Bright has pension where one of the options is an ethical green pension fund, putting your money in there, you're obviously helping the green cause as it were, because obviously.

If you have a company and you're offering pension funds, you can make sure that you have a green option available, or you want to be extreme, that could be the default. And it's the same for where the company stores its money. So the bank account the company uses, ideally you could find a company that has good green credentials. I'm sure you've seen in various cities around the world. So we have one in Brighton there's a branch of a bank, which has big spray painted things outside it saying stop supporting fossil fuels, maybe don't put your money in those kind of banks. Yeah, you don't want to spoil those kinds of things.

Yeah, the money they will be going to like green causes and helping plant trees and all that sort of thing.

It won't be invested in oil companies and gas companies. I'm sure you can also get ones that are very specific to investing in companies which are explicitly green. I think, in general, the green ones are just basically not the bad thing. Having one that's specifically invested in explicitly like green companies would be quite a narrow portfolio and might be quite risky to have a pension.

Okay. It's definitely something that people can look into if they're interested. . It would  be rude not to talk about our own software. Bright is a digital asset management company and you work for Dash one of our products, do you believe digital asset management can play a part in reducing emissions within a business?

Yeah, a lot of technology can I think and so for DAM specifically, the kind of things it replaces are, there's less emails, surprisingly, emails use quite a lot of energy. I think there was one stat somewhere about emails that wasn't quite true you might have heard of saying they're really ridiculously bad. They're not that bad. But they do use quite a lot of emissions up. Again, any kind of meetings between people that you can avoid, like having kind of sharing functionalities and calaboration functionalities within the software like within Dash will reduce those kind of need to do that. And just general efficiencies, like cutting out printing our paper and sending bits of paper to people, the general thing of tech as a whole is efficiency. And DAM is another example of making a process more efficient, which almost in all cases will reduce the emissions.

Going back to what I was initially talking about, where there's a kind of fear, and there is still I think, of having read a few articles recently of this kind of fear of tech and is it causing global warming basically on being a massive contributor. And I think it's this kind of thing, we're actually technology is making things more efficient. And although the technology itself is emitting things, the processes we had in place before that were emitting even more, and we're even worse. So you've got things like technology, enabling smarter production of goods, so they can actually emit less. Technology being used in smart metres in your home. I constantly get things from my energy provider trying to get me to put a smart metre in and that's an example of technology, reducing emissions. And just generally, the efficiencies you gain from the advances in software and technology kind of outweigh the extra emissions from things like servers and that kind of thing.

So I know you've been working on our environmental policy recently. Could you explain a little bit about that, and maybe what companies could be doing if they want to do a similar thing?

So we've been near the start of this thinking about what we can do here. And the first step is to work out what our missions currently are and where they're coming from. So there's various standards, I think, for these carbon emission reports. And there are companies out there that can help you generate these. So that's what we're currently doing. We are kind of a numerating all our emissions and there are various categories, scopes emissions, so direct, indirect, and then the one after that. So yeah, we've been looking into that recently. And we've found lots of stuff already about our energy usage.

A surprising thing we've found was our servers are using a lot less than we thought compared to our general people usage. And then having done that and gotten that report, we can firstly use that to kind of track our progress and see what we need to do next. These reports are yearly things, they tell you about your previous year of emissions. We can track what we're up to and how we're improving things. Hopefully. You know, you never know, it might go up, because we might have political reasons do that, but we're obviously going to be working to reduce it. And then also, knowing how much we do admit, we can then offset that. So once we receive the report, we will then be able to offset that amount of co2. Again, there are various companies out there for wherever you're based, that can do that for you. And they have lots of different kinds of projects available in different portfolios for things that you can invest in to counteract the co2 you're producing.

Brilliant. Well, I think for my final question, you mentioned earlier that you've been seeing sort of lots of adverts about being greener and stuff, and you don't want to risk sort of like greenwashing. But how important is it you think that companies are transparent about what they're doing or not doing to help this crisis that we're in at the moment?

I know that certain industries and potentially even most industries in the future are required to actually have these carbon reports. That's maybe up to the government to potentially mandate that every company needs to do this and make it publicly available so that everyone can see, are they actually green? Are they just paying lip service? We've even had clients ask for our report before they sign up for our product they want to see. So it's obviously a thing that is massively growing. Recently, the kind of interest in this we've foreseen and we felt this is really good timing, that we're starting to do a report because we want to show people that we are really doing it.

If you actually have proof that you are and you're actually doing it, that's going to be really helpful. Hopefully, legislation will force people to do these reports and improve what they're doing, because that's what we need to happen. Isn't that everyone needs to improve.

Thank you so much for coming to the chat with me today. If was interested in connecting with you or chatting with you. Where can I direct? LinkedIn? I put your LinkedIn link in the podcast notes anyway. But yeah, thank you so much.

It's been amazing.

Thanks for listening to the Big Bright Podcast. Make sure to subscribe to never miss an episode and check out our website at built by bright.com