Understanding technology’s environmental impact
In September the Scottish Tech Army (STA) team was invited to our first in-person event at Codeclan - ‘The Road To Sustainable Software Engineering'. The event was held at CodeClan’s Edinburgh base at the foot of the castle rock. As always, we were warmly welcomed by the CodeClan team.
The session was opened by Melinda Matthews, the outgoing CEO of CodeClan. Melinda is passionate about sustainability and highlighted the fact that we talk about land, trees, and oil but no one ever talks about software’s carbon footprint. On that note, she then introduced the speaker for the event, Eric Zie, Founder and CEO of GoCodeGreen.
GoCodeGreen is an independent climate tech company that is dedicated to measuring the carbon efficiency of software products. The platform is aimed at measuring the carbon impact of technology to help inform changes to reduce this. Ultimately, the company wants to help technologists make greener decisions when building solutions. Its ambition is to decarbonize software and the technology value chain.
As someone who doesn’t come from a technology background or education, I wasn’t sure what this meant for me. Even though I work with the STA and support charities with their technology problems, surely, we are immune or do this already. However, as Melinda highlighted – even my photos need to live somewhere. You forget that electricity and batteries have a carbon footprint.
In his presentation, Eric offered a unique view into sustainable software engineering and how techies can understand the massive impact our solutions can have.
I was surprised as Eric used baby shark as an example of the impact tech can have. With Baby shark ringing in my ears I found out that “The baby shark song was the most viewed video on YouTube with 11 billion views, this created 1.35 million tonnes of CO2. This is the same as the emissions generated by 193,129 passenger vehicles over the course of the year. As someone who listens to music all the time, it was interesting to learn that streaming a viral song on Spotify (‘Drivers License’ by Olivia Rodrigo) created 4,180 tonnes of CO2e in a year, which would need 199,000 trees planted to ensure zero climate impact.
Eric encouraged us to become more green in our digital ways of working and believes this doesn’t have to be a tiresome journey! In reality, approaching the question of sustainability from the start will save tech organizations time and money, as well as going towards reducing their carbon footprint. Eric states “the challenge for GoCodeGreen and ultimately the rest of us is that when you do something that has never been done before, you’ve got to educate and convince people that what you’re doing is right.
Aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals it is clear that GoCodeGreen is leading the industry in offering active solutions to current and outdated technological infrastructure. We all thoroughly enjoyed listening to Eric who spoke so passionately and credibly about creating sustainable software. We hope to see many more organizations follow this mantra and become more green.
As Joanna Allen, our Head of Projects and Programmes said when we left “that will have to be part of the normal development cycle as soon as possible and maybe we need to start lobbying for phones that last longer that 2-3 years”
This event was inspiring, informative, and really well run! Thanks to the CodeClan team. We look forward to your future events CodeClan!
Coming away from this talk, I now realize the importance of thinking more green. I currently have around 2000 photos and 700 videos on my camera roll alone, half of these are most likely accidental screenshots and definitely not needed. So now I urge you to take a proactive response to the climate crisis and reflect on how you as an individual can make a difference.
Written by: Charlotte Canham
Photo by Ian Battaglia on Unsplash