00:00:05 Pini Reznik

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Grin.eco Podcast. My name is Sara, I'm the co founder and today my guest is Pini, the CEO and co founder at re:cinq. How are you doing Pini? Oh, I'm good. Thank you for invitation. Great to have you here. So before we begin, I would like to ask you about your background, you are the CEO, but you're also a speaker about sustainability in IT. So I'd like to ask you a little bit about yourself. So I'm coming from technology. I finished my computer science degree in end of nineties. So doing it for a while. software development, infrastructure last 10 years before re:cinq, I was co founder and, CTO and all kind of other positions in container solutions, which is cloud native consultancy.

00:00:50 Sara Pawlikowska

And I also wrote a book, behind me called Cloud Native Transformation, for O'Reilly. So basically I'm a software [00:01:00] engineer, and moving from engineering into sustainability these days with re:cinq. So then what is the mission of re:cinq?

00:01:08 Sara Pawlikowska

the mission is reduce emissions in IT. And, there's quite a lot of them. And it's, IT is currently producing more emissions than airlines, anywhere between 3 to 5%. Which is more than about 2. 5 percent of the worldwide emissions. so there is a lot to reduce, actually. So you already mentioned, the impact of IT sector, but what are some of the most carbon heavy parts within that sector then?

00:01:35 Pini Reznik

obviously it's easy to say it's AI, right? And I think it would be correct. And especially looking into the future, AI will be a significant growth factor. But at this point, most of the IT is not AI yet, right? It's just traditional servers and massive data centers all over the world. Just generally doing IT stuff, web servers, banking systems.

00:01:58 Pini Reznik

Effectively, [00:02:00] every sector today is an IT sector. Somewhere behind, there is always set of large IT applications, doing a lot of work. Unfortunately, in a very, inefficient way. Because the general utilization of data centers today, the average is about 15 to 20%.most of the emissions are actually coming from servers we are not using.

00:02:23 Pini Reznik

but the future is mostly around AI, That's where the massive growth in compute is going to happen. But also, all the industry, there's still Digitalizing themselves, they will continue introducing more and more IT services and IT tools, and that will continue expanding.

00:02:45 Pini Reznik

Interesting. But so then what could be the role of AI in sustainability? Is it all bad then? Oh, no. AI is always complicated, right? There is nothing that is purely bad or good. [00:03:00] AI is obviously serving amazingly positive values. goals like, healthcare right? So there's a lot of opportunities for AI to improve our lives.and we can actually use AI itself to reduce the emissions in IT sector itself.

00:03:15 Pini Reznik

So we actually can teach the AI to find the inefficiencies and help the developers to do a better job in, in reducing emissions. So in this way. AI is never good or bad or anything, a tool is a tool in the hands of the user, right? So we as a company definitely going to use AI to teach it to find where our customers can reduce emissions, and then without actually reducing the, the customer value.

00:03:43 Pini Reznik

AI is definitely a hot topic these days, but as a side question, because we've mentioned that previously as well. So what about electric cars? Because I know that this is a big topic for many people. So what is your take on that? So [00:04:00] I think the most common challenge people present on electric cars is that the actual production of the cars, especially the batteries is generating more emissions for all kinds of different things than non electric cars. But this is very unreasonable take on this. it's probably true. I actually don't know. I'm not a scientist. I'm not A batteries engineer, so I assume they are using correct numbers. The point is that we are in the middle of evolution we are moving away from one source of energy to another source of energy and there is serious of intermediate steps that we have to take and Evolution if you read actually Darwin and I have a book behind me about, the evolution of species there is never like a step from legs to wings or the other way around, right?

00:04:48 Pini Reznik

It's always through the series of long series of intermediate steps that have to be, each one of these steps has to be beneficial for the species using it. So [00:05:00] electric cars in a way is exactly like that. It's an intermediate step, especially battery driven electric cars. It's an intermediate step that helps us to disconnect from actually burning fuel to electricity.

00:05:14 Pini Reznik

Once we're in electricity, then we can generate greener electricity, right? We have a potential to improve in a centralized way. all the cars, right? So obviously the electricity that is produced in some countries is not very green these days. So when you are charging your car with a coal based electricity, it's not very green. But once we introduce more green energy, it more or less automatically makes the cars greener while the normal petrol cars, there will be no impact on them. So in my mind, yeah, maybe this specific generation of electric cars are not the solution, but they are absolutely essential step towards, a much greener future.

00:05:57 Pini Reznik

And the reason people are buying electric cars today [00:06:00] is not to save the planet, but because they are better. And if we will try to convince people to buy electric cars for altruistic reasons, there is very little chance we will succeed. We just need to build better things that take us a step closer to the goal.

00:06:16 Pini Reznik

other argument that I'd like to, address in that sort of discussion about electric cars is that, some people argue that this is, putting the efforts in the wrong place, as we should be rebuilding the entire infrastructures instead of rebuilding the cars.

00:06:32 Pini Reznik

I think probably the biggest change in transportation that I can imagine will be not related to either of those but to self driving cars. The moment self driving cars will be introduced, the number of cars will shrink dramatically and the way they will look like and behave will be dramatically different, right?

00:06:50 Pini Reznik

So most of you go on the street and cars just standing there and doing nothing. So we need parking spots, we need chargers, we need all those things. There's no need for any of that. [00:07:00] So we can continue investing in infrastructure. We can invest in trains and,US for example can definitely invest a bit in trains, yeah, compared to any other developed country. But, I really think that the biggest investment should be done in self driving cars. Because that will just remove 90 percent of the cars from our streets, while allowing us to arrive to our destination in much better ways.

00:07:26 Sara Pawlikowska

On the other side, long, journeys, but definitely I would say we probably need to invest more in trains because they are much greener. And there is this big open question about flights. I guess electric airplanes is far away from us. Still, it's not something that we can expect in a decade or something.

00:07:45 Pini Reznik

But I actually don't have an answer for that one, but I think with, local infrastructure, if I would be in charge, I would be investing in regulation and infrastructure specifically focusing on self driving cars and on reduction [00:08:00] in cars numbers instead of, anything else. I would assume a hundred percent of self driving cars will be electric.

00:08:06 Sara Pawlikowska

So you mentioned that the electric cars are a intermediate step to a bigger change. what do you think are some of the green transitions that we actually really need right now?

00:08:18 Pini Reznik

there is a really good book from Bill Gates,about this. He's putting five, areas of, carbon emissions, which is transportation, heating and cooling, cement and, so construction and, Energy production and another one.

00:08:33 Pini Reznik

there is a lot of investment currently in greener cement and steel production. Those are specifically two massive ones. I think more than anything, obviously, it's about green energy. I think for whatever reason, potentially good reasons, we stopped investing in nuclear energy, which probably would be solving a lot of carbon emissions problems. And you can see on France, France is very green, not because of solar wind, but because [00:09:00] of, of nuclear. And of course there is a risk of, nuclear disasters and they did happen twice.but other disasters happen too. And we don't stop progress just because we're afraid of people dying because without that people are dying too.

00:09:15 Pini Reznik

there must be some sort of trade off. So nuclear energy is, by far probably the easiest way to achieve non carbon energy on large scale. green energy production, I guess it's an obvious thing. We just need more of it. no surprises there, majority of our emissions are coming from energy. Also transportation and heating and cooling. Although a lot of it is not done using electric power, but they should be shifting towards electric power and then we can generate more and more cleaner energy and then gradually we can move to much cleaner world.

00:09:51 Pini Reznik

I like that answer. But so going back to the IT sector specifically, I would like to ask you about circular economy. How do you [00:10:00] see that concept being applied in the IT sector in terms of, for example, waste management? Yeah. it's not applied enough as, as anywhere else. generally speaking, the easiest thing to say is just not happening enough. Although there is a lot of efforts. obviously there is quite significant investment in collecting old hardware and recycling it. But I think this is not the main point.

00:10:23 Pini Reznik

it's super important not to throw it in, in dumps, right? Because it degrades and, pollutes in all kind of different ways.there are two things that should happen in IT to make the economy much more circular. One is we should extend the life cycle of our hardware. So right now we are replacing servers and especially the devices, the mobile phones, for example, mobile phone, 85 percent or so of its carbon emissions are coming from embodied carbon that is, produced during the production of the device and not during the use.

00:10:57 Pini Reznik

So by extending the life of the mobile phone [00:11:00] from, let's say, average two years today to three or four or five years, You directly save emissions and not just emissions, but variety of different other wastes And just save money, right? So the same thing should happen in servers in data centers and generally in IT infrastructure We just need to extend the life of our hardware.

00:11:21 Pini Reznik

But that's not just on the users of that hardware. The second trend should be that the vendors should start producing hardware that is extendable and, you can fix it. For example, this phone, this is three years old iPhone. It looks exactly the same as the new one. The problem is for example, if I want to replace the camera, with slightly better camera, don't know why would they want to do that?

00:11:43 Pini Reznik

Because this one is. Amazing, right? But let's say I do want to replace a camera. There is no way except buying a new phone. And the vendors of this hardware, in this case it's Apple, they're choosing this design, right? There is no reason to choose this design, which is, [00:12:00] non extendable, right? In the past, when we bought a computer, we could replace memory.

00:12:08 Pini Reznik

Now I have a, I'm speaking with you from Apple. laptop, if I want to add memory to it, I can't, there is no way, So it means that I need to go to the store and buy for two or three thousand euro new laptop. If I need another 16 GB RAM to have a normal conversation on video. This is absolutely unacceptable, right?

00:12:28 Sara Pawlikowska

There is no reason for that. I understand that it's easier for Apple to produce devices that are designed and, and optimized for specific use. But it means that we're throwing away perfectly functional and useful devices and replacing them with new ones without any reason. So we need to change to the architecture that is extendable. So we can replace components of those devices and we need to extend the life span of each of those devices. So where are we currently on [00:13:00] transition to that? So in terms of regulations, are there any specific sustainable regulations or do we need more of that?

00:13:08 Pini Reznik

actually there is some companies taking steps voluntarily. For example, Amazon recently announced that they will extend the life span of their servers from five to six years, I think, and they saved $900M, right? Another company, I keep forgetting their name, but they extended the life cycle to 10 years and they found that there is a specific component in the server that breaks all the time.

00:13:29 Pini Reznik

So they replaced that component and then they can run the same server for 10 years. this is just good business, right? People just using the same stuff it just saves money. Otherwise in EU, there is quite strong regulation. specifically on carbon emissions, there's,actually it's wider ESG regulation to report on ESG.

00:13:49 Pini Reznik

I think there is not enough, pressure still. So there is increasing pressure from the government. especially in the EU there is the green deal that is converted to 55 [00:14:00] program and all kind of other digitalization programs. So there's increasing pressure on vendors to, to build greener stuff basically.

00:14:11 Pini Reznik

and to start reporting on their carbon emissions and generally on other, climate changing. things and also on, social and governance. So the entire ESG thing, anyway, there is government pressure, but until the government starts introducing carbon tax or some sort of fines for not reporting in time or not reducing enough, until that happens, there is no strong incentives for companies to actually reduce emissions.

00:14:40 Pini Reznik

there must be a stick, not just a carrot.

00:14:43 Sara Pawlikowska

But it can actually be good for business apparently.

00:14:47 Pini Reznik

it's absolutely obvious that if you don't buy a thing, then you save the money on that thing, right? if you over provisioned your servers and you have three times more capacity in the cloud than you actually need, You're paying for it, [00:15:00] right?

00:15:00 Pini Reznik

It's not just about emissions. You're paying for three times more than you need and you can save it by, yeah, just shut it down. That's that simple. It's not that simple. It's almost that simple. Another thing that I'm curious about is how does, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but because of the raising numbers of remote jobs and the home offices, do you think that there is some sort of trend? So maybe we're saving on the emissions from public transport or cars, but there is more energy consumption. I think this is one of those things, and it's just one example of this kind of thinking. Wait, how can I know? I cannot know this, right? Somebody has to actually calculate the difference. And unfortunately, there are not enough tools available to calculate the difference. Because what often happens also in IT, I see people that they say, You need to run [00:16:00] microservices, whatever they are.

00:16:00 Pini Reznik

You need to run a day during the night, right? All kinds of different strategies to reduce emissions. But actually, unless you measure, you cannot say for sure this helps. So I absolutely cannot say if working from home generates more emissions than working from office. I can guess, if it's centralized, I assume an office building would have more centralized meaning, typically more optimal way of running things. On the other side, we already have home offices, right? I already have a home. So I guess the extra energy consumption of being in this office is marginal. So it's hard to say, I think, unless you actually calculate it in detail. And the calculation is also complicated because it depends are you driving an electric car? Did you charge it in the, during the summer from solar? panels or not. Is it heat pumps in the office or air conditioning [00:17:00] or gas heating? you cannot just say that one is better than the other.

00:17:05 Sara Pawlikowska

do you think we actually need all those numbers? All those estimations? we have a lot of tools to measure different things, like carbon percentages. But does that really help that much? Or is it another carbon tunnel vision?

00:17:19 Pini Reznik

Again, I'm coming from IT, so the easiest thing for me to do is to talk about IT. Let's say you have a development team of 100 people and they're building stuff, right? So let's say it's a web store that sells, clothes. now, there are unlimited amount of ways to build software. And then you have, A bill on the public cloud and you have all kinds of expenses and other things on,I'm running the team effectively. the first question, do you actually want to reduce emissions?

00:17:46 Pini Reznik

Because if you don't, then why would you care? Then the next question, what do you care about? So majority of teams like that would care more than anything else about speed of delivery to the customer because the [00:18:00] agility is the new norm and faster you deliver to customer, more features you deliver to customers, then potentially you are more competitive against the other similar stores, right?

00:18:12 Pini Reznik

the most valuable thing the development team can do is to deliver faster and make sure that things are not falling apart too much. Just enough, right? So then you have a choice to basically, go and optimize your system, but when you optimize the system, it doesn't deliver value to customers.

00:18:29 Pini Reznik

It just saves something. Do they want to save? Do they want to save 10-20-30K euro on the cloud, bill and half of their carbon emissions? Arguably, they don't care. Not that they don't care at all. It's more like they care more about delivering value to the customer and that defines their behavior.

00:18:50 Pini Reznik

So unless you put in front of them the numbers, the cost and the emissions and other different factors, they will continue [00:19:00] behaving like that. So if you don't measure. If you don't know that, yes, you're delivering another button in your web store and people can put, another t shirt in the basket slightly faster, but in the same time, you generated five tons of emissions in the last week.

00:19:20 Pini Reznik

This is something that people have to know. they cannot just say, I didn't know, it's not my business, right? It has to be their business. So we do have to have numbers. I think without having numbers, there is no even point to expect people to reduce anything.

00:19:37 Sara Pawlikowska

if you could have unlimited resources and whatever you need to make a certain change, what change would you like to see the most?

00:19:44 Pini Reznik

okay, I'llrephrase it in a more convenient for me way, right? It's, obviously I would invest in more different energy and, other things. But I think other people are doing this. I think at this [00:20:00] point, so if I would focus on short and medium term, what is the biggest blocker right now?

00:20:05 Pini Reznik

I think more than anything is education and,people are not aware of what's going on, right? So it becomes philosophical discussion. Do we need to deal with climate change or we don't?almost every event I'm going to, every conference, there is always this person that I'm starting to talk to them and they're like, I don't believe in climate change.

00:20:28 Pini Reznik

Wait, what do you mean that you don't believe in climate change? You believe in gravity, you believe in, other scientific things. It's not a matter of belief, it's a matter of, science, right? you don't have to believe in it. You need to understand that this is, happening.

00:20:44 Pini Reznik

And,even if scientists are wrong,we still cannot use carbon-based energy forever. We still have to move away from it. Maybe not as fast as we're doing now. Maybe another 50 years later, maybe it's not that urgent, but [00:21:00] we have to do it anyway. So why wouldn't we spend our resources to actually moving to non carbon energy as soon as possible?

00:21:06 Pini Reznik

but there is not enough education and awareness around this topic. And I think I would do that because once people are aware and they know the numbers and they understand their impact, I think many of them will act. And once people start to talk to you, by the way, a lot of people are already acting, so it's not like there is no awareness at all. but I think. The way to speed up the transition is to help people to understand what's going on and encourage them to actually take actions. So more than anything I would say, awareness and education.