We’re big fans of the work Gael Duez has been doing with the Green IO podcast and conference series. So much so that we last year we attended all three Green IO conferences in Singapore, London, and Paris. So when we were asked if we’d like to do it all over again at the first Green IO conference of 2025 in Singapore it was an easy “yes!”. The event provided a platform for Fershad Irani from our team to speak about the Grid-aware Websites project that we have been working on for the past few months.
What is the Green IO Singapore conference and why were we there?
It’s worth acknowledging that a lot of the digital sustainability conversation remains heavily centered in Europe and the United States. And that, as someone living in Asia, can often mean missing out on certain events and conversations just because the of the time difference. It’d be great to have more happening in the Asia-Pacific region, and we are now starting to see more events and organised movements taking shape.
Last year, Green IO was one of the pioneers in this sense. As the first digital sustainability focused conferences in the region, it proved an invaluable event for responsible technologists in the region. That continued at this year’s event. As the only conference dedicated to digital sustainability in Asia-Pacific, it offers those of us working on digital sustainability in this part of the world to connect with fellow travellers.
This year’s Green IO conference also gave us an opportunity to speak about our Grid-aware Websites project for the first time in public. You can find my slides here: Imagining a grid-aware web
Some key takeaways from Green IO Singapore 2025
This year’s Green IO Singapore conference saw a diverse range of talks covering topics ranging from AI, to Sustainable UX, right through to hardware design, packaging, and disposal. In all, it made for a very interesting day of shared learnings
Reining in the AI beast
Vincent Caldeira’s keynote focused on AI and its thirst for energy, water, and other resources. But rather than spend 40 minutes focusing on doom and gloom, Vincent’s talk shared insightful and useful insights that AI practitioners can begin applying today in order to rein in the resource hungry beast while still enabling the scientific breakthroughs that AI can enable.
One solid takeaway from Vincent’s keynote was just how much AI practitioners can actually do today to reduce the impacts of the models they’re training and running. It feels to me a lot like how we speak about the sustainability of the web as well, where we have of the tools and knowledge today to start making meaningful change.
This was a message that was reiterated by Dr Lawrence Wee of the Singapore Goverment’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). Dr Wee also gave insights into how the Singapore Government is approaching greening information communication technologies (ICT) and AI through a variety of trials, rapid iteration, and dedicated research.
You can find Vincent’s slides here: AI’s energy dilemma: empowering developers for a sustainable future.
And Dr Wee’s slides can be found here: Navigating the twin transformations: AI and sustainability – from large models to green practices
Zombie servers – the low-hanging fruit of IT sustainability
Speaking of taking action, one of my favourite talks of the day was from Accor’s Khang Nguyen Trieu. They spoke about how a recent project to move the hospitality group’s servers to cloud solutions saw a huge reduction in their IT carbon footprint. The project saw around 600 physical server decommissioned. I liked a few things about Khang’s presentation:
- It reiterated a message that Anne Currie and Charles Humble touched on in a recent episode of the Environment Variables podcast that zombie servers – machines that were commissioned once for a particular purpose and have since been forgotten about – are such an easy place to start for any organisation looking to reduce their IT carbon footprint. For Accor’s team, that meant looking at their on-premise systems to find unused machines. For smaller organisations it might mean doing an audit of cloud compute instances to see if any zombies are lurking there.
- Audits like these not only result in carbon savings from compute instances being turned off, but they also result in financial savings as well. The narrative that finops = greenops is one that needs to be pushed further, especially in parts of Asia where carbon reporting might not exist to be a catalyst for companies to reduce their environmental impact.
- Finally, I really appreciated that Accor took the effort to work through their own lifecycle assessment and emissions estimation model rather than just taking raw data from their cloud provider’s dashboard and calling it a day.
You can view Khang’s slide at: Accor case study; a greener IT through migration to the cloud
Product design, packaging, and trash
This year’s Green IO Singapore conference wasn’t just all about technology and code. We got to hear from representative of HewlettPackard (HP) and Razer (yes, the gaming hardware manufacturer) about their own initiatives to embed sustainability as a standard practice in product design, manufacturing, packaging, and even end of life. What was shared were both stories for success, but also tales that paint the picture of a lot of work still to be done to align business models with sustainability practices.
Soo Lin Goh from HP presented: Closing the loop: how your IT devices can drive the circular economy
Kenneth Ng from Razer also shared: Transformative ESG work in manufacturing
Andrew Tay from waste management company KGS also shared the scene in Singapore at the other end of the circular economy. While their presentation had a very local focus, the picture they painted of very limited e-waste recycling rates (60,000 tonnes total e-waste, 6% recycling rate) is probably one that is reflected around the world.
Find Andrew’s slides at: E-waste in Singapore; a dream?
Disclosure and transparency
The day ended with a terrific presentation from Asim Hussain, Executive Director at Green Software Foundation. Asim shared cautionary tales of how powerful groups in the past (often ruling elites) have used measurement to their own advantage, and often to disadvantage those in lower socio-economic groups. It’s something that we see playing out again today in the access to accurate sustainability data, especially from big tech.
Asim’s presentation ended the day with a challenge to us all – become a vigilant and informed public that is able to recognise twisted climate data when we see it, and is capable of gathering and understanding the information we need for ourselves.
“If you want to take back power, become literate in measurement. Stop trusting what you are told and start verifying what you are told.”
Asim Hussain
Meet us at Green IO Munich!
Green IO Singapore was (once again) such a great event to be part of. A huge thank you to Gael, Thibaut, Belle, Madeline, and everyone else involved for curating such a wonderful event. You can find all the presentations from the day on the event page of the Green IO website.
It was so good, in fact, that we’ve decided to do it all again in a few months time – this time in Munich! The first Green IO conference in the DACH is guaranteed to be a terrific event, and the entire Green Web Foundation team will be there taking part. So if you’re able to be in that part of Germany at the start of July, why not set aside some time to attend the conference and to say “hi” to us of course!
