Host Sanjay Podder speaks with Dr. Katia Chaban about uniting IT and sustainability through circular economy practices. Dr. Chaban shares her journey into sustainable IT, the importance of addressing e-waste and embodied carbon, and the growing challenges posed by AI. She highlights how circular thinking, training, and cross-industry collaboration can help CXOs and technology leaders embed sustainability into IT strategies while reducing costs and environmental impact.

Learn more about our people:

Sanjay Podder: LinkedIn
Dr. Katia Chaban: LinkedIn

Find out more about the GSF:

The Green Software Foundation Website
Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

Resources:

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
Follow and rate on Spotify
Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Sanjay Podder: Hello and welcome to CXO Bytes, a podcast brought to you by the Green Software Foundation and dedicated to supporting chiefs of information, technology, sustainability, and AI as they aim to shape a sustainable future through green software. We will uncover the strategies and a big green move that's helped drive results for business and for the planet.

I am your host, Sanjay Podder.

Welcome to another episode of CXO Bytes, where we bring you unique insights into the world of sustainable IT from the view of the C-Suite. I am your host, Sanjay Podder. Today's guest, Dr. Katia Chaban. Brings over 30 years of global IT leadership, including with NTT Data, EDS, and many others to our current mission, harnessing technology, business and people so that enterprises, ecosystems, and the planet can thrive.

Katia, welcome. Excited to dive in.

Dr. Katia Chaban: Thank you. I am as excited as well. Appreciate the opportunity.

Sanjay Podder: Katia, can you, introduce yourself? You know what? You have been doing and what got you interested in the field of, you know, uniting sustainability and technology? You know, that will be very interesting to know.

Dr. Katia Chaban: It's actually a funny story because back in 2021, I had been with NTT Data actually, and back in 2020, 2020 I started my doctorate. During the period of COVID I decided. That I needed to do something right other than be upset about what was happening in the world. And so I started my education, so my doctorate in business. And then in 2021, I decided to actually leave corporate world, leave the IT industry and go and focus on school.

And I did that. And as I was trying to research my dissertation, like what is my topic going to be? I mean, it's a big part of that education through your doctorate. I had, I had two choices. I came up with this really interesting concept around acceleration of the digital transformation, right? How do we apply that emergency change behavior from COVID to digital transformations?

But then I also had this idea where I kept seeing this sustainability topic, this ESG topic in all of our strategy courses and all my readings and discussions, and then I came across this thing called the Circular Economy, and I'm like, "what is this thing?"

And so I started doing research about it. And so I then decided that I wasn't gonna do something that I had already been doing for a very long time.

I wanted to restart my brain and focus on something new. And so I did, and I focused on circular economy actually in the consumer goods industry. So not even in IT, but it was with that dissertation, its business impacts, and it turned out to be, you know, planet impacts with the amount of waste that comes from the returns process.

So I graduated, I accelerated that schooling and I graduated and I thought, "yay, I am out of IT! I'm gonna go and work in sustainability and save the world. This is awesome." And then I started talking to people and really building that network, from around the world and got to speak at a conference in Thailand where I got to,

and then, but I started talking to all my IT friends and some folks are like, "Hey, you know, there might be an opportunity for you in sustainability in IT."

I'm like, "what you talking about?" So as an academic now I've started to do the research and I went, oh my goodness, the water, the waste, the emissions, the carbon, what is the rare earth mineral? What is happening? And this, to me, this invisible impact of IT is a massive sustainability, and with the advent of AI and the other, is going to be something that we have to control.

And I said, well, I guess I can't get out of IT. I'm gonna go back to IT but I'm going back to IT with a new lens, a new purpose, and a new focus. And that's really to become that advocate, right, that evangelist, and to really drive the practices that we need to have in order not to be the negative impact to the planet, right?

We really have to maximize all the positive things that IT can do and at the same time minimizing our harm. So I thought I was outta IT after all those years, but now I'm back, but really energized on the topic itself because it really will have a massive impact.

Sanjay Podder: No, absolutely. I agree with you on that. In fact, some of the studies shows that, by 2040, 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions will come from IT. And this data came from a research which is, which predates the rise of generative AI. So we can just imagine how things can be. Before we dive in further, I just wanted to let the audience know that everything we discussed today, will be linked in the show notes below this episode.

So, Katia, you know, you are now focused on sustainability and technology and your background research in the area of circularity, right. You know, that is very interesting. How do you see all of this together? Like what are the big opportunities you see when it comes to, say, circularity in the IT context?

Right. You know, are people missing it? Because most of the time we talk about, for example, carbon emissions. We talk about usage, operational emissions, right? So, but when we talk about circularity, would be very interested, given you have been an expert in this topic, how do you see those opportunities in the IT context?

Dr. Katia Chaban: Yeah, so there's massive opportunities. One, circularity is a way of thinking, right? It's almost a, it's a philosophy and it can be applied to everything. So even when we're talking about software development and the SCI and how we're calculating emissions and what those environmental impacts are, what we're also trying to

teach people is that whole lifecycle develop development of keeping things in use for longer, and how do you develop things that are more modular and can be replaced and repaire...