Episode 61 Astrid Wynne – IT Sustainability expert

Catherine Weetman talks to to IT sustainability expert, Astrid Wynne.

Astrid is the Sustainability Lead at Techbuyer, a global sustainable IT solutions provider, which specialises in product life extension. She is also head of partnerships at Interact, a software tool that optimises energy and carbon usage of servers.

Astrid has co-authored a number of academic papers including ‘Optimizing server refresh cycles: The case for circular economy with an aging Moore’s Law’, which looked at how past generations of IT can provide a net positive on use-phase energy, economic benefit and retaining precious materials.

She is a board member at the Free ICT Europe Foundation, chair of the Sustainability Special Interest Group at the Data Centre Alliance and represents Techbuyer on the Interreg-funded research project CEDaCI, and we hear about some of the work at these collaborative and open-data projects.

This episode follows up on a previous conversation with Techbuyer, and digs into some of the perceptions around refurbished and remanufactured tech hardware, including reliability and performance. We hear how a remanufacturered server is able to outperform a latest generation machine, and why they are at least as reliable as new machines, too.

We hear how Techbuyer’s investment in research to understand the benefits of refurbishment and remanufacturing helped it to fledge a sister company, Interact.

We discuss why keeping critical materials ‘in the loop’ is essential if we want to have those same materials available for renewable energy, electric cars and so on.

And we hear about the kind of people who want to work for companies like Techbuyer, with interesting jobs that include problem-solving and creativity.