Using calculation models and specific notions, the Antwerp start-up Go Smart Digital helps companies to map the emissions of their own IT or of what they buy.
The EU Green Deal will not be without consequences. Thus, from 2025, the 50,000 largest companies will have to report on the impact of their activities on people and the environment, in accordance with the European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). ‘This will actually go hand in hand with new accounting,’ says Go Smart Digital founder Tim Sterckx, ‘which among other things will review carbon emissions’.
Sterckx traded a previous job for a new one. He teamed up with Sarah Parent of the reforestation accelerator Go Forest, which only made sense following all. ‘We had already met in the corridors of companies that she was trying to convince to plant trees to offset their emissions. This is how the idea of acting more preventively and helping companies to keep their carbon emissions first and foremost at the lowest possible level was born. And the important thing for this purpose is therefore to map these emissions, more precisely those of the IT part. ‘Many companies are indeed already active on what is called in sustainability circles Scope 1 – namely the emissions they generate directly with their car fleet for example – or on Scope 2 – what they emit with the energy or heat they buy – but not yet on Scope 3 – the emissions for which the suppliers of the products that the companies use or treat are responsible. On which their ICT park also depends.’
“For this mapping, we have developed several calculation models with which you can determine the footprint of hardware such as servers, but also of software such as cloud platforms,” explains Sterckx. ‘We apply them on the client’s ICT infrastructure, also repatriating public data from other platforms as a basis for the calculations. We thus take into account, for example, the average life cycle of a server, but also the settings. So we can see that a device doesn’t have to be running at maximum capacity for a specific task, and settings can therefore be adjusted to generate fewer emissions.’
Here too, it is necessary – and this is important – to raise awareness among individual employees, according to the founder: ‘It is indeed necessary to know that every Zoom interview you do, every attachment you send, every photo you keep in the cloud , requires the use of a server, which somewhere generates CO2 emissions. When we know then that the camera represents 96 percent of the broadcasts of a Zoom meeting, we conclude that it may not be necessary to activate it in colleagues that we know. The same goes for attachments or for reply all: every mail you send, every byte of attachment has an impact. It is therefore good to think regarding it beforehand to know if it is not preferable, for example, to share a document on a central server rather than to send it to everyone.’
Go Smart Digital’s consultants – there are three of them today – have only been active on the market for a few weeks and therefore still have to test the waters. In his previous job, Sterckx had already been able to partner with Konica-Minolta and with several Visma Group companies. ‘To really grow now on a commercial level, we want to recruit some junior consultants and we are also aiming for partnerships with others. This is how Go Forest took a stake in Go Smart Digital. Together, under the banner ‘Go Family’, we want to create an ecosystem of impact services that are complementary. Links have also been established with CO2Logic and South Pole, which means that we can offer companies a single point of contact with the aim of doing business more sustainably.’
The creation of Go Smart Digital was preceded by an in-depth market study which cost Sterckx some 90,000 euros. ‘For this purpose, I fortunately received the support of VLAIO in particular’, he specifies. ‘Now I am looking for a strategic partnership with a prominent player. We will announce it soon. I firmly believe that collaboration represents a new form of competition. There is vast knowledge in the market. It is therefore necessary to join forces. You might draw the comparison with Volvo, which invented the seat belt, but refused to patent it and shared the idea with the whole industry. Likewise, we want to share our ideas with as many people as possible, in order to create maximum impact.’
Go Smart Digital
The head office: chapels
Number of partners: 2
Finances: no plan
Site web: www.gosmartdigital.be
