Interview  •  Portraits

"Sustainability and circularity should be important to everyone today" - in conversation with Emma Dennard, VP Northern Europe, OVH Cloud

OVH Cloud won the Circularity Champion Award at the 2023 Franco-British Business Awards. We interviewed Emma Dennard, VP of Northern Europe who discussed the initiatives that contributed to this recognition, the challenges encountered, and the future direction of sustainability efforts at OVHcloud.

Can you share the key initiatives at OVHcloud that led to this recognition for circularity and sustainability?

Winning the award for Circularity was a fantastic result, and we were very grateful for the support and recognition that it gave us. Sustainability and circularity should be important to everyone today, particularly with the looming climate crisis. However, it’s also a very pragmatic strategy for us: being sustainable represents a way to keep costs down, which become savings that we can pass on to our customers and partners!

Since the very beginning of our operations, we’ve prioritised four main initiatives:

• Vertical Integration: We assemble and disassemble all our servers in two facilities. We also use our own form of water cooling, which is much more power-efficient than traditional air cooling. At the end of life, we disassemble all servers and re-use or recycle their components: last year, 36% of our components were re-used, and the rest were recycled.
• Recycled data centres: We also build data centres in existing buildings, avoiding the carbon footprint associated with construction. One of our data centres (in Virginia) used to be an old NSA listening post and provided crucial information ahead of D-Day!
• Low Carbon Commitment: 77% of the energy that our data centres use is from low-carbon sources, and we’re committed to 100% low-carbon energy by 2025.
• Measurement: We’re fanatical about measurement. If you don’t measure, you can’t improve. We’ve historically measured our carbon footprint, and last year released a tool that allows organisations to understand the carbon impact of their cloud computing usage across all three scopes on a monthly or yearly basis.

What inspired you and OVHcloud to prioritise circularity in your operations, and how do these efforts align with your company’s overall mission and values?

Circularity has been part of our business since the very beginning. Octave Klaba, our founder, started the business by creating his form of water-cooled server, which we industrialised and now use as a standard in every facility we own. Sustainability and circularity just make sense! If we reuse components, we don’t have to buy more, and in so many cases, sustainability can be a revenue generator rather than a cost centre (more on this later). We have to keep in mind that the primary goal is to fight the climate crisis and make sure we still have a planet to operate from in the future, but sustainability is a very pragmatic approach for us and a key part of our DNA. 

Can you provide an example of a successful circularity project at OVHcloud that has made a significant impact on reducing waste and promoting sustainability?

We have several projects that all add up to make a big difference. This is one of my favourites: we’re working with a startup organisation called TerraNova to reclaim valuable minerals in motherboards, using electrolysis in an acid bath. Motherboards are tough to recycle because they’re a complicated mix of metals, plastics and rare earths, but TerraNova has an incredible method of separating resaleable minerals from them. We just completed our first exercise with them, and the outputs can be resold – so it’s not just an investment in sustainability, it’s a revenue line!

That said, there are actually a lot of projects like this. We’ve recently started a new recycling approach at our data centre in Erith, we’ve created a new form of water cooling where the entire server is immersed in a fluid, which is even more power efficient. We’re also working with an organisation to recycle the packing foam that our server components arrive in!

What challenges have you encountered while implementing circular economy principles within your organisation, and how have you addressed these challenges to achieve success?

Measuring carbon footprint is actually very complex if you want to be thorough. Measuring scope 1 and 2 emissions (direct and indirect power consumption) is fairly straightforward – but measuring the carbon emissions from equipment manufacturing, transport and logistics, and operational support (lights/power in the office etc.) is not, especially when you’re renting equipment – potentially just for a few hours! We had to work with several industry bodies on slightly esoteric matters like equipment longevity (hardware is more efficient if it lasts longer) – and a customer’s ‘fractional share’ of this carbon footprint. This is easier when an organisation rents the whole server, but working the equation out when they rent a fraction of it (i.e. cloud computing) for a few hours, is very complicated. But we’re pleased that we’ve managed to do it, and are gradually bringing it to all of our services.

What kind of feedback have you received from your colleagues, industry peers, and clients since winning the Circularity Champion Award, and how has this feedback shaped your future initiatives in sustainability at OVHcloud?

The reception’s been great, and it’s very rewarding to be recognised for our work. The trophy sits opposite the doors where you come into our office, so everyone sees it as they walk in! We’re continuing to invest in sustainable initiatives, and are actually in the process of open-sourcing some of our water-cooling equipment so that other organisations around the world can build water-cooled data centres without needing to invest in a lot of R&D.

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