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Meet Jean-Marc – Advisor to the board

01 November 2022

Jean-Marc has spent some 20 years running business units, sales and marketing teams, and service operations for a number of large IT infrastructure, communications and systems integrators. And then in 2012, he became interested in sustainability and IT.

And then in 2012, two seemingly unrelated events set Jean-Marc on the path of Sustainable IT.

The first was when re-surfacing from a wreck dive off Malta, he saw a Leatherback turtle appear beside the dive boat asking for help. She had a fishing line wrapped around her rear left fin, starving the limb of blood. Immediately, Jean-Marc alerted his dive buddy, who duly jumped in to remove the line. Once freed, the turtle flipped over and with a wave of her fin, she disappeared beneath the waves.

The second was when researching what companies did with IT assets when they no longer had a use for them. Jean-Marc had a dawning realisation that very little was being done around the return journey for unwanted IT – by clients, integrators and manufacturers. This got him thinking and before long he was set on contributing to the development of solutions around Circularity in IT.

Initially, he figured that if we could measure and quantify the impact of IT on the planet, we could start to manage this impact positively. This led him to start providing clients with meaningful and tangible metrics around what IT carbon footprints look like and how we can reuse, repurpose, resell, recover, and recycle IT. He soon realised that we needed to do it at scale, so he looked at ways to automate the journey.

This is when Jean-Marc teamed up with KA2 and COzPro was born.

Jean-Marc says – Since 2015 I have spent many hours working out what I could personally do to advance the cause of Sustainability in IT. If ever I think the task is so large that I cannot possibly make a difference, I just think back to the turtle and it revitalises me. We can all make a difference, one turtle…. or one IT asset at a time.

Jean-Marc has a string of notable achievements which include:

  • Chief designer of COzPro- The Environmental App for ServiceNow, which enables clients to measure, manage and report on their IT CO2 impact.
  • Contributor to and reviewer of the ITIL 4 Sustainability Module.
  • Helping one turtle.

Outside of business, Jean-Marc chairs the Maritime Archaeology Sea Trust (UK Registered Charity # 1140497) and he is also a TDI and BSAC Technical Diver (# 607791,  #A8179923)