The Matcha Initiative
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With 20 years of experience in IT across different sectors and industries, Benoit had managed teams focusing on project management and production and now is responsible for IT projects accross departments. Benoit is a strong sustainability advocate: in 2017, he was one of the founders and, later on, leader of Credit Agricole CIB's first green team in Singapore. In 2024, Benoit was an ECODESIGN Coach within Credit Agricole Assurances (CAA) where he contribute to create and deploy a framework for all IT projects to add a sustainability dimension to reduce their environmental footprint. This will help managers and management to understand both financial and carbon impacts and take decisions with wide insights.
I will be glad to share my experience or help others to move towards a better and sustainable environment if I can. Let’s keep in touch.
To be honest it started more out of curiosity than it was a clear goal initially. Later, it became a necessity for me, as you cannot do everything at home, which is very far from what is done at work, to be aligned with your thoughts or convictions.
I started by building a community, to understand who showed interest around me and get ideas from my fellow colleagues.
The awareness of what sustainability means in the office has been raised, from employees to top management. The concept of doing things differently, with another parameter (environmental criteria) than cost, has been introduced.
We are working now more consciously to minimize our impact on the environment, make our employees feel good and sometimes even increase our own well being.
Mainly to find people who understand you, who trust you and also how to work towards the interest of the company. Then, you need sponsorship from management and finally draw a detailed plan to executives and motivate people.
Having a team of volunteers with limited budget is a challenge (how to keep people motivated over time, the frustration of having a limited impact).
We have overcomed the challenge by recruiting new green team members, earning trust from the management and the community, and by showing real, measurable impacts from the implementation of the initiatives. Definitely, a big part is commitment and learning. Innovating and increasing our network also helped a lot to overcome difficulties.
In 2019, we organized an Environment Week (upcycling workshop - talk about climate change, fast fashion - raise awareness about electronic waste, green market). We recycled newspapers, screened a documentary about the plastic issue and led our first beach cleanup.
In 2020,
In early 2021, I became officially Animator of “the Climate collage” and I conducted workshops with my colleagues to raise awareness towards the climate change issue.
In 2023, I created a new framework that helps project teams to apply new ways of coding with respect to the environment. This should help my company to reduce its impact and contribute to train and sensitise all colleagues to Green IT. I also help to sensitise my department to Green IT and reduce the impact on emails for example.