How Much Can Telecommuting Cut Carbon Footprint?

February 01, 2010


How Much Can Telecommuting Cut Carbon Footprint?
By Gary Kim
Contributing Editor


Lots of people these days are interested in telecommuting, at least in part because of its ability to reduce carbon footprint. Assume that a 100-person company could allow telecommuting three days a week.

Also, assume that employees commuting an average of 33 miles one day to reach their workplace, and that those employees switch to telecommuting three days a week. Also assume that all those avoided trips are taken by automobile.

That enterprise can avoid producing 6,351 pounds of hydrocarbons, 47,362 pounds of carbon monoxide, 3,146 pounds of oxides of nitrogen and 943,124 pounds of carbon dioxide, while saving 47,773 pounds of gasoline each year.

That analysis uses an average fuel economy of 21.5 miles per gallon.

Assume a fuel price of $2.75 per gallon. Workers save $750 in avoided fuel costs each week. Over a month those employees commuting three days a week save $3,250 in fuel costs and over a year will save $39,000 in fuel expenses.

Those are "gross savings." There are some costs to produce electricity to power the communication networks, boost satellites into orbit, maintain network monitoring centers and so forth. Those net reductions are hard to capture on a per-user basis.




Some other carbon-producing activities are basically a wash. People will power on their PCs whether at work or at home, will consume power for their telephones, printers and other machines. But those costs are relatively insignificant, whether tasks are performed in the office or at a home office.

There also are some possible energy offsets as well. People will spend less on dry cleaning, travel to lunch and other off-site meetings during the day. They will still eat lunch, but might arguably consume less energy eating at home compared to eating at work.

Still, on balance nobody argues with the fact that substituting communications for travel reduces carbon footprint. The savings obviously are greatest when a user can substitute telecommuting for physical travel over longer distances, as well as local travel to a work site.

If one employee saves just one airline trip of 1,000 miles by airline in a year, using a conferencing solution of some sort, that traveler avoids creating 580 kilograms of carbon dioxide, or 1,276 pounds, based on a mile of air travel imposing a load of 0.29 kilograms of carbon load per mile flown.


Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Amy Tierney