Seven Key Steps to Reducing Your Office’s Contribution to Climate Change
Reducing the potential climate impacts of manufacturing and other industrial operations has received more than its fair share of attention lately. A wide range of government, public interest, and private-sector initiatives have aimed their sights squarely into these types of operations, working to reduce energy use and improve resource efficiency throughout companies’ operations and supply chains.
But far less attention has been given to the climate impacts found inside the humdrum world of the office. According to a new and highly readable guide from the World Resources Institute, the office environment provides significant opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. According to WRI:
- Office buildings account for 19% of all commercial energy consumption.
- 70% of office building energy consumption is electricity, which is used for lighting, heating, cooling, and office equipment.
- Office buildings account for 21.8% of energy expenditures in commercial buildings, at a cost of about $17.8 billion annually.
- More than a fourth of U.S. GHG emissions are from transportation sources, including travel by road, rail, and air, and the emissions generated by employees traveling for office-related business and commuting to and from their jobs.
- 80% of transport-related fossil fuel use comes from road transportation and 13% from aviation. Forty-seven percent of passengers on U.S. domestic flights are traveling for business.
As the above data suggest, a significant portion of office-related climate emissions have to do with getting people to and from work, and WRI’s new handbook, Working 9 to 5 on Climate Change, focuses a great deal on the climate impacts of employee transportation and travel. It also covers office energy use, procurement, and other matters.
The seven key steps WRI offers to reduce office-related emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas, will likely sound familiar to those already working in the climate arena. The steps comprise a thorough, common-sense approach to any climate management. They include:
1. Securing employee and senior management support for your office’s carbon dioxide reduction initiative. Getting organizational buy-in is, of course, the most critical first step of any significant environmental initiative, especially when it may involve changes in office practices and procedures, or participation by individuals across departments, facilities, or business units. And the best means for garnering top-level support is usually to make a clear, compelling business case for action.
In the case of office and climate change, that business case usually revolves around energy efficiency — the potential to reduce a company’s energy costs, which average about $1.50 per square foot annually. Energy represents about a fifth of total expenditures for the typical office building, making it ripe for management attention.
2. Planning a GHG inventory. This is where things start to get tricky. One big challenge is setting organizational boundaries that define a facility’s climate impacts. Questions abound: Do you report on office space that you don’t own, but lease? Does your company lease space it owns to others? Does it own or lease energy-using equipment? How do you account for “direct” versus “indirect” emissions? The answers to each of these — and many other — questions will determine how you count and measure emissions.
3. Gathering data. You’ll need two kinds: “activity data” and the “emissions factor” for each activity. Activity data quantifies a specific activity — such as an employee business trip — in commonly used units, such as miles traveled, gallons or therms used, or some similar metric. Emissions factors convert these data into climate impacts using source-specific information — for example, whether the electricity used is produced by coal or natural gas. If two people travel by car, the calculations of fuel use will be different than for a car with a solo driver.
Putting all these calculations into place sounds more arcane than it really is, and there are several resources offering rules of thumb to make calculations easier.
4. Calculating emissions. Based on what you’ve determined in Steps 3 and 4, it’s time to calculate your company’s climate footprint. This requires a number of formulae, which are provided in the WRI guide as well as in spreadsheets provided on the Safe Climate and GHG Protocol Initiative Web sites. The process will yield the total GHG emissions for the operations being measured.
5. Establishing an emissions reduction target. Now that you know how much, the next step is to set a goal for reducing those emissions. There are absolute versus rate-based targets. The former set a hard goal — a 10% reduction by a specific date, for example; the latter are linked to fluctuations in business, such as reducing impacts 10% per unit of output. WRI, for one, recommends adopting absolute targets.
6. Reducing emissions. This involves a laundry list of measures to reduce energy consumption through more-efficient equipment, facilities, and operations; using “greener” energy derived from renewable sources; and reducing travel-related emissions for both business travel and employee commuting.
Another means of reducing emissions is to purchase carbon offsets. WRI did this in its own offices by investing in a project in the Portland, Ore., public schools that replaced oil-burning boilers with more efficient natural gasfired ones.
7. Publicly reporting your GHG impacts. The final step, says WRI, is to share your progress with shareholders, the environmental community, other businesses, and the general public — as well as keeping employees apprised of your company’s action and progress. There are some specific requirements, such as reporting emissions in metric tons and illustrating performance over time to show emissions trends. The goal is to ensure that reporting is “relevant, complete, consistent, transparent, and accurate,” counsels WRI.
Reaping the Benefits
The WRI guides doesn’t offer many case studies, but others have illustrated how these nonmanufacturing-related actions can reduce a company’s climate footprint while saving money. For example, a “Green Office Guide” produced by the city of Portland, Ore., Office of Sustainable Development offers these tidbits:
- IBM estimates it saved $17.8 million worldwide in a single year alone by encouraging employees to turn off equipment and lights when not needed.
- Owens Corning made all of its offices “paperless,” saving millions in lease costs by eliminating thousands of file cabinets.
- Legacy Health Systems in Portland eliminated needless photocopying, saving more than $125,000 per year.
- Davis Wright Tremaine, a law firm, uses re-manufactured toner cartridges in its laser printers and fax machines, saving approximately $12,000 a year for its Portland office alone.
- Fred Meyer’s, a grocery chain, provides company vanpools for some employees, saving nearly 800,000 miles per year and more than $50,000 a year in avoided gasoline costs.
Each of these has a salutary effect on these firms’ climate impacts, and each can be measured and monitored over time to show that even a humble local office can have a positive impact in addressing a serious global problem.