We may not be producing our own beer or leading a jet set lifestyle to deliver our training and projects, but we still believe it is important to keep a handle on the carbon footprint of the work we do so that we can share it with the people we work with and communicate the steps we are taking to manage our impact.
We keep track of all the activities that are associated with our project and like to include the total emissions in our final reports. Note that these are our own calcuations based on the best available data we could gather, and figures are not (currently) independently verified.
The most common activities associated with projects are listed below:
Use of office
We often work from home, which reduces the amount of carbon emissions from communting and using an office that might sit empty for long periods of time.
Using a plug in monitor we are able to measure the daily emissions from the use of a home office, and isolate equipment from the rest of the house. We picked up ours here. Usage is around 2kwh/day.
Using a location-based methodology of 0.21 kg CO2e/kwh, we estimate a day of home office usage is equivalent to 0.46 kg CO2e.
Because we are with Bulb Energy and supplied with 100% renewable energy, the market-based methodology allows us to have zero emissions associated with home office use – hooray!
Travel and transport
We only travel when absolutely necessary and where possible, we use public transport that has a lower carbon footprint than using personal vehicles.
Chris drives a 2010 1.4 ltr petrol engine VW Golf called Delilah. Based on the UK government’s emission factors, the car emits 0.28 kg CO2e/km.
We use the UK government’s emissions factor database for other modes of transport.
Hotel stays
UK government emission factors give the amount of CO2e emitted from one night stay in a UK hotel as 13.9 kg CO2e.
For more information or details on our calculations, or if you think we could improve our calculations, please get in touch.