Concerned about emissions from “home offices”

Technology and financial companies in an effort to reduce their environmental impact have discovered a new problem coming from remote work, which is the amount of CO2 emitted from activities. work from home.

Some companies have started to track their emissions when employees work from home and have found that this working pattern also causes a certain amount of emissions. Ms. Amanda von Almen, head of emissions reduction at Salesforce, said that emissions are not really eliminated, but just dispersed to another area.

Many large companies have estimated emissions from home offices, of which 6 have detailed statistics. According to this estimate, 500,000 employees from all six companies, when working from home, emitted the equivalent of 134,000 tons of CO2, in the first year of the COVID-19 outbreak. This amount of gas is equivalent to consuming 15 million tons of gasoline or burning 67,000 tons of coal.

While working from home has environmental benefits by reducing emissions from commuting, this finding shows that working remotely is not a simple and completely effective solution. for corporate emissions reduction goals.

Many companies see a range of benefits from the transition to working online. Salesforce says emissions have fallen by 29% per employee, while fund manager Fidelity Investments says working online cuts corporate emissions by 87% in 2020. also calculated that teleworking will reduce emissions by 50% in 2020 compared to the previous year.

However, these large companies, including leading companies such as Apple, Amazon and Wells Fargo, do not estimate emissions from “home offices”. Even the way to calculate the emissions emitted by working online is not uniform, making it difficult to make statistics and draw general conclusions. Many environmental experts also believe that this issue needs to be fully studied, so that the goal of reducing corporate emissions is really effective.

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