Calculating Your Carbon Footprint: Where Do You Start?

Does your organization perceive "going green" as being more expensive than maintaining the status quo? Before you launch an initiative to green your organization, we suggest you attempt to measure both your environmental footprint and the costs per employee to your organization in energy bills, technology purchases, and paper. (Measuring per employee allows you to account for organizational growth.)

If you can quantify even a few of these costs, you will be better able to show the return on investment for your organization when you adapt more eco-friendly policies. Many organizations that "go green" see a significant reduction in direct costs to their organizations, and measuring these can help you garner support for your initiative.

In this time of emerging global warming awareness, there has been a proliferation of online "carbon footprint" calculators of various types — so many, in fact, as to make conscientious, well-meaning people despair of ever knowing their personal impact on the environment.

Nevertheless, there are a few sites I’ve found that quickly cover most of what I want to know about my technology footprint.

A good place to start is the Consumer Electronics Association's My Green Electronics’ Calculator. CEA's great, five-minute calculator lists nearly all the electronics that I use every day. I plug in how many hours I use, say, my laptop computer, my phones, my TV, and other devices, and the calculator shows me how much energy I consume using them. What’s surprising on this one is how much energy I waste when devices are plugged in but not in use.

Next I like the U.S. EPA and University of Tennessee's Electronics Environmental Benefits Calculator, which shows environmental savings for computer recycling and reuse in terms of energy, materials, carbon dioxide, toxic emissions, and more. The Electronics Environmental Calculator is still in spreadsheet format, making it a bit difficult to use. Yet if you’re OK with talking my word for it:

• Reusing just one computer with a CRT monitor is equivalent to taking half of a car off the road for a year, or saving 68 percent of one U.S. household’s allotment of electricity for a year — not to mention a net savings of $670.
• End-of-life recycling the same computer and CRT monitor is equivalent to taking .02 cars off the road for a year, or saving 2 percent of one U.S. household’s allotment of electricity for a year, and a net cost savings of $28.
• Measured by cost, energy savings, and greenhouse gas reduction it’s roughly 25 times more beneficial environmentally to reuse computers than to recycle them at three to five years of age.

The U.S. EPA also offers a Personal Emissions Calculator that tallies up your personal carbon footprint based on how much you drive and recycle, how you heat and cool your home, and so on. This one takes about 15 minutes to fill out and provides you with an overall score indicating how easy (or hard) you are on the environment.

To calculate your office footprint, try out CarbonCounter.org's Business and Organization Offset Tool calculator. This calculator, which comes in the form of an automated PDF, works pretty quickly, but requires that you know things like your organization's yearly energy usage in kilowatts, the square footage of your building(s), total miles driven by your vehicles, total miles flown by your employees, and so on.                 

Finally, if you are stout of heart and want to see a whole bunch of different calculators, check out the Consumer Reports Greener Choices Carbon Footprint Calculators page. Consumer Reports has taken on the job of compiling all the different carbon calculators by listing them in one place.

Happy calculating!

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