Working Remotely May Have Significant Carbon Reduction Benefits – CleanTechnica

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This should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer, but if people didn’t commute every day to offices in buildings that need to be built then heated and cooled, a lot fewer carbon emissions would be created by the process we call working. Granted, wait staff, construction workers, and those who work on an assembly line can’t send in their daily contribution to the workforce via the internet, but lots of people get in their cars every day to go to jobs that could be done online.

According to a study published September 18, 2023 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, working from home can reduce the carbon footprint of an individual employee by more than 50%. Here’s the abstract to the study:

“The growth in remote and hybrid work catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic could have significant environmental implications. We assess the greenhouse gas emissions of this transition, considering factors including information and communication technology, commuting, noncommute travel, and office and residential energy use.

“We find that, in the United States, switching from working onsite to working from home can reduce up to 58% of work’s carbon footprint, and the impacts of IT usage are negligible, while office energy use and non-commute travel impacts are important.

“Our study also suggests that achieving the environmental benefits of remote work requires proper setup of people’s lifestyle, including their vehicle choice, travel behavior, and the configuration of home and work environment.”

The findings help shed light on the factors that can influence the environmental and climate effects of different work models, Longqi Yang, an applied research manager at Microsoft and one of the authors, told the Washington Post. “The remote work has to be significant in order to realize these kind of benefits,” Yang said. “This study provides a very important data point for a dimension that people care a lot about when deciding remote work policy.”

3 Categories, Five Parameters

Using data from the Residential Energy Consumption Survey provided by the Energy Information Administration and employee data on commuting and teleworking behaviors provided by Microsoft (several of the researchers are Microsoft employees), the researchers modeled greenhouse gas emissions of US-based employees working entirely remotely, on hybrid schedules, and fully onsite. The analysis focused on emissions from a variety of sources, including residential and office energy use, commuting, non-commuting related travel, and IT usage.

“This is a very complicated system,” said Fengqi You, a professor of energy systems engineering at Cornell University and another author of the paper. It seems obvious that not commuting to work in a private automobile would reduce carbon emissions, and yet the data showed that people who work mostly online from home tend to live further from their offices than those who travel to work every day

Therefore, when they do drive to work, they drive more and create more emissions doing so. Remote workers tend to have more cars available in their households and use their cars more frequently to shop or visit the doctor during the work day than regular office workers do.

Those who work fully from home could have a 54% lower carbon footprint compared to onsite workers, the study found. Hybrid workers — those who work two to four days a week at home — were able to reduce their carbon emissions by 11 to 29%.

Office energy use is the main contributor to the carbon footprint of onsite and hybrid workers, while non-commute related travel becomes more significant as the number of remote work days increases. In contrast, the effects of remote and hybrid work on computer usage have negligible impacts on the overall carbon footprint.

“This highlights that people should shift their focus from information and communication technology usage to commute decarbonization, facility downsizing, and renewables penetration for office buildings to mitigate GHG emissions of remote and onsite work,” the researchers said.

Today & Tomorrow

The study is a snapshot of the situation today and it is difficult to draw conclusions about the future of work. The expectation is that there will be more non-polluting cars in the future and the US electricity supply will continue to benefit from more renewable energy. Both factors would alter the findings of the study, the researchers say.

An onsite worker commuting by train may have a lower carbon footprint than a hybrid worker driving alone to work, the report says. Switching from traditional buses or trains to electric versions could advance climate change mitigation in conjunction with the greening of the power grid. Replacing conventional cars with electric ones may cut workers’ carbon footprint by 13 to 19%, and progressively decarbonized US power grids could enable a further 38% reduction by 2050.

The study finds that individuals, companies, and policymakers can implement coordinated sustainable practices to maximize the environmental benefits of remote and hybrid work, such as choosing public transit over driving, encouraging car sharing, assigning multiple headcounts per seat, reducing or eliminating office space for remote workers, and improving energy efficiency for office buildings.

It adds to the understanding of the role individual behaviors can play, Joe O’Connor, director and co-founder of the Work Time Reduction Center of Excellence, told the Washington Post. “This study really emphasizes the importance of lifestyle and the choices that we make … when we’re working remotely as being really key to realizing the kinds of potential benefits that can be unlocked.”

John Trougakos, a professor of management at the University of Toronto Scarborough, said, “It’s one interesting piece of the puzzle, but not the whole story. To have a comprehensive plan for something like this, you’re looking at more than just the workplace, and obviously the other choices that people make in their life will also impact the emissions that they create and that organizations might create as well.”

The Takeaway

The future of work is very much on the minds of many people and corporations these days. At this very moment, the UAW and the American auto industry are locked in a titanic struggle that revolves around how the EV revolution will affect auto manufacturing.

There are so many imponderables involved. Are there benefits to going to work and being separated from the daily interruptions that come with being at home? Are there fewer bonding opportunities for remote workers, who don’t get to share a beer after work or join the office bowling team? For their part, employers worry that remote workers are goofing off most of the time instead of attending to business. And yet there is anecdotal evidence that remote workers actually spend more time on task than those folks in their cubicles who are actually onsite.

If the issue is what is the best way to lower carbon emissions from working, remote work seems to be the right answer. But if the issue is productivity, having workers onsite where they can be directly monitored and supervised may be what employers prefer.

The lesson from this research may be that greener cars and cleaner grids are more important in the larger scheme of things than whether an employee is offsite, onsite, or somewhere in between.