The Environmental Impacts of Remote Work on Climate Change

By the spring of 2020, the way we worked had started to change. With fewer people on the road, less business travel, and not nearly as many flights, the early days of the pandemic gave us a sneak peek into some of the hidden benefits of remote work—especially when it came to our planet.

At a time when we’re already seeing the effects of climate change, it’s more important than ever to explore the environmental benefits of remote work. Here are just a few ways that working remotely can help reduce our carbon footprint, improve our planet's health, and make progress towards a more sustainable future of work.

Less car time is better for the environment (and workers, too)

There are several advantages to working from home. Flexibility, freedom, and better work-life balance are all obvious ones. However, #WFH jobs also eliminate the necessity for workers to commute. On average, a typical commuting worker will spend 9 days per year sitting in traffic or driving to the office.

Not only does switching to remote or hybrid work decrease downtime and increase daily productivity, but it's also one of the biggest ways we can impact our environment. Working from home eliminates the need for extra cars on the road, lowering overall greenhouse gases, fossil fuel usage, and energy consumption around the world. From the cities to the suburbs, cutting out billions of hours of car travel time per year would improve air quality, reduce oil runoff from streets, and avoid adding more pollutants to nearby soils or ecosystems.

Remote conferences and events reduce emissions

Last week, a group of Cornell researchers published findings from a study on COVID-19's environmental impact. According to the data, "moving a professional conference completely online reduces its carbon footprint by 94%, and shifting it to a hybrid model, with no more than half of conventioneers online, curtails the footprint to 67%." When it comes to global events and conventions, those numbers have a real impact; the industry's annual carbon footprint equals roughly the same volume of greenhouse gas emissions of the entire U.S. over the course of one year.

Working from home reduces power usage

When people make the switch to work part-time or fully-remote, they're not just making an impact by saving their commute. One of the biggest benefits of remote and hybrid work is the energy savings that happen back at the office. This is most evident in reduced utility costs for physical workplaces, like headquarters, retail locations, and even smaller offices. According to the World Economic Forum, worldwide power use has decreased as a result of remote work, even if the amount is less than some experts had originally predicted.

Although remote work still uses up electricity, home offices don't require the same kind of energy supply as bigger buildings with lobbies, restrooms, common areas, cafeterias, elevators, and other supporting or maintenance rooms that operate while employees are on-site.

Hybrid and remote work might help companies save paper

The carbon savings from a paperless office are twofold. First, when you reduce the number of physical materials needed to do work—printing, copying, binding—you're avoiding unnecessary printing and copying by default. Second, with fewer documents in transit or at large companies that require printouts or faxes, there's also less paper usage in transportation, storage, and other areas.

Around the world, digitizing employees' documents and day-to-day files has helped reduce paper usage for businesses of all shapes and sizes. For companies that hadn't already migrated their teams from hard copies to digital files, COVID-19 has proven to be one of the biggest catalysts for making the switch.

Wrap-Up

Not only does remote and hybrid working reduce traffic accidents, lessen the workload for first responders, and improve productivity, but it also decreases greenhouse gas emissions by reducing power usage, pollutants, and paper consumption.

It's up to all of us to work together to protect our environment and reduce our carbon footprints, and remote work is one of the easiest ways to start.