Working from home in the city can be a sustainable option.
Making lemonade from lemons, millions of employees working remotely does have an upside. This article from Green Prophet dives deep into all the environmental benefits of citizens working from home
Did you know that virtual working helps reduce lots of greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, fossil fuel consumption, plastic, and other paper waste? If you are among the people who care about the environment, then it’s high time you thought about how your daily work routine affects the environment.
Continue reading to find how virtual working can help to bring work-life balance through several positive environmental effects that come with online work. It’s all a win-win scenario.
How virtual jobs are helping the environment
Though recently technology has seen huge improvements, more social cognizance as well as more tight governmental restrictions, the following are still among the top global environmental concerns.
- Fossil fuel reliance
- Greenhouse Gas emissions
- Air pollution
- High energy consumption
- High levels of plastic and paper waste
Since our daily activities, including commuting to and from our offices, contribute a noteworthy portion of this major issue, most of the concerned leaders and like-minded citizens are seeking ways to decrease the impacts that come with offices and vehicles.
The main idea is – the ones who work remotely drive less, create less office-related plastic waste, and consume significantly less energy.
Additionally, since you’ll be running a home office you can take care of small, but impactful things like using recyclable paper, efficient hosting for your website, or through making the choice to power your home with solar panels.
All this sounds wonderful. Is it? But does virtual working help to reduce environmental degradation effects? For sure, Yes! Read on to know how.
Virtual workers use less gasoline
On average, Americans use more than 390 million gallons of gas every day. With about a population of 325 million citizens, each American uses an average of approximately 1.3 gallons of gas per day.
So, assuming about 25 million citizens take their job virtual, it will save the nation about 30 million gallons per workday.
Online working reduces carbon emissions
According to USEPA – the US Environmental Protection Agency – each year, an average vehicle is estimated to emit like 4.8 metric tons of carbon dioxide every year. This is assuming that cars drive at an average of 11,400 miles annually.
As almost all the employees drive approximately 30 miles each workday – translating to more than 7,800 miles annually. It shows that everyone can reduce carbon dioxide by more than 60%.
The total savings here are equal to:
- Planting more than 2 billion trees every year
- Providing energy to more than 10 million homes annually
- Powering more than 40,000 wind turbines annually
- Recycling more than 29 million tons of waste annually
By simply working from home, you can help save the globe a great deal.
If we all can shift to online working and refrain from working from the offices, we can undoubtedly alleviate the nation’s contributions to the overall carbon emissions.
Virtual working helps reduce air pollution
Apart from carbon, driving also emits nitrous oxide into the air, volatile organic compounds, and particulate matter. All these pollutants carry with them both human health and environmental effects. For instance, Nitrogen dioxide causes respiratory issues like asthma.
Additionally, when other nitrogen oxides react with ammonia or the other volatile organic compounds in the air, the resulting product alters the Ozone layer, water, and soil acidity, and other ecosystem diversities.
Online jobs use less energy
It is a fact that you will use energy, whether working from the office or the comfort of your couches. However, it is also a fact that employees tend to treat energy consumption differently when in their employer’s office than when at their home. This means that offices are identified with high levels of energy usage.
A study carried by Sun Microsystems before Oracle acquired it demonstrated that you would consume twice the amount of energy when in offices than when in their homes.
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Virtual jobs use less fossil fuel
Fossil fuels contribute to the highest part of greenhouse gas emissions in the US. Fossils are burnt mainly for heat, electricity, or transportation.
Over 60% of the electricity that’s generated in the United States comes from fossil combustion.
This means that if employees turned to work from home, they would significantly decrease the demand for fossils. Also, over 90% of the fuel used to power your vehicle comes from petroleum products.
Online workers use less paper
According to USEPA, Americans use nearly 70 tons of paper as well as paperboard annually. Even though the government strives to recover and recycle more than 68% of the paper product every year, it still leaves more than 22 million tons of paper in American landfills only.
What about the other nations that have no strict recycling guidelines?
In fact, virtual workers use emails and other cloud-based software programs to send messages, submit files, take notes, and create documents. This translates into reduced printing, paper filing, faxing, and label marking every day.
Virtual workers use less plastic
To date, the world has generated about ten billion tons of plastic. This should not surprise you considering the many people who buy breakfast, coffee, and lunch each workday.
Ranging from coffee cups lids, food packaging products, plastic beverage bottles as well as plastic carrier bags that almost every worker carries home every evening sum up to this surprising amount of plastic.
As a virtual worker, you can visit the coffee shop and other local eateries they do so like one or two times per week. This is because they have the convenience of refilling their coffee cups from their kitchen coffee pots, reuse dishware, and sometimes eat leftovers.
Online workers have more time for the environment
Virtual working can help you create more life balance, leaving lots of free time to activities that matter more. Some of the things that matter for most individuals include volunteering to an environment upgrading programs, hiking and spending your free time with nature, gardening in your backyard, or even taking part in community clean-ups.
There are a thousand ways to care for the environment in the form of caring for the animals, rehabilitating ecosystems in addition to spreading the environment-friendly gospel to help others care for the environment.
Bottom line
From the above view, we have seen that virtual working highly helps us to care for our environment. The benefits that come with working for your environment and your company make it a win-win strategy.
It’s time that employers trusted their employees to give them the required rights and let them work from home for the benefits of our global environment.
This article was written by Bhok Thompson from Green Prophet and was legally licensed through the Industry Dive publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.
