Employees who opt not to work onsite can reduce their footprint by 54% compared to in-office staff, US research suggests.
Employees who work from home two to four days a week have a lower carbon footprint than their colleagues who commute to the office every day.
And, as it turns out, working from home remains the least “polluting” organisational mode. Indeed, travel and office energy use are responsible for the majority of greenhouse gases emitted by employees who do not work remotely. But this doesn’t mean that working from home has no carbon footprint. “Remote work is not zero carbon, and the benefits of hybrid work are not perfectly linear. Without commuting you save on transportation energy, but there’s always lifestyle effects and many other factors,” said study senior author Fenggi You from Cornell.