Smart Working and sustainability

In 2020, we all asked ourselves, for the first time, if remote working is good for the environment and if closed offices and people working from home could have a positive impact on the atmosphere. Lacking scientifically certain data, EcoAct, a US company that supports businesses in facing the challenges of climate change, prepared, in collaboration with Lloyds Banking Group and NatWest Group, a report entitled "Homeworking emissions whitepaper" aimed to understand how remote working impacts the environment. The answer, however, is not so clear-cut.

Certainly, under current conditions, companies have reduced both Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, i.e., direct and indirect emissions, but it is difficult to determine the impact generated by employees who work remotely. However, the report still helps to reach an answer by identifying those indicators that can define the environmental impact of remote working.

The first indicator is the energy consumption derived from the use of electronic devices that are necessary for the performance of daily work activities by each employee. To obtain some data, we should consider that a laptop has an energy consumption that ranges from 50 to 100Wh and, therefore, if used for 8 hours a day, its annual consumption ranges from 150 to 300kWh, which generates approximately 150-300 kWh of CO2, based on the Italian energy efficiency ratio of 0.3 – 0.4.

The second indicator is the consumption for heating due to the fact that people are forced to increase their use. With this regard, we should consider that energy sources consumed are both natural gas and electricity.

The third indicator is the energy consumed for home cooling. In this case, only emissions from electricity consumption will be considered.

Lastly, we should consider the number of remote working days in a working week, for this purpose we will introduce the concept of "remote working FTE", according to which an employee who works remotely 2 days out of 5 is indicated with 0.4 remote Working FTE.

In terms of savings, remote working allows avoiding emission for about 600 kilograms of carbon dioxide per year per worker (-40% compared to 2018) with significant savings in terms of time (about 150 hours), travelled distance (3,500 km) and fuel (260 litres of petrol or 237 litres of diesel). This is what emerges from ENEA research on the environmental impact of remote working in Rome, Turin, Bologna, and Trento in the four-year period 2015-2018, published in the international magazine Applied Sciences.

"In our country, about one person out of two owns a car, i.e., 666 cars every 1,000 inhabitants, thus Italy ranks second in Europe among the countries with the highest rate of motorisation, after Luxembourg", explained Roberta Roberto, ENEA researcher in the Energy technologies and renewable sources Department and co-author of the survey, together with her colleagues from other ENEA departments Bruna Felici, Alessandro Zini and Marco Rao.

In Italy, transport is responsible for over 25% of total national greenhouse gas emissions and almost all of them (93%) come from road transport and mainly from cars (70%). “Agile working and all other forms of remote working have shown that they can be an important instrument for change, capable not only of improving professional and personal life quality, but also of reducing traffic and city pollution and to revive peripheral areas”, added Roberta.

Based on the responses of a sample of 1,269 agile workers in the PA in the four cities examined, who use private internal combustion vehicles for commuting from home to work, every remote working day would make it possible to avoid 6 kg of direct emissions of CO2 and to save 85 megajoules (MJ) of fuel per capita. But there are also other environmental benefits: the analysis also highlighted a reduction in nitrogen oxides per person per day (from 14.8 g in Trento to 7.9 g in Turin), carbon monoxide (from 38.9 g in Rome to 18.7 g in Trento) and PM10 (from 1.6 g in Rome to 0.9 g in Turin), PM2.5 (from 1.1 g in Rome and Trento to 0.6 g in Turin). Furthermore, 24.8% of respondents declared that they opted for more sustainable transport means (public transport, bicycle, or on foot) for travel outside work during remote working days, 8.7% of them changed their choices in favour of private transport, while 66.5% did not change their means of transport.

"We chose these four cities for two reasons: firstly, for their peculiarities linked to the territory and the historical profile which could lead to diversified impacts on urban mobility and, secondly, due to the high number of responses to the questionnaire received from public sector employees in these four cities, who work from home 2 days a week on average”, underlined Bruna Felici, ENEA researcher in the Studies, Analysis and Evaluations Unit.

Collected data suggest that, on average, respondents travel 35 km a day for 1 hour and 20 minutes. Rome is confirmed as the most critical city, with an average travel time equal to 2 hours, probably due to greater distances (1 out of 5 workers travel more than 100 km a day) and more intense traffic. In fact, in Rome there are around 420,000 daily trips for work and study reasons, while each person spends 82 hours a year stuck in the traffic.

About half of respondents declared that they travel exclusively with private motor vehicles (47% by car and 2% by motorcycles), while 17% travel exclusively with public transport and 16% with a mix of public and private transport. In Trento there is the greatest use of private internal combustion vehicles for home-work travel (62.9%), followed by Rome (54.4%), Bologna (44.9%) and Turin (38.2%). “Private mobility offers flexible solutions in terms of time savings and freedom of movement, especially for those having school-age children. Public transport, on the other hand, is mainly chosen with a view to saving money or in the event of a lack of parking spaces", concluded Alessandro Zini, ENEA researcher in the Studies, Analysis and Evaluations Unit.

In conclusion, there is no certain answer to whether smart working is good for the environment, but each company can apply the criteria described according to the characteristics of their employees and therefore identify the most effective application of remote working and the incentivization of certain transport means to reach the workplace.