If you are one of the many who are opting to work at home at least part time, then hats off to you: you are contributing to the preservation of the environment, probably without even knowing it. Aside from its benefits to family, home life, and productivity in general, telecommuting has been shown to save energy and ultimately, help in environmental protection and preservation.
In this article, we will demonstrate the many benefits of telcommuting on the environment. These benefits can be used to further telecommuting advocacy to both government and commercial organizations.
One way that telecommuting conserves energy is in the production, operation, and maintenance of vehicles. Modes of transportation such as cars, buses, and trains used by people to get to and from work everyday require a lot of energy. Despite the costs of production and maintenance, however, there are more and more vehicles on the road. This leads to traffic problems, which in turn, result in wasted man-hours, stress, and reduced productivity. To address these conditions, we continue to build more roads and widen or expand existing roads again resulting in additional expense and energy consumption.
Telecommuting not only saves money and energy, but it also guards against environmental degradation by keeping cars off the road and reducing fuel consumption. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 1.2 million gallons of fuel would be saved if even 10 percent of the US population were to telecommute at least once a week. That is the equivalent of about 24 million pounds of pollutants kept out of our atmosphere each week.
In addition to this, with fewer cars on the road, we will have less traffic and therefore, reduced gas emissions from slow-moving vehicles. There will be less need for road expansion and parking lots, saving not only materials and resources, but more importantly, land. The land taken up by parking lots can instead be converted into parks that will help preserve the quality of our environment.
Another way that telecommuting contributes to energy conservation is in office maintenance. The electricity required for lighting, cooling, and heating an office building is significantly more than what would typically be required at home. Repairs and the transportation of materials and equipment for these repairs are other factors that contribute to energy consumption.
A telecommuter would translate to one less energy consumer in an office or building. This means fewer demands on lighting and other electrical requirements. It also means a maximized use of existing structures.
If the US government continues to support and encourage telecommuting, we can look forward to the day when telework is the norm when less people are transported across crowded highways and snarled traffic, to offices where they perform tasks that can be done at home anyway.
