Summer 2007. It’s not that simple to figure out your carbon footprint.
FSEEE is housed in an old building where thick, insulating walls are offset by drafty, single-pane windows. Forest Magazine file photo.
ACCOUNTING FOR CARBON
The word of the year in 2006 was “carbon neutral,” according to the New Oxford American Dictionary. Everyone, it seems, from homeowners to travelers to businesses, is jumping on the bandwagon to reduce emissions that contribute to global warming. Websites now allow you to enter a few simple figures and calculate your carbon footprint; some offer “carbon credits” for sale so that you can offset your carbon use with money earmarked for projects that help reduce carbon emissions. Feeling guilty about flying? On some online travel sites you can offset the carbon that will be used in your flight by purchasing a credit when you buy your ticket. Still driving an SUV and feeling not only the pain at the pump, but the disapproving stares of hybrid-vehicle drivers? There are calculators that let you know how many wind farms you should build to offset that gas-guzzling tank.
It’s a great time to be green.
In keeping with the spirit of combating global warming on a local scale, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics decided to investigate the feasibility of becoming a carbon neutral organization.
Although we think our workplace tends to be average to low as far as environmental impacts, there are a few spots that could use improvement. For instance, FSEEE’s eight employees drive 20,000 miles a year in work-related travel, releasing more than eight tons of carbon into the atmosphere just to get to or perform our jobs. Our board members travel to an annual meeting and have to account for the air and road miles used in that process. And we use paper, tons of it every year, with no way of measuring how much of it ends up in a landfill.
Some of our carbon use we can account for and offset. Other impacts are not so easy to quantify. Here’s what we’re looking at; stay tuned for further accounting.
Electricity: The FSEEE office is heated and cooled with a heat pump, and a programmable thermostat ensures we’re not heating or cooling empty space when we’re not here. We know this works, because winter Mondays require us to wear extra layers while the building heats up after the weekend. Even James’s dog Zella feels the cold.
We offset our electric use by participating in a green-power program that enables us to purchase our electricity from renewable sources that include wind and solar.
Office practices: We half-fill a ninety-gallon trash can every two weeks. We recycle paper, glass and cans, have a duplex printer and reuse paper printed on one side for draft or internal documents. We use 35 percent post-consumer waste paper. The cost for 100 percent recycled paper is about three times what we pay now, and we haven’t made that switch. We donate used equipment to foster homes and schools.
Printing: Forest Magazine is now printed with a vegetable-based ink called Freedom Ink. It uses 100 percent flax seed oil, unlike soy ink, which can contain up to 80 percent petroleum oil. In addition to being a non-petroleum product, this plant-based ink does not emit harmful volatile organic compounds, making it safer for those printing the magazine. It also dries quickly, saving time and energy.
Paper: Forest Magazine is printed on 65 percent recycled paper, including 15 percent post-consumer content, as is the paper on which we send updates and donation requests. We create a tree-free HTML version of the magazine every quarter and send that to 40,000 U.S. Forest Service employees and congressional staffers.
Commuting miles: FSEEE employees annually travel about 20,000 miles by personal vehicle to get to work or for work-related travel, emitting 17,087 pounds of carbon. Many of us combine these trips with other errands: dropping kids off at school, grocery shopping, returning our library books. For the purposes of our tally, we counted all miles to and from work. James’s work requires that he travel by car to meetings or to visit national forests throughout the region. Andy, who has the longest commute at eighteen miles each way, makes the trip by bicycle an average of three days a week. Others of us have reduced miles by taking public transportation or walking.
Other miles: Board members travel close to 8,000 air miles and 1,200 road miles to get to our annual meeting. This year we opted to offset the air miles by buying carbon credits when we booked the tickets. —Patricia Marshall