With Earth Day (April 22) fast approaching, the environmental benefits of telecommuting are once again in the news. The most concrete analysis I’ve seen lately comes from Undress4Success, a site offering advice and research for folks who work at home. They asked the simple question: what would be the impact if everyone who could work from home actually did? The answer they came up with for the USA: a savings of 625 million barrels of oil a year, as well as $43 billion less spent on gasoline and elimination of a couple of weeks of wasted commuting time per person.
Of course, no one expects the entire population to switch over to telework en masse, and a jump from the current 4% to 40% would undoubtedly cause dislocations elsewhere (would there be enough internet bandwidth, for example?). But the numbers are fun to look at and can give you, the web worker, a warm fuzzy feeling. They also have a page where you can check the numbers for a particular locale, or get the underlying sources and assumptions emailed to you.
{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2008\/04\/19\/telecommute-to-save-the-planet\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_9baf657f65f8ef990ed9157d3651457e","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}