Corporate Travel

Getting our employees to meetings and other work-related events often requires air travel, which contributes to our overall carbon footprint. A significant percentage of our full- and part-time employees nationwide commute back and forth to work in single occupancy vehicles.

Corporate Travel (Tons CO₂)

Highlights

In 2007 we switched to a new corporate travel vendor that is able to report greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions more accurately. This will allow us to better understand the impact corporate travel has on our carbon footprint.

Challenges

While it appears that our GHG emissions associated with corporate travel went down in 2007, we actually reported too conservative (too high) a number in 2006. The result is that our GHG emissions for corporate travel in 2007 are higher than what we think they were for 2006.

Looking Forward

While corporate travel accounted for 6,988 tons of our GHG emissions in 2007, we understand that reducing business travel, even as our business grows, is both possible and desirable.

Methodology

To determine the GHG emissions for corporate travel in 2007, we used our travel booking software and other internal data sources to compute the total miles flown for all employees, which were just under 10 million air-miles. We then used a calculator for CO2 per passenger mile based on the computations published by the Climate Neutral Network.

We also used the same internal data sources to calculate the number of rental car miles driven by our employees, and we used a fleet-average estimate to calculate the number of gallons of gasoline burned and its associated carbon impact.