Your office-wide operational GHG emissions & carbon offsets?

Our firm is not tracking, and to be honest I don't know that I'm going to invest the resources of our firm in trying to account for our operational carbon or not. Per discussions with the AIA LFRT sustainability directors, a number of folks who have measured their carbon have indicated that relative to the carbon our projects generate either from the products themselves (steel, concrete, etc.) or their operations, the operational carbon of their practices is a drop in the bucket. I think for the time being anyway I'm going to stay focused on the bigger carbon items in our project materials to try and balance the impact/effort of the work. I don't think the business case is there for focusing on operational carbon of the practice when our larger impact can be in the buildings we design and support our clients in operating.

1. Are you measuring?  Yes
2. What are you measuring (transportation/travel, facility energy usage, procurement of materials)? Transportation (flight and train), and operations (thermal and electricity). We also conducted a full LCA of our office renovation, which we published in the Journal of Building and Environment. All of our projects are subjected to an LCA throughout the design process, but the figures are not tracked in aggregate, rather each project is compared to a self-referential baseline. 
3. With what tools? A combination a various tools but most significantly Excel and Watt Time (for the carbon intensity of electricity we used at our office). The LCA used Tally. 
4. Are you purchasing carbon offsets? If so, what program are you using? No and this is a subject of discussion.    Just a side note, the travel impact is massive. We've implemented ways of knocking the total down, including more use of GoTo Meeting and having staff members live on site during CA, both of which help. There is definitely more work to be done though. 

We’re tracking in broad terms—our admin staff input data from our monthly natural gas bills into a tracking sheet, and we also track office-related travel via reimbursables (car/air/train mileage). We do not track food or office purchases, so it’s pretty limited, and we already address our office electricity usage through REC purchases via our provider. We track using a very dumb spreadsheet which I’m happy to share. At the end of the year, we purchase offsets. We have used the Gold Standard program (we also looked at Terrapass). The cost ranged from $800-$1200 for offsetting 58 metric tons of CO2, our 2018 total. It doesn’t take a lot of time if your office staff is on board, and it’s not a significant amount of money. It helps us with that “walking the talk” part of things, even if compared to the impact of our projects it’s tiny. It’s a great vehicle for staff engagement and education. Here’s the announcement I sent around about it in case it’s useful (we do educational work, so connecting the offsets to kids was important): * Offsets: This year is the first year where we have tracked our office-related travel and purchased carbon offsets. After surveying a number of different offset programs, we went with Gold Standard, and this year we are supporting the Cleaner Cook Stoves in Rwanda project. The new efficient cook stoves reduce the amount of wood burning in households, which means less deforestation, less harmful smoke, less indoor air pollution, and fewer GHGs. It’s definitely a “less bad” approach but a vital first step that has real, positive impact, especially for kids. Little known fact—cookstoves currently produce 2.3% of global CO2 emissions. From: Allison Wilson

Hi Jay, I posted this recently on a different thread, so apologies to those seeing it for the second time. LMN stopped using the Seattle Climate Partnership calculator in 2016 since it hadn’t been maintained since 2010 (?) or so. We now use the coolclimate calculator, with some tweaks, to calculate our footprint encompassing all 3 scopes. https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/calculator I’m happy to walk you through our methodology and the questions we ask ourselves. We include: * Air travel for work * Ground travel for work * Steam/elec use for our office * Paper/printing (though we don’t believe the Cool Climate calculator for printing after having a discussion with the creators of it) * Commute. We do a commute survey every year or two and use regional averages for Co2/VMT per transit type. * Compost/recycle/waste A summer sustainability intern usually does the reaching out to get the numbers as well as the initial data entry. We then talk about it quite a bit and interrogate the numbers and methodology. I think we are going to do the calculations every other year going forward, but interpolate and sequester our carbon footprint annually. We then work with a local company, Forterra, to attempt to sequester the carbon. This involves planting trees in our area. The method and math for the trees is here: https://forterra.org/service/evergreen-carbon-capture This also allows our employees direct action in planting said trees, including some great action photos. Sadly, photos of planting trees looks more like sustainability than energy modeling action photos. The emissions are published (percentages, not total) as part of our Sustainability Action Plan. https://lmnarchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/2018-LMN_2030-Sustainability-Action-Plan.pdf (the total GHG is around 700 Tons for 150-ish employees, much of that is flying) This is an important “walk the talk” issue, but we’ve also discovered that our carbon footprint is around 5% of our single largest building’s projected annual carbon. (we do large buildings for the size of our firm) So if we reduced that single building’s carbon by 5% we would have essentially offset all future carbon assuming we hold steady. If we include carbon from all of our buildings we design in a year our footprint is much less than 1%. If we include our cumulative building’s carbon footprint our office carbon footprint is negligible. We have to walk the walk but we need to spend most of our efforts on the big issues – ie, our projects. -Kjell From: Jay Hindmarsh

Bora has been purchasing offsets from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation for the past 13 years to cover air travel, our office car and local rentals, office energy usage, paper consumption, and our shared beach house energy usage. Several years ago we graphed the relationship between air travel and everything else, and between these offsets and the annual emissions of that year's building projects. We're still doing it anyway. [cid:image006.jpg@01D56EEA.5DADC6D0] [cid:image007.jpg@01D56EEA.5DADC6D0] Mike Manzi RA, CSI, CDT, LEED BD+C Bora Architects 503 226 1575

I guess my graphs didn't go through, so I'm attaching.  Sorry for the extra email!

Hi all, picking up on a pretty old thread. I do think the conversation has changed over the last four years -- we at Flad are working on joining many of you in tracking our emissions. Our travel emissions from our baseline year are significant, as expected. Does anyone have a good travel policy they would be willing to share? I'm particularly struggling with vehicle rentals. Many years ago, I worked at firm where we were always able to rent hybrid vehicles as part of our policy. However, I had to travel for work last week and our options for vehicle rental at the airport were a mini-van or an SUV, despite a reservation for a small car. If I had been on my own, I would have just used shuttles, ride share, walking, etc., but my colleague traveling with me required a rental car for a couple of different reasons. If anyone has a good policy or good insights into what works across a larger firm with a variety of different staff perspectives on business travel, I would really appreciate advice. Thank you!