How To Calculate Corporate Travel Emissions
As business travel begins to pick back up, many companies are looking for ways to reduce their travel emissions. Understanding how to calculate corporate travel emissions is key, as business travel contributes an outsized portion of transportation-related emissions—making it an easy and attractive place for companies to explore ways to decrease their overall carbon footprint.
The benefits of a lower corporate emissions profile extend beyond the environment, and such reductions can make practical business sense. The first step towards this goal is calculating the emissions for your business travel, allowing you to identify the best targets for emissions reduction strategies.
Categorize Your Travel Emissions
To understand its emissions profile, you need to break down your business travel into categories. Remember that emissions from commuting or from travel with company-owned vehicles do not count as business travel. The most important things to track are: air mileage, rail mileage, automobile mileage, and total miles traveled.
With this information compiled and categorized, you can then use general emissions profiles for each transportation type to figure out your travel emissions per category.
On a per passenger basis, an airline flight emits 0.39 pounds of CO2 per mile, a car emits 0.75 pounds per mile, and rail travel 0.2 pounds. While the emissions from any given trip will vary depending on the number of passengers, these numbers provide a baseline based on cumulative averages. There are also online calculators available from many sources that can be an alternative to running the numbers by hand.
Identify Your Biggest Travel Emissions Sources
For the vast majority of businesses, air travel will constitute the bulk of emissions. On average, an airliner emits 53 pounds of CO2 per mile, while a car produces less than a pound of CO2 per mile.
Of course, these emissions are spread among all of the passengers on the plane, but other factors can also influence the emissions of an airline flight. Newer, well-maintained planes are more fuel-efficient than older planes or those that follow a looser maintenance schedule. The type of ticket also has a significant impact, with business and first-class seats producing more carbon than an equivalent coach class seat.
While air travel is usually the biggest portion of your emissions footprint, it is important to remember that other forms of transport can also contribute significantly. The cumulative emissions of many taxi rides or trips with ridesharing companies can add seriously to your emissions over time.
Track Your Travel Emissions With Our Smart Tools
Understanding how to calculate corporate travel emissions is key to controlling your organization’s carbon footprint. Tools that show you carbon estimates for different travel options make tracking emissions data even easier. By comparing the impact of different travel options before you book, tracking and reducing your carbon footprint becomes a simple task.
Rocketrip’s tracking tool is fully integrated into our travel booking system. Once you’ve identified your biggest carbon sources, use our convenient platform to evaluate future travel options in terms of your company’s travel emissions goals.
