Saturday, February 9, 2008

The green road warrior

If you live near our office in Walnut Creek, it is easy to take BART or ride your bike to work to be green. But how about those of us traveling for Workday working with our customers or selling our solutions?

Airplane travel is one of the most carbon emitting activities and until the airline industry comes up with a better alternative fuel source, we can only leverage carbon offsets. TerraPass offers a simple calculator to see how much carbon is emitted by a flight (based on your portion of the plane's fuel consumption) and how much it costs to offset it.

An example: Last year, 10 Workdayers traveled to a prospect in Wichita, Kansas for a few days. Taking everyone's starting point into consideration, this amounted to 27,000 miles of round trip travel producing 10,000 lbs of CO2. Offsetting this amounted to about $60 for the team or $6 per travelers, which is roughly 1-2% of the average ticket price (or a beer at the airport lounge).

It felt good to travel carbon neutral. And of course we had the beer, too.

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