Lights, heat, food all add to footprint

Industry to industry, businesses can have wildly varying carbon footprints – roughly defined as the amount of greenhouse gas put into the atmosphere – dependent on internal energy use, but also on the energy used by the products they create.
“A carbon footprint is the total greenhouse gases that are caused, directly or indirectly, by an individual or an organization,” said Sam Krasnow, a policy advocate and lawyer with Environment Northeast, an environmental and climate policy advocacy and research nonprofit. His firm offers carbon-footprint analysis.
To get to a carbon-footprint figure – commonly measured in tons of carbon dioxide or tons of carbon-dioxide equivalents – a firm, household or individual records the amount of carbon dioxide created by all their actions.
And for a business to calculate that greenhouse gas emission, it’s important to first look at what type of business it is.
If it’s an architecture firm, for example, a researcher would first look at the firm’s direct emissions, including office lights and heat used, employees’ commutes and food consumed at the office. Then they would have to take a look at the amount of carbon put into the environment through “indirect” emissions, which for an architecture firm would include those created by the buildings the firm designed.
“So if they’re an architecture firm designing buildings that are not energy efficient, that’s an indirect emission from their work and would add to their carbon footprint,” Krasnow said. “Whereas, on the other hand, if they were designing ‘green’ buildings with solar panels, energy efficiency and recycling, then you could say the indirect impact of their work creating buildings would be much smaller.”
And depending on the type of industry or scope of the investigation, it must be determined how far those indirect emissions will be calculated. “You can take on an infinite number of indirect impacts, so you have to draw a circle” around what you want to calculate, Krasnow said. •