What is the environmental impact of working from home?

Many of us at the moment have had to explore and think about what it means to work at home and compare this with potentially (or not) going back to work in the future.

A recent article by Dr Stuart Walker explored what the impact was on working from home or at the office. How did commuting by bicycle or heating your home office affect your environmental impact?

Effectively, what it came down to was the fact that the shared resources of offices are sometimes most environmentally friendly if your commute to work is not high impact (e.g. you are able to cycle or walk).

While measuring environmental impact is important, this type of measurement is often not straightforward.

For example, this analysis assumed that going to the office was usually best because of the shared resources. However, as many found during lockdown, the mental health benefits of being at home and able to take short breaks or cook meals rather than buying takeaway food. However, that was not taken into consideration for that calculation.

However, when people live slower lives, which is what they do when they work from home, then they consume and buy less pre-packaged items which may translate into a lower environmental impact which was not taken into account.

For example, take the infamous run on baking ingredients that happened in many countries during lockdown. Stuck at home, many many people began to cook and bake in ways they hadn’t for years. Most of them would have bought packaged lunch deals had they been working at the office.

Even if you calculate the extra energy people used for electricity and gas for all that baking and cooking, I suspect it was much less than the equivalent environmental impact of items they would have otherwise consumed in terms of production, manufacturing, packaging, transport impacts.

Thus, while the types of environmental impact analyses mentioned in that article are useful, as even he mentions, often outside factors can have even greater impact. As in this case, while there are differences, there seem to be other choices that are much more significant and impactful. For example, Walker mentions that replacing corporate travel with Zoom conferencing would have more significant impact than the office vs home working debate.