Understanding Your Sustainability Categories

To effectively track your office’s environmental impact, it’s important to understand what each category represents and what kind of data to input. The units shown are the primary units used for summing totals on the dashboard.

• Energy Consumption (kWh)

  • Purpose: Tracks the amount of electricity and other energy sources consumed by your office.

  • What to Input: Kilowatt-hours (kWh) from electricity bills, or equivalents from natural gas/other fuel consumption (e.g., convert gas usage to kWh). Focus on total consumption from utilities.

  • Unit: kWh (kilowatt-hour)

  • Example: If your electricity bill for a month shows 15,000 kWh, you would enter ‘15000’ for Energy Consumption.

• Water Usage (Liters)

  • Purpose: Monitors the amount of water consumed within your office facilities.

  • What to Input: Liters (or cubic meters, m³, which can be converted to liters: 1 m³ = 1000 Liters) from your water bills. This includes water used for restrooms, kitchens, and any on-site landscaping.

  • Unit: Liters

  • Example: If your water bill indicates 20 m³ of usage, you would convert that to 20,000 Liters.

• General Waste (kg)

  • Purpose: Tracks the total amount of non-recycled waste generated by the office that goes to landfill or incineration.

  • What to Input: Kilograms (kg) or tonnes of waste. This often comes from reports provided by your waste management service.

  • Unit: kg (kilogram)

  • Example: If your waste hauler reports 500 kg of general waste for the week, you would enter ‘500’.

• Recycled Waste (kg)

  • Purpose: Tracks the amount of waste that is diverted from landfill through recycling programs.

  • What to Input: Kilograms (kg) or tonnes of recycled materials (paper, plastic, glass, metal, e-waste, etc.). Also typically from waste management reports.

  • Unit: kg (kilogram)

  • Example: If your recycling efforts resulted in 300 kg of materials, you would enter ‘300’.

• Business Travel Emissions (km)

  • Purpose: Estimates the environmental impact of employee business travel. While the unit is ‘km’, the underlying goal is to track the distance traveled that contributes to emissions.

  • What to Input: Total kilometers traveled for business purposes (flights, train travel, company car mileage). This often requires collecting data from travel booking systems or expense reports.

  • Unit: km (kilometer)

  • Example: If total business flights for a month covered 10,000 km, you would enter ‘10000’.

• Commute Emissions (km)

  • Purpose: Estimates the environmental impact from employees commuting to and from the office. Similar to business travel, ‘km’ represents distance contributing to emissions.

  • What to Input: Total estimated kilometers traveled by employees for their daily commute. This is often gathered through employee surveys (e.g., average commute distance per employee multiplied by number of commuting employees and workdays).

  • Unit: km (kilometer)

  • Example: If a survey indicates employees collectively commute 5,000 km per day, and there are 20 workdays in a month, you would enter ‘100000’.