Counting Carbon
Tracking—and Reducing—OPAL’s Office CO₂e Emissions
At OPAL we constantly challenge ourselves to understand and reduce the environmental footprint of the buildings we design, focusing primarily on minimizing the carbon emissions associated with their operation and with the materials used in their construction. To achieve a net-positive environmental impact as a firm, however, we’ve come to recognize that we must also factor in the environmental impact of OPAL’s office operations. With that in mind, we recently began quantifying our office’s carbon footprint—including staff commuting, project site visits, and office energy use—using 2019 data to establish a baseline.
The process was underway when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S., upending our daily routines virtually overnight. On March 16 we adopted a work-from-home model, dramatically changing our work patterns and, it soon became clear, our carbon footprint as well. Negotiating this new landscape has posed challenges, but it also affords us an unprecedented opportunity to explore ways of reducing our carbon footprint, not just during the present crisis, but also after it passes.
Before COVID-19, our 14-person office was responsible for approximately 34 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) emissions annually—the equivalent of 7 Passive House residences. According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, averting irreversible climate change will require a 45 percent reduction in total global emissions by 2030. With the lessons we’ve learned from working through the pandemic, we believe we can reduce OPAL’s office carbon footprint enough to meet that goal by the end of 2021, and to achieve carbon-positive operations by 2030.
Before the pandemic, driving accounted for a significant share of OPAL’s CO₂e emissions. Commuting to work and visiting building sites in SUVs, hybrids, fuel-efficient rentals, and electric cars, OPAL staff drove a total of 88,400 miles in 2019. The bar graph below shows the monthly distribution of CO₂e emission from site visits to each OPAL project, and from each staff member’s commuting mileage before and after we shifted to working remotely. Since the start of social distancing, we have suspended all nonessential site visits. Except for a few staff members who require physical access to the office, we have remained at home, working, meeting, and collaborating remotely. While initiated for health reasons, this new regime has had the unplanned but beneficial outcome of reducing our monthly CO₂e emissions from driving by 92 percent.
Electricity use in the OPAL office accounts for another significant share of CO₂e emissions—15 percent of our total in 2019. Many of our designers and architects are accustomed to using powerful, energy-intensive computers with up to three monitors at a time. Since we began working from home, however, 85 percent of our staff have switched to laptops, which use 75 percent less power than our office computers. After accounting for an increase in interior lighting for our home offices, we estimate this has yielded a 50 percent reduction in emissions from our firm’s use of electricity.
While these reductions were the byproduct of actions motivated by a very different, temporary goal—flattening the curve of COVID-19 infections—they demonstrate the potential of simple but ambitious measures to reduce our environmental impact over the long term. By changing the way we work, we reduced our CO₂e emissions by over 90 percent, surpassing our internal goal by a factor of 4. Extrapolating this improved performance over the course of a year, our annual CO₂e emissions are currently less than those of a single Passive House residence.
The pandemic will pass, so we are taking steps now to maintain these improvements as we return safely to working in the office. Even before the sudden dawn of this new era, more than half of us were already walking or biking to work. Carpooling will increase commuting efficiency for those who work on a regular schedule. When we return to working primarily in the office, we will begin an optional, one-day-a-week work-from-anywhere program. (We estimate that heating our homes for one additional day per week will increase carbon emissions from that source by 20 percent, an amount far outweighed by the emissions we’ll save by reducing our commuting miles.)
When we analyze the global warming potential of an object or system, it is easy to overlook the accessory components of its environmental footprint. Even as we’ve reduced the carbon footprint of our buildings through careful material selection and the application of Passive House design principles, our site visits during the design and construction phases of a project have typically generated emissions equal to almost 35 percent of the annual operational emissions of the finished building. Quantifying the carbon impact of every mile we drive or fly enables us to apply a cost-benefit analysis to each site visit. We can then propose to our clients a maximum number of site visits in the course of their project, with the goal of limiting travel-related emissions to 10 percent of the finished building’s annual operational emissions.
We project that by then end of 2021, our new programs—carpooling, weekly work-from-anywhere days, and careful budgeting of our site visits—will reduce OPAL’s office-related emissions by 50 percent, to 18 metric tons of CO₂e per year, meeting our stated goal with 3 percent to spare. We plan to offset all of our remaining operational emissions through 3Degree’s carbon offset programs. We understand that carbon offsets are not a get-out-of-jail-free card; we will employ them temporarily, as we explore other ways to achieve carbon-positive office operations.
The environmental and health benefits of these measures will not come without cost. We value our studio culture and the natural collaboration that we are accustomed to experiencing on a day-to-day basis. Our relationships with clients, general contractors, and allied professionals all benefit from face-to-face interaction. But for too long, individuals and societies have prioritized comfortable habits over the health of the environment. OPAL’s ethos since its founding has centered on challenging outdated habits of seeing, working, and building. That approach has enabled us to make groundbreaking developments in reducing the environmental impacts of our buildings without compromising the comfort of their occupants. We will apply the same approach to reducing our office’s environmental footprint while also ensuring the productivity, cohesiveness, and well-being of our team.