Conference Calls - A Green Option

Reduce Your Business’s Carbon Footprint With Conference Calls

by Mike Stanford

When it comes to reducing your carbon footprint, there are a great number of common sense methods which can help reduce your personal burden on the environment, from buying perennial fruit and vegetables over annual, to using cold water when washing clothes or dishes. But when you run a business, finding simple ways to develop a sustainable business model might not be so readily apparent, particularly if you run a large business with offices in several countries.

So where do you start? Well, depending on how far down the rabbit hole you wish to go, it’s best to start with a full energy audit. This can be as simple as making a note of all wasteful energy-consuming devices in your office, from computers in stand-by mode, to water-coolers left chilling overnight; or as complex as working out the carbon cost of your company assets and raw materials.

However, it’s the little things that are both the easiest to act upon, and can often reduce your carbon footprint a surprising amount. Take effective and efficient communications, for example – something every business strives for. Here, there’s a solution that is cost-effective, time-efficient and incredibly green compared to the alternatives.

Does your staff travel to meetings, even going so far as to fly to other countries for an hour’s meeting? Sure, sometimes this is an unavoidable expense, especially when meeting clients or stakeholders for the first time. But take a single first class round-trip to London from New York, which clocks in at 4 tonnes of carbon emissions. Now look at the carbon cost of a conference call: 57g per participant per minute.

So even if you make an hour’s worth of  conference calls every day for an entire year between three people, you’re only looking at 2.7 tonnes of emissions, a fraction of the 19 tonnes each person in the US is responsible for (8.73 tonnes in the UK). With one in five employees (in the US at least) now taking 3.9 business trips per year, even switching one of those trips to a conference call represents a huge saving in carbon. Conferencing calling: the easiest way for businesses to go green.