Green Business Starts At Home

My daily commute to work is 25-feet. No, I did not say 25-mile or 25-minute. I said 25-feet...and no car required, obviously. My morning fuel is usually a mug of green tea.

Often I am the only adult of working age at home on our street during the day. Those of us who work from home can tell you it takes discipline to keep from visiting the refrigerator every half hour, to keep phoning clients instead of doing the laundry, to fend off friends who (for some mysterious reason) cannot understand anyone being home not being available for chit chat at all hours. Most of us who work from home will tell you the rewards are well worth the self-discipline.

Working from my home office as an entrepreneur, I have gained time management skills and healthy, growing income from multiple businesses. Creating new projects -- particularly the ones centered on environmental issues and ideas to help Boomers succeed in retirement -- keep me focused and motivated.

Just last month one of my sisters, who is also green-friendly, finally persuaded her boss to let her move her medical transcription job home. She is not only regaining the time and money spent commuting to that distant office, she is also celebrating one more reduction in her own carbon footprint.

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia defines carbon footprint as, "a measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of green house gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide."

Carbon foot-printing provides a way for us to get a mental handle on one of the ways we impact Planet Earth.

Yesterday I was noting my odometer log -- mileage records for tax purposes. I realized how greatly my carbon footprint has been minimized in those 20 plus years of 25-foot commutes from the bedroom to the home office.

A 25 mile one-way commute adds up to over 12,500 miles a year for the average worker. My own yearly mileage for errand-running and trips is less than 5,000 miles. Add the 12.5K miles of a normal commuter to my 5K and it would be easy to put on over 17,500 miles on a vehicle in a year.

I looked all over the Internet for figures on the average yearly mileage in the US and the UK. The results run anywhere from 12,000 miles per year to 20,000 for each driver. Some reports state that the average person in the US produces approximately 7.5 tons of carbon dioxide every year. Every mile a car is driven produces nearly a pound of carbon dioxide.

Of course there are hundreds of simple and creative ways for each of us to reduce our impact on the environment: planting trees, recycling, avoiding plastic bags (re-using our own shopping bags), adjusting the thermostat to use less heating and cooling energy (solar panels, anyone?), keeping our tires properly inflated, using public transportation when possible, eating locally-produced organic foods, and the list goes on and on.

If it is possible in your own career to work from home, I urge you to consider it. In these days of sky-rocketing gas prices and Global Warming driving less simply makes sense. And, if you have the self-discipline to accomplish your work from home, you will enjoy the time savings as well as the savings at the gas pump.

But the true benefit of working from your own home office, in the bigger scheme of things, is how much less gasoline you will need to use each day and how much just that difference can support sustainability for Mother Earth.