SMB Networks / Federal Programs /

Being green, seeing green

By Toni Kistner
Net.Worker, 05/07/01

Forget enhanced productivity and quality of life. In the next few years, telework is poised to make a lot of businesses a lot of money. Not in real estate savings or tax breaks, but in the relatively obscure emissions exchange market. And much of the credit goes to a little Austin application service provider called Teletrips.

One of the benefits of telework is that it keeps workers off the roads. Looked at another way, telework lets you accumulate "nontrips" to the office. Every time you take your car to work, it emits a quantifiable amount of nitrous oxide as well as other pollutants into the air. Today's gasoline engines are much cleaner and greener than their precursors back in the 1960s, but pollutants such as nitrous oxide can't be eliminated, so the only way to decrease their emissions (with the exception of driving an electric car) is by decreasing vehicle miles traveled (VMT). If businesses could track the amount of VMTs their employees saved by telework, they'd be able to quantify the amount of saved emissions.

That's good because if you can quantify saved emissions, you can assign a monetary value to them - they're called reductions. Though news to me, emissions trading has been a healthy practice among utility companies and manufacturers for about 10 years now. In a nutshell, federal regulation requires all plants to keep emissions below a certain cap. Plants that go above the cap must cease production. But emissions trading allows dirty plants to buy on the open market credits they can use to stay below the cap. These credits are earned by green companies - those who don't pollute.

While emissions trading sounds bizarre - after all, polluters are still polluting, just paying green companies, ironically enough, for the privilege - National Environmental Policy Institute Director Mary Beattie argues that the program has proven to "promote faster reductions [in pollutants], at a lower cost, and sooner." The idea being to "improve air quality without more regulation," she adds.

Of course, Beattie explains, dirty plants are encouraged to upgrade to cleaner technologies instead of buying credits. Because they're expensive, dirty plants typically buy credits to solve short-term problems, as a way to keep operational until a long-term solution such as a technology upgrade can be implemented. The point really is that this system pays green companies for being green.

The rub has been to find a way to quantify the car emissions saved by teleworking and how to bring mobile pollutants (a.k.a., cars) into the emissions trading system. While you can put a monitor on a smokestack, monitoring individual cars isn't practical.

That's where Teletrips comes in. The company has developed Web-based tracking software that allows teleworkers to track their nontrips to the office. The worker logs on to the Teletrips site, inputs information about the make and model of the car, and the typical length of trip (in time and miles) to the office. On telework days, workers log any short trips they made running errands. The subsequent saved VMTs are converted into the amount of saved emissions.

Teletrips also aggregates all data for a company's employees, converting the accumulated VMTs into emissions credits on an ongoing basis. In time, the credits will be given a market value and be traded on the emissions market same as the stationary credits of factories and utility companies. Teletrips will take a 10% fee when a company sells its credits, Teletrips CEO Scott Fleming says.

Teletrips' software was the missing link that prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to back a 2-year pilot project authorized under legislation drafted by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa). "We're the glue between the government, private sector and the environmentalists," Fleming says.

The pilot will run in five cities - Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia - and be administered by the not-for-profit NEPI. Telework friendly companies such as Nortel and AT&T have already signed up. While pilot companies can start earning credits right away, the value of those credits probably won't be set for about a year, Beattie says. At that time, the EPA will review the feasibility of trading stationary credits and mobile credits at the same value.