Salesforce World Tour 2022: Travelling to New York with Net Zero Impact

Salesforce’s World Tour is an annual gathering for all the trendsetters and changemakers in the Salesforce ecosystem to share ideas and successes while hearing about the latest news and updates from Salesforce. After a successful net zero road trip to Washington, DC this spring, we knew that our CTO Jacob Guertin’s trip to New York City would have to be Net Zero as well. The challenge: offsetting the CO₂ emissions of two flights, car rides, and a hotel stay. After all, business travel is a classic example of Scope 3 emissions, and transportation is the economic sector that contributes most to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States!

Sustainability is one of Salesforce’s core values, so it’s no surprise that they did their part to create a sustainable World Tour event in NYC. The New York event was held at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which has achieved the LEED Silver certification.

Like many organizations with missions driven by innovation, Salesforce has shown their commitment to sustainability by going Net Zero in their full value chain. Net zero emissions translates to cutting the maximum amount of GHG emissions possible while offsetting the remainder through carbon offset programs. One way Salesforce does this is by investing in 1t.org, which has the goal of planting one trillion trees by 2030. Salesforce has implemented this initiative across their full value chain, meaning it measures Scope 3 emissions as well as Scope 1 and 2 emissions from direct and indirect energy use.

Green Impact is committed to our mission of environmental sustainability, so we calculated the Scope 3 emissions for Jacob’s attendance at World Tour NYC and are offsetting those emissions by purchasing carbon credits.

In order to get to World Tour, Jacob had to drive 25 miles from his home to Pittsburgh International Airport and fly from PIT to La Guardia, approximately 334 miles away. After landing, he traveled 9.1 miles to his hotel.

 Calculating for the round trip, Jacob flew 668 miles and drove 68.2 miles total.

The average four door car produces 411g of CO₂ per mile. Multiplying this by the 68.2 miles driven, we can conclude that Jacob’s car travel emitted 28,030.2 g of CO₂, or 0.03 tons.

The average plane emits 53lbs of CO₂ per mile. The Bombardier CRJ-900 that Jacob flew on can carry 70 passengers and requires 4 crew members. When you multiply the number of miles traveled by 53lbs of CO₂ and then divide by the 74 people aboard the plane, you can find that each person is responsible for 478.44lbs of CO₂, or 0.23 tons.

(4.11g of CO₂*68.2 miles) + ([53lbs of CO₂ *668 miles]/74 people) = 243.23kg of CO₂ emitted in travel

 

 

Adding up the totals for both the plane and car travel, we can conclude that Jacob’s travel emissions equal 0.27 tons of CO_2.

Jacob spent one night in a hotel during the conference. Using carbon emissions factors obtained from the EPA Center for Climate Leadership, we calculated the hotel stay emissions to be 0.007 tons of CO₂. Without information on the other greenhouse gases, like CH₄, and N₂O, that the hotel emits we can’t include these additional emissions. To conservatively estimate for our team member’s carbon footprint, we are using the “Analysis and Benchmarking of Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Luxury Hotels” paper from the International Journal of Hospitality Management that estimates one night in a luxury hotel to emit 0.03 tons CO₂.

Fuel (0.122 MMBtu per room per day)*Fuel Emissions factor (53.06 kg CO_2. per mmBtu)= Emissions (6.47 kg CO₂ per room per day)

This simple overnight trip shows the complexity of calculating emissions for even the most routine business activities. Fortunately, Net Zero Cloud simplifies emissions calculations and streamlines the emissions tracking process. Interested in learning more? Schedule a free demo with Green Impact today!