Have you ever wondered what the environmental impact of your business travel is? Well wonder no more, Salesforce has you covered. As part of our ongoing look at Salesforce’s Net Zero Cloud, I decided to put my recent trip to Salesforce Tower in London into our own Net Zero Cloud instance and see what it looked like.
I am, I assume, like many of us in that I have a keen interest in protecting the environment when I can, but I really don’t have much idea what my impact is on a day-to-day basis. I turn off lights at home when I’m not in the room which has the added benefit of saving me money but what does my lifestyle do to the environment in terms of facts and figures.
I started by listing out each step of my journey. Firstly, there is a taxi to the Train Station since I live in the middle of nowhere. Second a train into London, then a few short hops on the London Underground to get to my destination. The same again but in reverse to return later the same day. This is a pretty standard journey for many of us who live outside the capital, we have to travel to our local transit hub, use mass transit into the city and then a few tube trains to within walking distance of our final destination. The astounding conclusion was that this journey cost 55.5 Kg of CO2e to be emitted into the environment on average (average train efficiency, average taxi etc).
How was this calculated? Well, Salesforce did it for me. I simply entered the detail for each step of my journey. For example, for the taxi journey I specified that I was in a taxi and the cost of the journeys (I totalled my journeys together and input both journeys as one for ease). I had already set the default for my journeys to be the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs 2022 figures for calculating the emissions so with those simple inputs from me, Salesforce calculated the impact of that journey. It is the same the whole way through, enter 2-3 simple data points and sit back while the numbers are crunched.
These figures are all rolled up into organisation wide dashboards and can be broken down by date, journey type etc, even by individual. The simplicity of the inputs lends itself well to integration with other systems. For example, at Stimulus Consulting we have our own app in our Salesforce environment for managing our expense claims. I could very easily connect to the 2 together so that whenever someone expenses a journey, we can get the carbon footprint for it automatically added to our reporting. This something I am excited to do so we can better understand our impact and where we can reduce it.
Fancy reading more about Salesforce Net Zero Cloud? We have also written the following helpful articles...
Delivering Net Zero Cloud with the Power of Salesforce
Dig Deeper into Salesforce Net Zero Cloud
What is Salesforce Net Zero Cloud
As a Salesforce Net Zero Cloud Partner, we’re the right people to contact about moving to net zero. Contact us now for more information.