Another Way to Measure CSR: Organizational Carpooling

Sustainability has become a focal point of many organizations in recent years. Since corporate social responsibility has become so widespread, many companies are now directing more resources to ensure that they are operating in a responsible and sustainable manner. But most importantly, reporting on it.

Many companies now focus on building or improving their green facilities, transitioning to electronic forms of communication instead of paper, switching to video conferencing over air travel, and so on and so forth. Eventually, these organizations need to be publishing this data in quarterly or annual reports for their stakeholders. Transparency is paramount. Companies now consider how their day-to-day operations impact the environment, their community and its employees.

Another form of reducing your employees', and by proxy, your organization, GHG is through carpooling. Carpooling? Yes, carpooling. Ride sharing is another approach organizations need to consider in order to more effectively reduce their environmental footprint. There are many services out there today, such as Ride, Scoop, and BlancRide. These dynamic ridesharing SaaS gives organizations the ability to track and report on their carbon emission savings for every single employee that uses the platform.

Just to provide some insight on how detrimental private transportation is on the environment, the transportation sector in Canada is one of the biggest significant emitters of GHGs. According to Environment Canada, in 2007 transportation was responsible for 27% of the total GHG emissions. Road transportation accounted for 69% of the GHG emissions within the sector. Additionally, GHG emissions in Ontario represented 39% of the total provincial emission levels (source: Stats Canada).

Those percentages are astronomical due to the number of people who drive alone to and from work everyday. Just to throw in a few more statistics, according to the 2011 National Household Survey (NHS), roughly 15.4 million Canadians commuted to work. 74.0% of commuters, or 11.4 million workers, drove a vehicle to work. Only 5.6%, or 867,100 people made the trip as passengers. 

Organizations need to start looking at these trends and consider whether or not they want to be the first to champion carpooling on a large scale model. Once an organization deploys an internal carpooling initiative, whether through a 3rd party provider or doing it in-house, they could justify that they are taking their GHG reduction a step further by tracking and reporting on an individual basis.

For example, you could save 3.5 tons of carbon emissions per employee, on average, if employees carpool to and from work. Every year that a car isn't being driven. it's similar to planting 400+ trees. For those who are environmentally conscious, that is a huge value proposition.

If you want to try carpooling using your smartphone, Google is your best friend. Just remember, these carpooling services are scalable models, which means that they (mostly) work very well when they have a sufficient amount of people active on the platform. In the case of Toronto's BlancRide, they need approximately 30,000+ people for the service to work seamlessly. Keep in mind Toronto's population is 5+ million people. According to BlancRide's last update, they are at approximately 12,000 users. So they are swimming upstream, if you will.