| Contact us | Help
Find Professionals
Find Work
MyElance
Water Cooler
search

Elance Blog



Elance Home » Community Spotlight
jdiller's picture
jdiller
Elance employee

Greenlancing – How Virtual Workers Help Save the Earth

Apr 22, 2008 3:36pm

For Earth Day, we tried to estimate the kind of impact that Elancers are having on the environment.



Every week, small businesses farm out thousands of marketing, technology and administrative jobs to 50,000 members of the Elance professional network, and they are also doing something good for the environment.

Based on our rough estimate, by not meeting in person or commuting to work via automobile or bus, Elancers could be avoiding more than 250 million pounds of CO2 emissions annually.

Of course, we had to make assumptions to calculate this impact, such as considering the distribution of Elance providers globally and the ratio of individuals vs. businesses, but given our assumptions and a few key data points, here’s how the data adds up:

54,000 active individual Elance providers
X 20 mile average round trip daily commute1
/ 20 miles per gallon of gasoline average2
X 19.4 pounds of CO2 emissions per gallon of gasoline3
X 240 average working days per year
= 251 million pounds of CO2 emissions saved annually

How did your need for transportation change when you started using Elance as a buyer or service provider?

Sources:
1. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 2000 report
2. U.S. EPA Fuel Economy Trends, 2007
3. U.S. EPA Emission Facts, 2005

Trackbacks - Links from other blogs

Trackback URL for this topic is: http://www.elance.com/p/trackback/2737
Share this:
delicious | digg | reddit | google | yahoo | technorati
» add new comment
2 Replies
Apr 23, 2008 10:23am
shaw_belt

Hello Jon,
"Greenlancing" is a great term! In the U.S., where more people drive in their own cars by themselves to get to work or meetings, I'm sure the carbon emissions are huge. But even in other countries where buyers and providers are more likely using public transportation, the savings in carbon emissions being able to work from home is still large. To go even further, I saw a piece on the news about this site, to help reduce unneeded energy usage in computers and other high-tech devices by companies: http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org.
So, "greenlancers" can be even more green by using energy conserving equipment as well as not commuting in automobiles.
Apr 25, 2008 4:06am
VectorFlower

No doubt about that online tools are one of the easier/natural way to reduce automobile emissions. Personally, after when I felt Elance as comfortable way to earn, it reduced atleast 2 hours/day of my travel time.
 
Actually we were 3 designers/developers started with a business title VectorFlower with the aim of expanding our team size. After doing more than 50 projects here, We found that a team travelling to the same work location each day is not necessary to do the jobs that posted under our category of service. So we started working individually from our homes. Although we had a lot of other benifits from this decision, this way atleast 90km/day of travel and so fuel/emission saved!