Life cycle assessment of an office: Carbon footprint of an office staff

Abstract

Environmental problems have become today’s most emphasized issues due to the unconscious use of naturalresources and the ongoing increase in consumption resulted in an increased level of environmental pollution. Offices,where most of the daily time is being consumed in today’s modern world, generate the important amount of dailywastes and increase the environmental burden. In this respect, it is important to investigate and to reveal theirenvironmental impacts. In this study, the Organizational Life Cycle Assessment (O-LCA) of an office has beenconducted in order to investigate the environmental impacts caused by a typical office and to reveal carbon footprintof an office staff. The water and energy consumption (electricity and natural gas), transportation, and business traveldata were obtained based on the real consumptions of the organization, while data required for the calculation of thewaste amount (paper, cardboard, plastic etc.) were provided from literature. Afterwards, data obtained for office havebeen run into SimaPro Analyst 8.0.2 software in order to calculate carbon footprint and to analyze the environmentalimpacts. As a result of the calculations made, the carbon footprint of the office has been found as $10^5$ kg $CO_{2^-}$ eq year-1and the carbon footprint of an office staff has been determined as 5263.16 kg $CO_{2^-}$ eq $year^{-1$}, accordingly. The obtainedresults have indicated that the highest share in terms of carbon dioxide emission is caused by electricity consumption,followed by transportation, business travel, office consumables, electronic devices, natural gas consumption, officewastes, water consumption, and electronic wastes, respectively.