Measuring the good stuff in sustainability

Following on from earlier attempts to measure and report the sustainability of my business (see other blogs below), I’ve been preoccupied with a new problem.

I’ve been bothered by sustainability’s tendency to focus on reducing bad stuff. I’m missing the focus on creating good stuff, mostly because that’s what I really want my business to be about.

A basic sustainability accounting problem is this: we can measure and manage lots of bad stuff (such as carbon emissions and wasted time), but how can we do the same for the good stuff?

To answer this we have to get our heads around two basic problems. I’m using cycling and driving for work purposes as my prime example.

• When we ride a bicycle for work purposes, we cut car costs (bad stuff), but we have difficulty accounting for the ‘good stuff’ of cycling.
• We can quantify some costs (such as petrol, hours elapsed or carbon emissions) and benefits (projects won) by either mode, but these are really just measures of internal efficiency. What about the external effects of these activities?

Sustainability makes us look at how effective an activity or business is – how much good stuff we’re creating in the wider community. It’s both efficiency and effectiveness.

So that’s what’s been bothering me recently – and why I’ve been so quiet – I’ve been working on this experiment!

The table below is the outputs of an experiment with these issues. It uses my company’s road travel – by car and by bicycle – to explore measures of their sustainability.

To do this, I’ve constructed basic social, environmental and economic measures. I’ve converted the base units for driving and cycling (kM and hours travelled per year) into energy used (kW-H), carbon emissions, and social costs and benefits (see sources at end of blog).

Units	Car (per year)	Bicycle (per year)
Basic stuff Hrs Internal cost per hour	. 90 $208	. 30 $192
Social stuff Body kW-H	. 25 (body)	. 16 (body)
Environmental stuff kW-H kgCO2-e $-kgCO2-e	. 2,161 (petrol) 811 40	. - 16 (body)* -144* -7*
Economic stuff $ Social Costs $ Social Benefits	. 341 0	. 5 -318*
The Balance $ Balance $ Balance per hr	. 381 4	. -318* -11*
* Benefits are marked as negatives (negative costs) to help avoid confusion.

The comments below give you my views on these figures.

The basic stuff

Hours

I travel about 90 hours per year going to meetings and doing fieldwork around the Auckland, Northland and Waikato regions. I also fly but have excluded this here due to lack of data.

This year I cycled about 30 hours going to meetings, mostly within 10km of my office. For the record, my business bought the bicycle and it paid for itself within the first year.

Within my business the cost of driving is about $208 per hour (including petrol, maintenance and driving time) and cycling is about $192 per hour. This tells you my short cycling trips around the congested Auckland City are cost-efficient.

The social stuff

kW-Hr

My clients don’t care (or don’t know) whether I arrive by car or bicycle, so there’s little to say about relative social effectiveness in this context.

So I use kilowatt-hours to help compare the energy-intensity of these very different modes. The figures suggest my body currently uses more energy per year sitting in a car than it does riding a bicycle.

It’s a nice way of putting travel in context: if I’m going to travel, I might as well find a way of making that time and energy useful.

The environmental stuff

kW-Hr

Measuring energy also helps compare use of different resources over time – in this case the energy from petrol versus foods as resources. You’ll notice my body uses a lot less motive energy than petrol per year.

kg-CO2-e and $-kg-CO2-e

The carbon emissions for driving are those from petrol use. As a result, those credited to cycling are those not used driving (expressed as a negative figure). I prefer this approach to carbon crediting (fat burnt and carbon not used) over tree planting. The carbon emission-dollars ($-kgCO2-e) just show the economic impact of this – a small saving from cycling.

The economic stuff

Dollars

The social costs cover the economics of accidents, congestion and other impacts. The social costs of my driving far outweigh those of cycling.

The balance

The balance for the two modes is the sum of the dollar figures in the table – the economics of these modes.

The total figure indicates my car driving is roughly as bad as my cycling is good – even for the relatively limited amount of cycling I do.

My rough calculations show work-related car driving costs NZ roughly $720 million per annum, while work-related cycling benefits us by about $11 million – that’s from the few percent of people who do work-related cycling. Imagine if more people cycled for work…

I’m surprised. These figures show cycling is both more internally efficient for short trips, and much more effective for creating good stuff outside the company.

Along the way I’ve also evolved a choice of measures (hours, energy, carbon emissions and dollars) we can use to profile other aspects of the business.

Sources

I’ve used my own performance figures with the following sources of data:

• Work hours and kilometers traveled by car and cycle from the Ministry of Transport.
• My body’s energy use while cycling from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.
• My car’s energy use from good old Wikipedia.
• Economic costs and benefits by travel modes from Smith, Veryard and Kilvington (2009). I’m aware NZTA have just increased the benefits of cycling to $1.45 per kM but use Smith et al’s 2009 figures for consistency.

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