About
How to use this website
This site tries to help several audiences:
- All members of the DUSP community, to show how the department's activities are impacting the environment.
- Students within DUSP, to provide pointers for further study that will improve on these initial estimates of greenhouse gas emissions.
- Other students at MIT, to provide a possible methodology for carrying out a similar study for other departments.
- Members of other universities, to provide a methodology for assessing their department or organization.
Information is divided into the following sections:
- Study motivation. Why an audit at the department level is useful, why greenhouse gas emissions are relevant.
- Summary. Our complete emissions.
- Scope and limitations. What the study considers and what it omits.
- Travel. Long-distance travel on DUSP business, including flights and vehicle use.
- Commuting to school.
- Our buildings.
- Material inputs. Limited in this initial audit to paper only
- Waste. Trash disposal and recycling.
- Extending the audit. Making the audit more comprehensive, including a list of remaining tasks that the initial audit has identified.
Carrying out the study
The audit methodology (larger version of the chart).
The audit of greenhouse gas emissions was carried out by Frank Hebbert in Spring 2007 as a term project for Ecologies of Construction (4.406). The initial version was submitted in May 2007. Minor edits and clarifications have been made since then. There is huge room for improvement in the accuracy and scope of this audit. Please provide feedback to fkh at mit dot edu.
Producing this audit took 76 hours, mostly spent in front of a MacBook laptop rated at 60W. Assuming that all electricity used came from the MIT grid, the total emissions resulting from this study were 24.89 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent. Additionally, a server somewhere at MIT is hosting these pages, but this impact cannot be measured easily.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the following people for assistance with data:
- David Fredel, Market Development Manager, Wausau Paper
- Jim Harrington, SAP Facilities manager
- Cheryl Keane, Copytech
- Duncan Kincaid, DUSP CRN Director
- Janine Marcuse, DUSP headquarters
- Tarek Rached, energymap.mit.edu
- Steve Rapp, Wausau Paper