| Building | Soccer Fields |
|---|---|
| Building & maintenance | 4.7094 |
| Occupation of site | 0.0396 |
| Occupation of grounds | 0 |
| Utilities | Soccer Fields |
|---|---|
| Electricity | 10.8226 |
| Gas | 0 |
| Water | 0.0003 |
| Green power | -10.8226 |
| Food | Soccer Fields |
|---|---|
| Catering & business lunches | 14.61 |
| Beer, wine & spirits | 3.09 |
| Milk | 0.4 |
| Tea, coffee, sugar & biscuits | 1.21 |
| Commute | Soccer Fields |
|---|---|
| Private car use | 0.2474 |
| Car pooling | 0 |
| Public transport | 1.1788 |
| Motor cycle / scooter | 0.1344 |
| Cycling / walking | 0 |
| Travel | Soccer Fields |
|---|---|
| Average size of cars | 0.2906 |
| Total fuel bill | 0.1356 |
| Public transport | 0.0368 |
| Taxi | 0.7423 |
| International flights | 0 |
| Domestic flights | 1.3042 |
| Goods | Soccer Fields |
|---|---|
| Office paper | 0.1248 |
| Journals, magazines & newspapers | 0.4895 |
| Printed materials & publications | 0 |
| Other stationery | 1.7042 |
| Computer & printer equipment | 4.9645 |
| Recycle | Soccer Fields |
|---|---|
| Recycled paper -0.000 | 0 |
| Recycled bottles -0.089 | -0.1156 |
| Recycled computers -0.382 | -0.4961 |
| Recycled toner cartridges 0.0012 | 0.0016 |
Occupied Land
Occupied land refers to land that has been developed and is now used for buildings, roads and all other physical infrastructure. In our case it refers to our the building our studio is within as well as our share in the public infrastructure needed for our business to operate.
Forest Land
Forest land refers to land required to provide all the timber products we use — for our desks and other furniture, in any building work we undertake, and in other items like paper. We avoid using any wood from old growth forests and seek Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) accredited timber.
Grazing Land
Grazing Land is the land used to support livestock that provides us with things like dairy, wool, and leather. It is used for meat too, but we buy only vegetarian food for our guests and staff.
Cropping Land
Cropping land is land used to grow our food, oils, cotton and other fibres. Whenever possible we buy local, organic produce — while this does not reduce the amount of land required to grow them, it does ensure that the transport footprint is as small as possible, and that poisons and petroleum products are not used in their production.
Energy Land
Energy land is the amount of forest land that would be required to absorb the carbon dioxide that is produced by Digital Eskimo's activities, and so avoid further global warming. This would be much higher if we did not offset our greenhouse gas emissions by investing in renewable energy projects through Climate Friendly.
+1 Soccer field = 0.77 Hectares
(1.9 Acres)
-1 Soccer field = 0.77 Hectares
(1.9 Acres)
Digital Eskimo has always worked very hard to minimise our impact on the environment. In order to help us better understand these impacts, and develop more effective strategies to address them, we calculated our ecological footprint for the 2009 financial year.
Ecological footprinting is one way of measuring whether the way in which we operate is sustainable in a global context. We chose this method because it is widely used, it provides results in an understandable format while clearly showing relative impacts of different elements of our operations.
We decided to utilise the excellent Victorian EPA calculator, developed in conjunction with the Centre for Design at RMIT. The calculator uses only generic data inputs (which are easier to audit in a small business such as ours) and the results therefore serve as approximations rather than exact figures. While this isn’t as accurate as a full audit delivered by specialists, for a company such as ours (with expertise in house and limited resources) it is the far more practical and affordable option.
Digital Eskimo's Ecological Footprint for the year until 30th June 2009 was 26.79 global hectares. Global hectares are not a particularly easy area to conceptualise for most, so we rounded it up to the universally understood measure of land, Soccer (or Football!) fields.
26.79 global hectares = 34.7 soccer fields.
This translates to a per staff member average of 1.98 soccer fields.
While this is a pleasing result, we can certainly improve on it. Our challenge is to decrease our footprint in both per capita and absolute terms even as we grow.
It is also worth noting that over half our footprint is due to the local/organic food we provide staff, which allows them to eat healthy, nourishing meals for breakfast, lunch and (occasionally!) dinner in the studio. While this certainly has an ecological cost, it is much lower than the resultant impact if the eskimos were to eat out at cafes each day, brought take away food into the studio with its resultant packaging, purchased non organic food for sandwiches at the local supermarket and so on.
While it's impossible to measure the savings here we can safely assume that a better environmental (and social!) outcome results from our food & wellbeing policies.
Ecological footprinting is a way of measuring the environmental cost of a person, company or country's activities. This cost is shown as the amount of productive land required to sustain those activities indefinitely. Ecofootprinting allows comparison of dissimilar types of activities as well as allowing a comparison against what is genuinely sustainable and what is a 'global fair share'. There’s only one earth, so a sustainable world is one where the total footprint is no more than that. Anything more is unsustainable. Global fair share is equivalent to the ecofootprint for one person according to a 'one world' ecofootprint.
