According to estimates, smart working allows you to avoid the emission of about 600 kilos of carbon dioxide per year, on average, for each male and female worker, with a 40 percent saving in emissions. Working remotely also has significant advantages in terms of the time you earn (about 150 hours), the distance traveled (-3,500 km) and the fuel consumed (260 liters of petrol or 237 liters of diesel).
The data emerges from a research of AENEASthe National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, which studied the environmental impact of smart working in the cities of Bologna, Rome, Turin and Trento in the four-year period 2015-2018, therefore before the pandemic. The analysis focused on a sample of 1,269 agile workers in the Public Administration who use the car to get to work. The study was published in the international journal Applied Sciences.
In Italia i transport are responsible for over the 25% of emissions national totals of greenhouse gases and almost all (93%) come from road transport, with cars making up the ‘lion’ share (70%).
«In our country about a person out of two own a cari.e. 666 cars per 1000 inhabitants, a figure that places Italy in second place in Europe for the highest rate of motorisation, after Luxembourg», explains Roberta Roberto, ENEA researcher in the Department of Energy Technologies and Renewable Sources and co -author of the survey, together with colleagues from other sectors of the Bruna Felici Agency, Alessandro Zini and Marco Rao.
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«Agility working and all other forms of remote working, including smart working, have shown that they can be a important tool for change able not only to improve the quality of life professional and personal, but also to reduce traffic and the pollution citizen and to revitalize entire peripheral areas and neighborhoods considered dormitory», adds Roberto.
Based on the responses of workers who use internal combustion vehicles for home-work travel, everyday remote working would avoid 6 kg of direct emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Do not environmental benefits they don’t stop there: the analysis showed a reduction of nitrogen oxides per person per day (from 14.8 days in Trento to 7.9 days in Turin), carbon monoxide (from 38.9 g of Rome to 18.7 g of Trento), PM10 (from 1.6 g in Rome to 0.9 g in Turin) e PM 2,5 (from 1.1 g in Rome and Trento to 0.6 g in Turin).
The study showed that less use of the car for work also affects the extra-work travel on smart working days: 24.8% of the sample declares that they have opted for more sustainable ways (public transport, on foot or by bicycle), 8.7% changed their choices in favor of private transport, while 66.5% did not change their mobility options.
The survey involved an overall sample of 3,397 people from 29 public administrations throughout Italy, but the analysis then focused on the answers received from ‘agile’ workers based in Bologna, Turin, Trento and Rome.
«We chose these four cities for two reasons – explains ENEA researcher Bruna Felici -: the first concerns their peculiarities linked to the territory and the historical profile which suggest diversified impacts on urban mobility, while the second, and also the more practical, lies in the high number of questionnaire responses we received from civil servants in these four cities on average they work from home 2 days a week».
From the collected data it emerges that, on average, the sample travels 35 km a day for a duration of 1 hour and 20 minutes.
Trento it is the city with the greatest use of private internal combustion vehicles for home-work travel (62.9%), followed by Roma (54,4%), Bologna (44,9%) e Torino (38,2%).
«Private mobility offers flexible solutions in terms of saving time and autonomy of movement, especially for those with school-age children. Public transport, on the other hand, is mainly chosen with a view to saving money or in the event of a lack of parking spaces», observes Alessandro Zini, ENEA researcher of the Studies, Analysis and Evaluations Unit.
Rome is confirmed as the most critical citywith an average travel time of 2 ore, probably due to greater distances (1 in 5 Roman workers travel more than 100 km a day) and more intense traffic. In fact, in the capital there are around 420,000 daily trips for work and study reasons each person spends 82 hours a year in traffic.
