Environmental Footprint

Resource usage with respect to the environment

An Environmental Footprint is a term used to include the measurement of ALL resources consumed and exhausted while conducting a process, be it in work or at home.

In reality it is partly a fictional term and it is generally used as in an emotional sense as it is not something that can be defined or measured against any parameters.

Several initiatives that exist can help an organisation get close to the measurement of an Environmental Footprint, the most obvious example being 'Carbon Footprint'.

Standards exist in many countries to conduct Lifecycle Analysis (LCA) to identify the consumption of resources across a process. However, again this falls short of being able to establish an Environmental Footprint for an Organisation as the scope of LCA is a focussed tool and rarely covers all activities of an organisation.