How to Track Carbon Footprint When the Business is Always on the Road

As you probably know, carbon footprint talk can get annoying fast, because it usually swings to one of two extremes. On one side, it’s a massive, corporate-style report with ten tabs, a consultant fee, and language that sounds like it was written for a boardroom, like they’re doing just fine, probably more than fine. But then, on the other side, it’s vague feel-good statements that don’t connect to anything operational, so nothing changes and everybody moves on. Well, maybe people know the 5 R’s of waste management, but that might be it. You see how it’s two totally extreme here?

Now, with that part said, measuring carbon footprint can be way more normal than people make it. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be fancy, and it definitely doesn’t have to become a whole personality (as some businesses obsess over this). Now, sure, it’s great to put emphasis on this, and yes, please do (just maybe not overboard).

But it just needs to be consistent enough that the numbers actually mean something, because once a business can see what’s driving impact, it’s a lot easier to make smart choices that also happen to save money. But where do you even begin with this all though?

You Need to Start with the Small Stuff

Well, the small stuff that’s already happening, if we’re getting more specific here. But yeah, the fastest way to make this hard is to start by trying to measure everything. That sounds responsible on paper, but it’s also how tracking turns into a one-time project that never gets repeated, because it takes too long and feels too complicated.

But a better move is starting with what’s already happening anyway. It’s the easy stuff that you can already track, like fuel purchases, mileage, jobs completed, routes driven, disposal fees, material orders, service calls, returns, all of that is already part of business life.

All businesses on the road vary, of course, but these are things that mostly line up that most businesses on the road can easily track. But the trick here is pulling a few of those into a simple weekly rhythm, so it becomes routine, not a special event. And yeah, sure, different businesses have different “big drivers” too, like a field service business with trucks is going to have transportation as a main category. A business that ships products is going to see more impact in shipping and packaging, well, you get the idea here.

Fuel and Mileage are the Easiest Metrics

If vehicles are involved (and if you’re on the road, then that makes it pretty obvious here), then fuel and mileage are the easiest place to start, because they’re measurable, repeatable, and already tracked in some form. Plus, fuel is one of those costs that hits the budget directly, so tracking it doesn’t feel like extra work for the sake of optics; it feels like basic operations.

The beauty, when it comes to tracking mileage at least, is that it really matters due to the fact that fuel alone doesn’t tell the full story. Think about it, two weeks can have similar fuel spend, but one week might have been tight and efficient, and the other might have been scattered with extra trips, bad routing, or a bunch of repeat visits.

But the amount of fuel used also makes this sort of a baseline if you think about it, and the whole point with this is to not have any guesswork and just put a full stop to any sort of guesswork. They turn “it feels like fuel has been bad lately” into “fuel went up 14 percent over three weeks, and miles per job also went up, so something’s off.” Basically, a metric then becomes attached, so then it’s easier to just track.

Ideally, Just Collect the Basics Consistently

There’s no real point in making it fancy, sure, giant corporations do, but you’re not a giant corporation, and a good chunk of them aren’t even transparent and don’t even reach their sustainable goals (they just become silent instead). For a lot of businesses, this seems like it’s the whole make-or-break part, but it really doesn’t need to be. And outside of giant corporations that don’t care, well, the smaller businesses usually do so due to tracking and how complicated that can be. Not because they don’t particularly care for sustainability itself.

So the goal is building a weekly check-in that’s boring in the best way. Same day every week, same handful of numbers, same place where it gets logged. It’s the things like fuel used, miles driven, jobs completed, re-runs, and any disposal or diversion numbers that apply. Well, that’s enough to create a baseline and track improvement.

Actually, if you really think about it here, some businesses already have tools that store route and service data in a way that makes weekly tracking easier. For example, a company doing curbside collections might pull missed pickup counts and service exceptions from residential waste hauler software instead of piecing it together from texts, phone calls, and memory. More businesses like this are doing this (when it used to just straight up be from memory at one point in time).

But with that part said, though, a spreadsheet is fine. No, really, a simple spreadsheet that gets updated weekly beats a complex system that gets ignored, seriously, every single time here.

It’s Really About Communicating Progress

When reading that, you’re probably thinking “yeah, obviously.” Sure, it makes sense, but you’d be surprised that so many businesses still don’t communicate progress the way they’re actually supposed to communicate. But a lot of businesses want to talk about sustainability, but they don’t want to sound like they’re performing. That’s fair. The easiest way to avoid that is to stay specific and keep it simple.

But you absolutely do need to share what’s being tracked, share what improved, and share what’s being worked on next. If reruns dropped, say that. If miles per job improved, say that. If diversion rates improved, share the percentage. If data is still being refined, it’s okay to say that too. Really, honest progress tends to land better than perfect-sounding claims, because perfect-sounding claims make people suspicious.

*Disclosure: This is a collaborative post