As a measure of business’ impact on the environment, carbon footprinting was virtually unknown a decade ago. Now, it appears that carbon footprinting and measuring greenhouse gas emissions look to be the next new cost of doing business. The goal: reduced emissions and in the process a smaller, balanced carbon footprint.

First a refresher: A carbon footprint is a measure of the impact human activities have on the environment, in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide.

Determining your business’ carbon footprint isn’t so straightforward, however. It means estimating the lifecycle carbon inventory throughout your entire supply chain — and each link’s contribution — in all your various business sectors.

It isn’t an easy process and requires a lot of resources.

Given all that, the question everyone asks is the steps newspapers will need to take to measure their carbon footprint. And how will it affect their business? Let’s look at what’s going on now.

New York City recently completed a thorough tally of its greenhouse gas emissions, through an audit cited as a model for other cities. Based on that program, Mayor Michael Bloomberg calls for the city to reduce emissions by 30 percent by 2030. In Great Britain, the government has adopted as its national target a 60-percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Businesses as diverse as General Electric and Starbucks, Intel and Sun Microsystems are preparing their own programs. So are newspapers.

Thinking about issue

At The Washington Post, Bob McLane, director of safety programs, says, “We’re beginning to think about the issue, and we are gathering data to attempt to determine what our newspaper’s carbon emissions might be.

“It is a reasonable likelihood that the newspaper industry will all be responsible for reporting these emissions in the very near future,” he says.

At Dow Jones, Paul Jakubski, director of environment and safety, notes that “Dow Jones is starting to build a carbon footprint model based on the 100-page Greenhouse Gas Protocol,” which can be found at http://www.ghgprotocol.org/templates/GHG5/layout.asp?type=p&MenuId=ODg4.

In May, Dow Jones’ new owner, Rupert Murdoch, launched a company-wide plan to address climate change throughout his media empire. His News Corp. pledges to reduce its carbon footprint 10 percent by 2012, and will be carbon-neutral by 2010 by buying emission offsets from projects like wind farms in India.

Another step

Another step papers can take is to become familiar with the ISO 14001 standard, which spells out how facility and property managers need to structure their environmental auditing program. By the way, while carbon dioxide gets all the publicity, there are actually six problematic greenhouse gases to be concerned with; including methane, nitrous oxide and hydroflourocarbons.

Until models are available however, another emerging alternative is the use of carbon-offset services.  These service companies help businesses calculate how much carbon dioxide they generate and how much investment is needed in carbon-reducing technologies to make up for — or offset — the damage caused by their activities.

Some environmentalists are decidedly skeptical of offsets, seeing them merely as an eco-fantasy that allows businesses the illusion of having it both ways: burning lots of greenhouse-emitting products but avoiding doing harm.

In recent years offsetting has ballooned into a $30 million annual business, with companies like TerraPass, DrivingGreen, Climate Care, the Carbon Neutral Company and the Bonneville Environmental Foundation employing different strategies to achieve savings.

Climate Care, for example, shipped highly efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs to Kazakhstan to offset the pollution created by the country’s older coal-fired plants. The firm is sending another 10,000 bulbs to Majuro, in the Marshall Islands, to help residents there conserve energy.

Another firm, CO2balance.com, plants trees on former farmlands in England.

Nothing quick or easy

These efforts notwithstanding, there is nothing quick or easy about generating a greenhouse gas inventory. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a pioneer. There are tools and models available, success stories to turn to for ideas, and a growing number of government agencies, industry coalitions and for-profit companies that are standing by with guidelines.

The good news in all this is that the identifying and calculating required may ultimately lead to the development of a standard data acquisition methodology and databases for newspapers to use in carbon inventory calculations, a general modeling framework and a means for calculating carbon inventories on a periodic basis.

Ken Columbia is director of workforce development at the Newspaper Association of America. He can be reached at coluk@naa.org.