The numbers for one meeting
Two people from your office visit a client 200 miles away for a 1.5-hour meeting and come back the same day. These are example figures, using the 2026 government factors:
| How | Calculation | kg CO2e |
|---|---|---|
| Drive together in an average car | 400 miles × 0.26699 | 107 |
| Train, both people | 1,287 passenger km × 0.03092 | 40 |
| Video call, both people | 2 people × 1.5 h × 0.02159 | 0.06 |
If the meeting were in Edinburgh and the two flew from Heathrow with a hotel night each, the trip would be about 510 kg CO2e: 490 kg for the flights and 21 kg for the rooms. See our post on train or plane for more routes.
What the video call figure includes, and what it doesn't
There is no government emission factor for a video call. The figure above uses the office equipment part of the government's homeworking factor, 0.02159 kg CO2e per hour in 2026, which assumes a 140 W workstation (laptop or PC, monitor, phone and printer) plus 10 W of lighting. It covers the devices at your end.
It doesn't cover the internet networks and data centres that carry the call. There is no UK government figure for those, so we don't add one. What we can say is that the comparison isn't close: even if the call's true footprint were 100 times our figure, the car journey would still be about 16 times larger.
Over a year
If the two people make that trip by car 10 times a year and switch to video calls instead, business travel falls by about 1.07 tonnes CO2e, plus the time on the road.
Do I need to count video calls?
Not separately. They are already in your figures in three places:
- Laptops in the office use electricity that is in your Scope 2 bills.
- Laptops at home are covered by the homeworking factor, if you count homeworking. See our post on homeworking emissions.
- The video service is part of your software spend in Scope 3 category 1. Our post on cloud, servers and laptops covers how to count it.
Making it stick
- Write a short travel policy: video first for routine meetings, train for trips that are worth making, and flights only by exception.
- Record the trips you still make, so the fall in business travel shows up in your figures.
- Put the policy in your Carbon Reduction Plan. Business travel is Scope 3 category 6, one of the categories PPN 006 requires.
How Carbon Recycling helps
Record business trips as they happen: car miles by car size and fuel, rail in passenger km, flights from airport codes, hotel nights by country. Carbon Recycling applies the right year's government factors and puts them all in Scope 3 category 6, so the drop after a video-first policy shows up month by month. Add the policy to your Carbon Reduction Plan as a completed measure, and if customers ask about it, our free supplier questionnaire answer bank includes wording for a travel policy that favours rail and video calls.