Let’s be honest – most of us are not going to ride our bikes to work on anything approaching a regular basis, no matter how dedicated we are to improving the environment and protecting the planet.

With Earth Day upon us, we should all look for ways to reduce the wear and tear on our world while still being able to be productive employees.

Only about two percent of employees work from home a majority of the time, but some studies estimate as many as 40 percent have jobs which don’t require them to be in an office or at a particular place at a specific time. People who work in retail or on a construction site, of course, have to be where their job is.

Telecommuting has become a way of life for many people because broadband access to the Internet has become so widely available. Telecommuters are actually more productive than their office-bound counterparts because, as some have argued, there is less “visiting” from cube-to-cube or office-to-office and fewer distractions from regular office activities.

Broadband allows baby boomers who might otherwise have retired to continue to work and be productive members of their teams if only on a part-time basis because they don’t have to deal with the hassles of going to the office. Those with disabilities have found that Adaptive Technologies installed in their homes have made them available to work full days because the special commuting issues they face are no more.

Anyone in the Middle Atlantic region who suffered through last winter’s December and February snow storms know that for anyone who works from home it was just another work day – although keeping the kids occupied after a week of “snow days” became a universal challenge.

Articles have been written detailing the amount of money a telecommuter can save by not having to pay transportation costs – gasoline for a car, or the fare for a bus or train – not having to pay for parking, lunch or daycare. The savings to an employer range from reducing the amount of office space to the amount of coffee they need to provide. Printers, copiers, light, heat, and air conditioning costs would all shrink if more employees worked from home.

But, this is Earth Day, so we should examine some of the broader savings which might be achieved by more people working from home. If everyone who could work from home today did work from home, we would save 45 million gallons of gas – at $3 per gallon that would be $135 million saved in fuel costs in one day.  It would also eliminate 423,000 tons of greenhouse gases which is the equivalent of taking 77,000 cars off the road for a full year.

It would also save 775 people from being injured or killed in rush hour traffic accidents. The amount of money which would be saved from just that aspect is tiny compared to the amount of anguish which families would be spared.

So, it turns out we can be better citizens of the Earth while still being productive employees by working from home and using America’s highly developed broadband network.

Happy Earth Day!

Kate Lister is part of the Telework Research Network (http://undress4success.com/research/)