How Dcycle calculates employee commuting emissions (Scope 3, Category 7)

What this measures

Dcycle calculates the CO2e emitted by each employee’s daily commute between home and the workplace — the “in itinere” journey. Business travel (client visits, conferences, meetings) is not included here: it’s tracked separately under Business Travel (Category 6).

How the data is collected

Three methods feed the calculation, and organizations can combine them depending on size:

• Employee survey — a short questionnaire sent by email where each person enters their origin, usual transport mode, whether they drive (vehicle size and fuel type), how many days a week they commute to the office, and whether they carpool.
• Bulk upload (Excel/CSV) — for larger workforces, HR can upload a file with every employee’s data at once.
• Manual entry — for individual cases or corrections.

See Upload employees and Send the employee mobility survey for the step-by-step upload flow.

What’s captured per employee

• Journey distance — entered directly in km, or as an origin and destination that Dcycle converts to a distance.
• Transport mode — car, bus, train, subway, tram, motorbike, bike, or on foot.
• If by car — vehicle size (small/medium/large) and fuel type (petrol, diesel, electric, hybrid).
• Days per week commuting — for example, only Monday/Wednesday under a hybrid schedule, or zero days for fully remote employees.
• Carpooling — whether the employee shares the ride with colleagues.

How each person’s emissions are calculated

The logic, without the underlying formulas:

1. Start from the one-way distance to work.
2. Double it to account for the round trip.
3. Multiply by the number of days that person commutes during the period, based on their weekly pattern.
4. Apply an emission factor specific to that transport mode — a petrol car emits more per km than a train, while cycling or walking emit nothing. These factors come from Ecoinvent, an internationally recognized and auditable reference database.
5. If the employee carpools, divide the result by 3 — the estimated average occupancy of a shared car — reflecting the lower per-person impact.
6. On any day the employee works remotely, that portion of the journey counts as zero emissions.

The result is the CO2e (kg or tonnes) each employee generates per year from commuting.

How the organization-wide total is calculated

The company total is simply the sum of individual emissions across all active employees for the period analyzed (typically a year). From there, the platform lets you:

• View the total in tonnes of CO2e and the average per employee.
• Break the total down by transport mode — how much car travel weighs against public transport or cycling.
• Compare on-site versus remote headcount, and estimate the potential savings from encouraging remote work.
• Flag employees whose emissions sit well above the average, so you can suggest alternatives such as public transport, carpooling or cycling.

Transparency

• The emission factors used come from Ecoinvent, an external, recognized source — not Dcycle’s own estimates.
• The calculation follows the GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard, the international reference standard for corporate carbon accounting.
• Each employee can update their mobility data whenever their habits change, and the system recalculates automatically.