Ask ten office providers: « how much does one of your workstations emit? ». You will get ten brochures about values, and zero numbers. Here is ours: the electricity behind one desk at Zecoworking amounts to about 23 kg of CO2e per year. A full year at the office weighs the same carbon as a single new pair of jeans. And we show the calculation.
The calculation, in three lines
- 23,088 kWh consumed in 2025: our space (dedicated Enedis meter) plus our share of the building’s common areas.
- Converted with the French grid factor: 0.0519 kg CO2e per kWh (ADEME Base Carbone). That is 1.20 tonnes of CO2e for the year.
- Spread over the space’s 53 desks: 22.6 kg of CO2e per desk per year, rounded to 23.
The scope, stated honestly: this is the site’s electricity (heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting, shared appliances). Your laptops, your commute and your cloud usage are not in it; they would not be in any landlord’s figure either.
What does 23 kg mean?
These three things weigh the same carbon
Put differently: against the average French person’s annual footprint of around 9 tonnes, the office we provide you accounts for 0.25%. The climate lever of your working day is not the room you sit in: it is the trip to get there, which can weigh 40 times more.
And versus a traditional office?
For a like-for-like comparison: the average office tracked by the OID consumes 126 kWh/m² per year. At 15 m² per desk (a common ratio, circulation included), an « average » desk comes to about 1,890 kWh, or 98 kg of CO2e with the same factor:
Annual emissions of one workstation, kg of CO2e
Site electricity only, same emission factor for both bars.
The gap comes from two cumulative things: pooling (one meeting room, one kitchen and one phone booth for 53 desks, not one per company) and the space’s technical sobriety, detailed in our method article. On top of that, electricity that is 90.4% non-fossil, described in our general comparison.
A number you can reuse
If your company files a carbon report or a CSR statement, this number is made to be copied: 23 kg of CO2e per desk per year, site-electricity scope, citable source. Your offices become a line you are proud of, not an empty box. Our available offices are 10 minutes from La Défense: come visit, the meter is by the entrance.