Heating energy consumption estimate for the School of Management and Economics (Unito) in view of a carbon footprint calculation

The Commodity Science section of the Department of Management (University of Turin) has decided, in 2016, to partecipate in the Clim’Foot project, funded by the LIFE programme dedicated to the promotion of environmental protection initiatives. This project is aimed at the measurement of organizations carbon footprint, and the research team of the Department considered the application of the School of Management and Economics to this purpose to be an interesting opportunity. Following what recommended by the GHG Protocol, the research team has therefore begun to gather the necessary data in order to build the emissions inventory, among which there are those about the energy consumption of the organisation. In doing this the team has soon struggled with the lack of information about the heating consumption, mainly due to the presence of building sections created in different periods and to the existence of different authorities dedicated to its management. This problem, with the development of the project, turned out to be the most difficult to face in order to achieve a proper collection and interpretation of data. Starting from a bibliographical research, where energy measurements are mainly related to residential buildings rather than public ones [16], it has been proposed to proceed on the basis of the building volumetric measures and utilization time, presenting all the hypothesis developed to reach a reliable result in view of a carbon footprint calculation.