Measuring our water use
While water use is a small portion of our total environmental footprint, it has tremendous importance as a natural resource. Here’s an estimate of our annual water use for offices and data centres. Note that in 2014, we collected water data only for Etsy’s offices while in 2015, we also calculated water use at our data centres.
| Year | Cubic meters of water |
|---|---|
| 2015 | 2626 |
| 2014* | 2224 |
| Year | Cubic meters of water |
|---|---|
| 2015 | 3.46 |
| 2014* | 4.15 |
Installing water-efficient fixtures and appliances can help reduce water consumption by an estimated 30%, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). At Etsy, many of our offices now contain low-flow and waterless fixtures, and we continue to integrate these fixtures in all new office spaces. We also select office plants that require less water, and we use rainwater collection for the garden at our Hudson office. While we don’t have access to accurate water meter readings for all our offices, our water use across the company is estimated based on what data we do have for our Brooklyn and London offices, and for one of our data centers.
Methodology
It’s very difficult to obtain reliable water usage data across all of our offices. The only office for which we have exact 2015 water data is our London office. In our Brooklyn office and Seattle data centre, we have 2015 water data for the whole building, but not for the portion of the building used for Etsy’s data operations. To estimate the portion of our water use in Brooklyn and Seattle, we calculated the percentage of the building that we occupy and applied it to the total water consumption to get our portion of the data. We would have been more confident deriving an estimate based on a percentage of headcount, but we did not have access to building occupancy figures.
To extrapolate water usage to all other offices, we took the per-person water usage from the London data and then applied it to the headcount over the period of time for which each office was operating in 2015. As Etsy does not have employees at our data centres, we calculated an average water per square foot of area figure from the Seattle data centre and used this to apply across the other data centres square footage.
Our 2015 water usage figures do not include estimates for work-based water used at home or in coworking spaces used by remote workers.
- In 2014, water data was collected only for Etsy’s offices, not our data centres.