In early 2021, I visited an old friend, a self-proclaimed digital nomad running a remote-first consultancy from his renovated farmhouse in Drenthe.

We sipped coffee by a wood stove while he explained his zero-commute, paperless, solar-powered lifestyle. “My carbon footprint is basically zero,” he said proudly.

I smiled. “And your team?”

He paused.

That pause, the silence of an assumption cracking, is where this story begins.

THE WHY

Remote teams are the norm for many micro and small businesses in the Netherlands. They seem cleaner, cheaper, more flexible.

And yes, they cut down on commuting.

But governance doesn't stop at the front door of your office, it follows wherever your business decisions travel.

Remote work shifts environmental responsibility from employer to employee. That’s not green. That’s offloading.

If you're serious about sustainability, the question is no longer where people work, but how that work is managed and measured.

And in governance terms, unmanaged risk, even if it looks like freedom, is just negligence in disguise.

THE NUMBERS

Let’s get specific.

• One remote worker generates approx. 3,000–5,000 kWh/year from home office equipment and heating/cooling, more than some Dutch office spaces per head.
• Streaming 8 hours/day of video calls = 1.4 tons of CO2/year per team member.
• The average SME in the Netherlands with 10 remote staff creates ~7,000 kg of digital waste annually, much of it stored unnecessarily in cloud servers.
• Hybrid setups often lead to duplicate infrastructure: extra monitors, desks, routers, printers, doubling the resource footprint.
• Only 12% of remote setups are covered by proper e-waste disposal or sustainability policies.

WHAT NO ONE TELLS YOU

The myth? Remote equals green.

The truth? Displacement isn’t reduction.

The energy used to power video meetings, data centers, and 24/7 connectivity doesn’t disappear, it’s just harder to see.

Meanwhile, policies around sustainability, digital hygiene, and circular procurement rarely apply to home offices.

Even well-meaning businesses fall into “eco-theater”: planting trees on one side, while hoarding terabytes of unused data on the other.

And let’s not forget the human layer: working from home may reduce physical travel, but it increases cognitive load, isolation, and burnout, each with its own indirect environmental and social cost.

DECISION COMPASS

If you're leading a remote or hybrid team, ask yourself:

1. Do I know the true energy and digital waste footprint of my team’s tools and habits?
2. Have I audited our cloud storage and communication tools for efficiency and necessity?
3. Are we treating home workspaces as part of our corporate sustainability responsibilities, or ignoring them?
4. What incentives or support do I offer for greener home office setups?
5. Am I measuring sustainability by optics, or by outcomes?

FINAL REFLECTION

Remote work is here to stay. But the ethics of how we work must evolve.

True sustainability in small business isn’t about adopting trends, it’s about owning consequences.

We cannot outsource responsibility to the cloud, or to our team’s spare bedrooms.

The green future of entrepreneurship lies not in abandoning the office,

but in bringing governance and care into every space where work lives.

That includes the homes of those we trust most.