Clayton is a suburban community near St. Louis. Clayton published its Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory Report in late 2011 or early 2012, for the baseline year of 2006. Clayton studied both its community-wide emissions and its emissions from government operations. The latter are a subset of the former, but municipalities study them separately because they wish to demonstrate leadership, and they have direct control over their own emissions.

Community emissions in 2006 were 472,466 MTCO2e. Clayton’s population was 15,935, according to the report, and thus, per capita emissions were 29.65 MTCO2e. The report focuses on emissions only, and does not report energy consumption or costs. The first graph at right shows Clayton’s community GHG emissions by sector, while the second shows them by source. Fully 60% of the GHG emissions in Clayton came from one source in one sector: electricity consumption by commercial buildings. One possible reason is that Clayton has a downtown area that is the seat of the St. Louis County government, and which contains numerous multistory commercial buildings. For instance, the report states that the daytime population swells to 80,000, roughly five times the nighttime population.

The third pie graph on the right shows emissions from operations of the Clayton municipal government. Total government emissions were 5,627 MTCO2e. Eighty-three percent of the emissions came from municipal buildings and facilities, fully ten times as much as the next largest source, vehicle fleet. That is more heavily loaded towards buildings than we have seen in other municipal inventories from the St. Louis region. The report does not suggest why emissions should be so heavily loaded towards buildings, but one possibility is that Clayton is relatively compact geographically, and that reduces fuel use in the fleet. Clayton has only 1/4 the land area of Creve Coeur, for instance.

Sources:

The Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory Report, is available on the website of the City of Clayton, http://www.claytonmo.gov/Resident/Sustainability.htm.

Land area statistics were taken from the Wikipedia articles on Clayton and Creve Coeur.