Leading the Way to a Low-Carbon, Sustainable Future

Posted by Mike Dillon, SVP, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary

As seen on the Adobe Conversations blog.

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Sustainability at Adobe has been hardwired from the beginning, going back to our invention of the PDF almost 25 years ago. It marked the beginning of a paperless office, dramatically reducing the need to print documents. Today, PDF is at the heart of Adobe Document Cloud, making the process of managing, signing, and storing documents 100% digital. No paper required!

Adobe’s holistic approach to conserving resources involves our employees and operations, customers and products, and the communities where we work and live. Our guiding principles are:

• Create healthy and innovative work environments
• Enable our customers to become more sustainable through the use of our products
• Reduce operational costs and increase productivity through resource conservation and waste reduction
• Provide opportunities for employees to get involved in environmental efforts at home and in the community

Today, we are joining RE100 and announcing our commitment to The White House’s American Business Act on Climate Pledge.

As a part of these actions, we are committing to five ambitious goals that will help contribute to a low-carbon, sustainable future:

1. Energy: 70% of Adobe’s global workplaces are LEED certified. In the past five years we’ve dramatically lowered our energy consumption and emissions, achieving carbon neutrality in 2013 with minimal use of renewable energy credits. But this is simply not good enough. Adobe is committed to helping move the market and demonstrating that renewable energy is good business. So we’ve taken the aggressive, long-term goal of powering our operations and the digital delivery of our products entirely with 100% renewable electricity by 2035.
2. Water: Universal access to clean water is more threatened than ever, and several of our largest sites are vulnerable to prolonged droughts due to climate change. Since 2010, we’ve reduced overall water consumption by more than 60 percent, and will continue to drive conservation across the company.
3. Waste: Adobe diverts more than 97% of its waste from major sites in North America. We apply these best practices to our other locations around the world to minimize waste and divert what is left away from landfill.
4. Collaboration: We work openly with other companies, communities and non-governmental organizations to share and adopt sustainability best practices.
5. Products: We are a leader in developing software (and digital delivery of software) that helps our company and our customers consume fewer natural resources. Even with 30+ years of innovation in this space, we know we’ve just scratched the surface.

COP21 in Paris next week will be a critical milestone toward a global commitment to stopping climate change. According to the CDP 2015 Global Climate Change Report release last week, “a successful Paris agreement would set the world on course for a goal of net zero emissions by the end of this century.” Adobe is proud to be one of the companies leading the way.

To learn more about sustainability at Adobe, visit Adobe.com. View our latest corporate responsibility report and our 2015 CDP submission here.