Environmental sustainability

At Adobe, we believe a creative world sustains itself. We continue to strive to exceed industry certification standards and maximize efficiency with cutting edge technology – all while empowering employees to create a culture of environmental sustainability. It is Adobe living its values.

We recognize that our office and data facilities and our business-related travel represent the largest share of our energy use, waste generation, and greenhouse gas emissions. Adobe's Facilities Management and Product Design teams partner with experts from around the world who enable us to learn, innovate, and continuously evolve our business practices. Today, Adobe is recognized by Newsweek, Ethisphere and the U.S. Green Building Council as one of the greenest companies in the world.

Within this focus area you will find:

• Adobe Environmental Sustainability Council
• Adobe Office Buildings
• Adobe Data Centers
• Green House Gas Emissions and Carbon Offsets
• Sustainable Manufacturing
• Waste Management
• Green Purchasing
• Product Packaging
• Product Use and Innovation
• Sustainable Design

Adobe Environmental Sustainability Council

Adobe's environmental efforts are coordinated by the Adobe Environmental Sustainability Council, a global, cross-functional group of Adobe employees and environmental experts whose goal is to identify and promote sustainable environmental practices throughout Adobe. The Council is comprised of representatives from the functional groups responsible for the key areas related to environmental sustainability including Facilities, Operations, Supply Chain, Procurement, IT, Legal, and Corporate Social Responsibility. This group reports to the Adobe CSR Management Review Committee and coordinates our master environmental sustainability strategies. The Council advocates for sustainable initiatives and is a resource for sustainability questions and opportunities throughout the company.

Adobe also has an employee-led Green Team which organizes environmental initiatives and volunteer projects for fellow-employees. The chair of the Green Team attends the Sustainability Council to represent the voice of employees.

Adobe Office Buildings

Adobe has an extensive commitment to reducing the environmental impact of all of our owned and leased facilities around the world. We are proud to be a leader in the LEED Green Building movement and to be continuously exploring new ways to conserve energy, limit emissions, create new operational efficiencies, and reduce costs.

Our offices consistently rank among the most environmentally sound business facilities in the world. Adobe currently has five LEED Platinum certified buildings, including our corporate headquarters in San Jose, California which in 2010 matched the highest score ever given by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). Our facility in San Francisco, California is the oldest building in the world to have been awarded a LEED Platinum certification. Every 3 years, we submit our facilities for LEED recertification.

Our San Jose and San Francisco, CA offices account for 37% of Adobe's 3.1 million square feet of real estate and have become the standard by which all of our facilities worldwide are measured. Over the period from 2001 through 2010, Adobe invested a total of $2.7 million in 70 separate energy-related conservation projects in its headquarters buildings alone. Here is a snapshot of our energy reduction results:

• San Jose: Reduced electricity usage by 27%, natural gas usage reduced by 16%, domestic water usage reduced by 53%, and irrigation water usage reduced by 93%. 98% of solid waste is diverted from landfill through recycling.
• San Francisco: Reduced electricity usage by 26%, natural gas usage reduced by 29%, and water usage reduced by 48%. 95% of solid waste is diverted from landfill through recycling.

Investing in alternative and renewable energy enables Adobe to support innovation in the energy field and also experiment first-hand with the latest technologies while reducing our own environmental footprint.

• Adobe installed Bloom Energy fuel cell energy servers, known as "Bloom boxes," at its San Jose and San Francisco offices, reducing the company's need for power from the traditional electrical grid. Fuel cells have been shown to generate power more economically and cleanly than power sourced from the electrical grid. The San Jose fuel cell installation provides about 30 percent of Adobe SJ's on-site power needs and the San Francisco installation is expected to provide 35 percent of Adobe SF’s on-site power needs. Adobe purchases clean biogas to offset the natural gas displaced by the fuel cells, making them effectively carbon neutral.
• As part of Adobe's ongoing commitment to sustainable practices and utilizing green technologies to offset demand for fossil fuel-generated electricity, Adobe installed 20 Windspire® wind turbines at San Jose headquarters to generate clean electricity on-site. Adobe estimates that each of these Windspires® can generate approximately 2,400 kWh per year, or the equivalent electricity required to power ten average American homes.

Adobe Data Centers

Adobe recognizes that data centers and their cooling systems are a significant contributor to our carbon emissions as consumers of electricity.

Adobe currently uses 35 co-located, or hosting, facilities. These are specially designed facilities that allow for the consolidation of a range of technology equipment in a secure, temperature-controlled environment. We currently co-occupy these facilities with other companies for the purpose of efficiency maximization. Adobe consumes approximately 7.3 mW of power to feed over 1,300 racks of equipment. Roughly 95% of the facilities are located in North America, and the majority of these facilities support Adobe's software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, with only three being used to support internal IT needs. Three of Adobe's Omniture business unit's co-located facilities represent about 75% of Adobe's global power consumption.

We regularly review our operations, always searching for opportunities to improve our performance. For the centers that support our internal operations, our IT department launched a campaign in 2009 to deliver Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which, through data center virtualization, will reduce the company's software and hardware requirements as well as eliminate approximately 100 physical servers per month through 2012. This initiative will result in an 800% reduction in the energy required to power and cool our systems.

Green House Gas Emissions and Carbon Offsets

Adobe measures and reports Scope 1 and 2 emissions, as well as Scope 3 emissions in the form of employee business travel. We are currently not calculating employee commuting or any product-related or customer-related emissions as part of Scope 3. This information is updated annually and is available in the Sustainable Silicon Valley, Carbon Disclosure Project, EIRIS, Quantum, and Trucost reports.

To calculate our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, we use World Resources Institute's GHG Protocol and the Climate Registry Protocol to compile information from the utility bills from each location that is owned or leased.

Adobe purchases credits to offset 100% of the carbon emissions from Scope 1 and Scope 2 in all LEED certified sites in North America. These purchases usually take the form of renewable energy credits (REC) and verified emission reductions (VERs), primarily obtained from wind farms and landfill biogas plants. We hope to gradually be able to reduce the amount of offsets we buy as we are able to use more clean power directly, whether through purchase or on-site generation.

Adobe is constantly researching, testing, and implementing new methods for energy conservation, including retrofitting with energy-efficient equipment and installing monitors that instantly meter power usage at all our sites around the globe.

Sustainable Manufacturing

Adobe is one of the largest providers of software in the world and, as such, employs global third-party, turn-key companies to replicate, build, and assemble our products. Although we do not own these operations, we have a tremendous opportunity to positively impact environmental sustainability efforts by encouraging the adoption of eco-friendly practices that include recycling waste materials, increasing the use of recycled materials, and complying with environmental regulations such as RoHS in China and EU WEEE, among others.

In 2006, Adobe joined the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) and adopted the Coalition's Code of Conduct as Adobe's framework for implementing its own supply chain social responsibility program. As part of EICC requirements, Adobe commits to helping ensure that working conditions in its global supply chain are safe, that workers are treated with respect and dignity, and that manufacturing processes are environmentally responsible.

Adobe has reviewed the ISO 14001 standards that guide environmental practices within the manufacturing process. After a careful consideration, we have determined that the majority of ISO 14001 environmental standards are not applicable to Adobe's operations at this time. The standards apply primarily to large manufacturing organizations and are highly specific to particular products, materials, and processes.

Waste Management

We are committed to reducing waste through our purchasing policies, recycling practices, and disposal techniques.

Waste reduction programs are deployed where possible throughout Adobe's 80+ facilities worldwide. For example, the approximately 2,100 employees at Adobe's San Jose, CA campus actively engage in recycling and composting programs that divert up to 97 percent of the site's solid waste from landfill. Paper, cardboard, plastic, glass, cans, printer toner cartridges, and batteries are recycled, and food waste, paper, Spudware®, and compostable food containers are composted.

We are also concerned about the waste generated by the production of our software. Although we do not have our own manufacturing or production facilities, Adobe's Supply Chain Operations team requires all Adobe supply-based partners to follow the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) Code of Conduct. These include contracts with third-party vendors for the replication assembly, printing, and shrink-wrap of our Adobe products. Adobe software production suppliers are located across the U.S. as well as in the UK, Ireland, Austria, Germany, Russia, and Singapore. As part of this agreement, Adobe requires its vendors to recycle Adobe's packaging materials when they must be scrapped due to obsolescence or are returned by our distributors.

In fall 2010, Adobe selected the company SIMS Recycling to be our North American eWaste collection and management partner. Together, we are developing processes to recycle and dispose of our technology-related hardware, such as outdated computers, servers, printers and other technologies.

EICC Code of Conduct

Adobe CSR Associations