In March 2011, San Francisco EcoTuesday was hosted at the Adobe office South of Market. Meera Ramanathan, Global Sustainability Manager with Cushman and Wakefield, which is Adobe’s facilities management firm, gave a short introduction of the wonderful sustainability initiatives Adobe has accomplished over the years. In the few minutes she spoke (prior to the speaker) were not enough to dive deeply into all of the initiatives that have been happening at Adobe.
San Francisco EcoTuesday is very excited to have Meera as the speaker this month. This time she will not only discuss Corporate Carbon Accounting and Adobe’s environmental goals, but also share about the numerous environmental initiative awards that Adobe and Cushman & Wakefield's have won recently.
Adobe has been at the forefront of the green building movement. Ten of Adobe’s building are LEED-Platinum certified and 5 from outside of the United States are pursuing LEED equivalent certification. Adobe’s newest goal is to achieve NetZero energy consumption by 2015 for their San Francisco, San Jose and Boston offices that account for 30% of Adobe’s total square footage. Measuring energy usage is the first step to accomplish this goal. Adobe monitors and collects energy usage information from 30,000 data points. Given this data, they look into ways to reduce the Energy Demand. They also produce renewable energy onsite. Last but not least, Adobe buys carbon credits to offset 100% of Scope 1 and 2 emissions.
The GHG Protocol categorizes emissions into three broad scopes:
Scope 1: All direct GHG emissions.
Scope 2: Indirect GHG emissions from consumption of purchased electricity, heat or steam.
Scope 3: Other indirect emissions, such as the extraction and production of purchased materials and fuels, transport-related activities in vehicles not owned or controlled by the reporting entity (employee business travel), electricity-related activities (e.g. T&D losses) not covered in Scope 2, outsourced activities, waste disposal, etc.
We look forward to hearing Meera speak next Tuesday, June 26th at Yoshi’s in San Francisco. Register today- there’s only one week left!
