Environmental Sustainability

Planet Smart for the Students
of Today and Tomorrow
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VitalSource is Carbon Neutral

We are committed to reducing our impact on the environment, creating a more sustainable future, and providing carbon neutral products and services. Our pledge of net carbon neutrality and future sustainability is an initiative and investment that we are tackling through a three-step process; measure, act, and report.
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Measure
With the help of experts from Watershed, a carbon accounting company, we translated our company’s business activities into accurate greenhouse emission totals. This measure formed the basis for VitalSource's carbon neutral programme and will serve as our baseline going forward.
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Act
With a clearer understanding of how much we contribute to climate change, we will reduce this footprint by adjusting our business practices and investing in carbon reduction projects including clean power generation and reforestation around the world.
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Report
We value transparency and believe that everyone should have access to the information they need to make informed decisions about the environmental impact of the products and services they choose. Each year, we will share our measurements and actions.

Sustainable Course Materials with Planet Smart

VitalSource’s environmental sustainability initiative has been developed to quantify the massive emissions savings of digital course materials and to further reduce the impact of the remaining emissions from operating our global business and from students using digital materials.

Planet Smart is our initiative to extend carbon neutral practices to our partners and students. We are proud to offer the industry’s first carbon neutral course materials programmes, VerbaOne, and carbon neutral course materials directly to students through our US, Canadian and Australian stores. Each unit of course materials purchased through the VitalSource store reduces a student’s carbon emissions by 45x compared to a print textbook.

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The Industry’s First Carbon Neutral Course Materials Programme

VerbaOne, our Equitable Access programme, takes sustainability to a new level. We measure the carbon impact of the programme for each partner institution and offset the carbon cost of every print and digital material delivered. You tout your carbon-neutrality to campus stakeholders with a branded site that tracks your offset data in real time.

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Trusted Partners

In addition to serving as a trusted sustainability partner to our institutions, we are proud to lean on industry leaders to support our carbon neutral initiative.
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Learn how we continue to set the standard

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