Chevrolet’s College Carbon Reduction Efforts Total $5 Million

For the past several years, Chevrolet has been on a mission to prevent 8 million metric tons of carbon from being emitted. To that end, General Motors’ largest brand has been purchasing carbon credits from a variety of different venues – notably, from colleges and universities.

Chevrolet is helping eleven different colleges across the nation to reduce their carbon footprint, largely using methods developed by the automaker itself. The marque is intent on purchasing $5 million worth of carbon credits from those eleven colleges and retiring them, rather than utilizing the credits to help the automaker reach its own emissions goals.

What’s more, the new, greener facilities being utilized by these colleges can help them not only by reducing utility bills, but also by generating more carbon credits year-to-year which can then be sold to other companies. In effect, the efforts by Chevrolet will become a source of future income for the universities.

General Motors’ Executive Director of Sustainability Greg Martin said in a release: “As we kept inching closer to our carbon-reduction goal, we wanted to support colleges going above and beyond to help combat climate change, and open the door for other companies to contribute to such campus clean energy projects. This helps ensure campuses can continue to receive funding from companies’ carbon purchases long after Chevrolet completes its carbon-reduction initiative next year.”