In recent years, environmental protection issues have gained considerable attention in industry and academia. Many countries have environmental regulations prescribing the responsibilities of manufacturers. In addition, it can often be observed that there are defective items being produced in a real production environment. This paper studies the effects of carbon emission and quality improvement investment on the integrated vendor–buyer inventory models. The carbon tax and the options of investing in process quality improvement are included. The objective is to simultaneously optimize the order quantity, the number of delivery, and the quality investment cost. We derive the total cost functions and show that the functions possess some kinds of convexities. Finally, numerical examples are presented to illustrate the results of the proposed models.