In Santa Clara, California, where I work, employees were involved in planting trees at a San Jose school, preparing gardening beds at an educational farm, and teaching elementary school classes on environmental stewardship and recycling. One group of employees volunteered as mentors for the Tech Challenge at the San Jose Tech Museum, helping students showcase their solutions for cleaning up junk in space.
Employees at several Intel sites engaged in garbage pickups, including 140 bags worth of trash collected from the local river in Costa Rica, a half day spent in Nizhny, Novgorod, cleaning the neighborhood around Intel's office there and sixty Intel people in Israel cleaning Sharon beach.
Bangalore, India, employees engaged in community educational activities highlighting environmental awareness. A team from Intel in Hudson, Massachusetts collected and recycled old electronics for the 8th year in row. They also planted shrubs and trees in their community, as did their counterparts at Intel's Leixlip, Ireland facility.
All told, there were hundreds of Intel volunteers at dozens of activities around the globe participating in Earth Day activities.
I spent the day SAP, the large software company and Intel partner, speaking at the SAP Sustainability Leadership Exchange about Intel's "Road to Sustainability". The audience consisted of SAP's top customers and partners, all interested in hearing innovative and compelling sustainability strategies that they could take back to their companies.
Conversations like this really get me excited, not just because of the topic but also because I enjoy seeing the reactions and hearing the questions regarding Intel's sustainable business practices and community involvement. After highlighting Intel's focus on sustainable operations, clean energy partnerships, energy-saving products and community/government action, the questions starting rolling in, mostly centered on quantitative achievements. Here are my favorite examples:
Intel recently increased commitment to purchasing 1.43 Billion kilowatt hours of Renewable Energy Credits, satisfying about 51% of the company's purchased energy needs and continuing Intel's status as the largest corporate purchaser of clean power in the United States.
Intel's 10-year effort to conserve water has yielded savings of about 3 Billion gallons of water a year, enough to quench the world's thirst for a day.
At the 2009 Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, the keynote stage was built from 40,000 recycled plastic bottles.
I'm looking forward to the publication later this month of the Intel 2009 Corporate Responsibility Report, which will highlight Intel's approach to sustainability and provide detailed information on environmental performance and initiatives.
How did you spend earth day and what is your company doing to be sustainable?
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.