Technology with the Environment in Mind

Intel's First Designed and Built Green Building

DRIVERS

Management Commitment to Social and Environmental Responsibility

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, a long-time champion of the environment, instilled a legacy of environmental consciousness at Intel that continues today. Intel strongly encourages its employees to apply the same level of knowledge and creativity to solving the environmental challenges of design and production as they do to creating and developing the next breakthrough technology.

"We strive to minimize our environmental footprint and achieve the highest standards of environmental consciousness in everything we do, from how we design and manufacture our products to how we build and operate our facilities, manage resources, and handle waste materials" [18]. In order to adhere to this environmental philosophy, a "design for environment" approach is being used.

Building and designing the world's most sophisticated products in cutting-edge factories involves addressing many environmental challenges, such as energy efficiency, air quality, water and materials recycling, and more. These challenges grow in complexity as we push the technological boundaries and explore the limits of materials science at Intel.

The Rational for the Adoption of a Sustainability Mindset

It goes without saying that energy-saving designs will cut down on maintenance costs in the long run. This simple example shows how three factors: social, environmental, and economical, merge to form a sustainability mindset. To change someone's mindset to that of Sustainable Development, a socially responsible organization will constantly evaluate the weight of these three main elements during the decision-making process. However, the corporation's true commitment to environmental sustainability is shown when one of the elements is not fully met, and that element is usually the economic one. When the ROI is questionable, only an organization that sincerely adopts and believes in its social business responsibility will decide in favor of a Green Building.

Processes and Procedures for High-Quality Results

Intel operates a Corporate Services (CS) entity to self-manage real estate assets, construction, operation, maintenance, and general services. The associated teams and groups are well educated to ensure that proper codes, standards, and procedures are followed at a defined level of quality. Being a global company, these business procedures are managed practically the same all over the corporation.

The Intel Construction Management Procedures (CMP) database incorporates standards and specifications that are well defined to ensure a building's trademark profile uniqueness, quality, flawless data communication; and that it is based on industrial cost benchmarks. Corporate policies, specifications, and standards are updated through a global consensus change process, after verifying the justifications and the outcome benefits. This process requires that every stakeholder group, affected by the change, will review and confirm all changes before final approval and deployment.

Innovations by nature are being executed based on the same processes. Intuitively, innovations may be implemented and deployed more effectively if they are based on clearly stated corporate values and on the use of existing business processes. In this context, Green Building innovation falls under this category. The major challenge was to justify throughout the approval chain that the changes did indeed comply with Intel's basic rules.

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