Technology with the Environment in Mind

Intel's First Designed and Built Green Building

SUMMARY

Key Differences in Green Building Use/Sustain

Greening an R&D building has many functional, economical, environmental, and social advantages and is proven to be a logical construction strategy in today's world. The utilization of used materials diverts much construction waste from landfills. The modular design and use of recycled materials wherever possible, supports fast and low-cost modifications and retrofits down the road. The Green Building indoor environment enhances employee productivity, thereby retaining employees, reducing absenteeism, and enhancing researchers' concentration, which all results in gains for the corporation. Implementing recycling strategies during the life of the building helps to reduce waste and the cost of resources. Further, this reuse, recycle mindset becomes habitual for employees and is carried over into their after-work lives. The building site and planning maximizes natural light penetration thereby reducing operations and sustaining costs, and thus increasing corporate profits. Saving energy reduces CO2 emissions and subsequently global warming. Water-saving strategies reduce depletion of a valuable resource and reduce overloads in municipal waste systems.

Last but not least, Intel Green Building boosted employees pride and morale. The employees are proud to be the leaders in promoting Intel's corporate responsibility initiatives.

Leveraging the Success for the Future

The IDC9 building is not only the first registered Intel project to be certified as a "Green Building" project; it is also a role model for the Israeli construction industry. The challenge now is to ensure that this "green" mindset will continue to grow and will become part of Intel's construction standard as well as being implemented in the Israeli construction industry.

Intel has registered another two of its buildings to be certified by LEED*-EB, the rating system for existing buildings. The lessons learned from the R&D project will help Intel with these two projects.

Motivating Innovation Initiatives

It was a challenge to drive innovative strategies in three broad areas: transform a structured corporation (Intel) engineering business process to include an innovative "Green" component and get consensus on this new mindset; succeed in getting the Israeli national construction industry to implement a "Green" mindset in how they conduct business; and to be audited and awarded certification by third-party experts.

In order to encourage continued employee engagement we are planning an internal campaign for employees to strengthen the connection between the "Green Building" and out-of-the-box environmental thinking.

The key message from the authors is to motivate: we now know it is possible to execute a local and innovative initiative successfully, even in global corporations, once it supports clearly-stated corporate values.

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