Being green is just good business
As the largest chip manufacturer worldwide, Intel has been leading the area of environmental excellence for decades. For us, being green is just part of the way we do business. One thing that plays to our advantage is that our manufacturing process essentially gets refreshed every few years. We can anticipate that, so instead of having to retrofit facilities, we've applied a philosophy of design for environmental health and safety that projects eight to 10 years down the road. With each step we take in successive generations of the chip, we employ different manufacturing recipes every two years. So when we went from the eight-inch wafer to the 12-inch wafer, we were able to drive reductions to 50 percent in terms of water and energy use. We have a long-term goal to reduce our energy use on an average of 4 percent a year from 2002 to 2010, which will amount to a 30 percent overall reduction during that period.

We are a large user of electricity, but we're also the largest purchaser of wind energy in the state of Oregon, and one of the largest purchasers of renewable energy in New Mexico. As a global company, Intel exports its environmental leadership to every country we do business in, including China, where we've been asked by the government to work on their air-quality regulations.