In Search of a Drought-Proof Source - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 294

the pointy-headed world of Intel, experience shapes ideas, ideas lead to actions, actions
have consequences, and consequences provide further experience, which feeds back in-
to the learning loop. Or, as Len Drago , Fab 32's environmental health and safety direct-
or, put it, “We learned from our mistakes.”
As it was being criticized in Albuquerque in the late 1990s, Intel apparently under-
went an epiphany and made green technology a corporate priority. The company in-
vested heavily in conservation, pollution control, renewable energy, emission reduc-
tions, and recycling initiatives—all of which saved resources and emphasized efficiency,
provided environmental credibility, and ultimately saved it money. “It's about doing the
right things right,” says Intel's CEO, Paul Ottolini , who has linked employee compensa-
tion to achieving environmental goals.
“Water conservation was a big, big focus here from the get-go,” said Tom Cooper, a
cheerful blond hydrologist who runs the company's water programs worldwide, as he
toured me around Fab 32.
Between 1998 and 2006, Intel invested about $100 million on water conservation
projects, $20 million of that in Chandler alone, which saved over one hundred thousand
acre-feet of water, equivalent to about 36 billion gallons. By using recycling and con-
servation technologies, and streamlining their manufacturing processes, the fabs in
Chandler have reduced water use to about 2.5 million gallons a day.
Intel is still the largest water user in Chandler, by far, but these numbers are remark-
able and set a standard for other manufacturers to emulate, or at least to aim for, as wa-
ter demand rises and supplies grow stretched across the country.
Worried about industrial espionage, Intel bars outsiders such as me from touring
the inside of its fabs, so Cooper showed me around the outside of Fab 32's futuristic
circulatory system. City water, which originates from the Colorado River, is squeezed
through a series of membranes until its mineral content is a hundred-thousandth that
of water in the river. The ultrapurified water goes into the fab to wash chips. Brine, left
over from the water cleansing, is fed into a tall silver evaporating tower that looks like a
toy rocket. It sends rinsed water back into the system and the salts to a series of evapor-
ation ponds. The rinsed water is treated, and the resulting gray water is used in cooling
towers and air scrubbers, and to irrigate the campus's xeriscaped grounds. Finally, In-
tel sends 1.5 million gallons of water a day to Chandler's $19 million RO desal plant,
which the company paid for. After being cleaned to drinking standards, this water is
injected six hundred feet underground into a sandstone aquifer beneath the city, which
has enough stored to survive a major drought.
Intel hopes Fab 32 will become a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental
Design, a green building standard)-certified manufacturing facility. It has room to build
two more fabs on the Ocotillo campus and has already worked their water budgets in-