In Search of a Drought-Proof Source - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 295

to its calculations. The company has invested some $9 billion in Chandler; it employs
ten thousand people statewide, and it pays an average of four times the median salary.
Its three fabs recycle tons of waste, and the company donates wooden packing boxes to
local nurseries, used copper to sculpting classes, and tons of coffee grounds as mulch to
the local botanical garden. In Chandler, Intel had extensive negotiations over water use
with the city before building its fabs, built a desalination plant and brine-evaporation
ponds for the city, and has been a model corporate citizen. But one of the lessons of the
greening of Intel is that such innovation is not easy, or cheap.
Wiredpoints out that the company's environmental record doesn't take into account
the energy required to operate the pumping, recycling, and recirculating of water on the
Ocotillo campus. The three fabs there use enough power to supply fifty-four thousand
homes a year, much of which comes from the Palo Verde nuclear plant, which uses 20
billion gallons of water a year in its massive cooling towers. Nor do Intel's numbers take
into account the water footprint of its workers.
Nevertheless, the chips Intel builds at Fab 32 help power the computers used to keep
American water supplies abundant and clean. And the company has produced a “tool
kit” on water use developed by a “virtual team” (every Intel fab around the world con-
tributes at least one employee to the virtual team) to use internally—and, in theory, with
other companies willing to share information about costs, return on investment, prob-
lem solving, and the like.
Some Arizonans worry that Chandler is more beholden to Intel than the other way
around, and that if an environmental problem arises the company could easily steam-
roll city leaders. (Though when an evaporation pond—built by Intel and run by the
city—began to stink, upsetting neighbors, Intel bent over backward to fix the problem.)
Traditionalists worry that Intel is changing the nature of the region and supplanting
them, though this is a common reaction to the shifting demographics and rising urban-
ism of the Southwest.
In places such as Chandler, the past, present, and future of water come together. Here
the New West and the Old West are learning to cohabitate and share, and water is the
key resource that brings them together and could split them apart.
In Unquenchable,Robert Glennon writes approvingly of Intel's economies of scale
at the Ocotillo campus, but his words might send a chill down the spine of local agri-
culturists: “It takes roughly 135,000 gallons of water to produce one ton of alfalfa, but it
takes fewer than 10 gallons to produce [an Intel] Core 2 Duo microprocessor…. Each
acre-foot [of water] used to grow alfalfa generates at most $264. That same acre-foot
used to manufacture Core 2 Duo chips generates $13 million.”
Fab 32's futuristic circulatory system must have seemed like a nearly unattainable
dream a few years ago, when its critics sniggered at Intel's environmental missteps. But