Wigle: Intel investing in sustainability

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Lorie Wigle is Intel's general manager of eco-technology.

Editors note: This is the second in the Green Line Series of interviews that GoGreen Conference is conducting in advance of GoGreen '11 Portland on Oct. 4. Interviews will appear on Sustainable Business Oregon weekly in advance of the conference. The first interview was with Rep. Jules Bailey, D-Portland.

Intel's General Manager for Eco-Technology and GoGreen '11 Portland Keynote Speaker, Lorie Wigle, has her eye fixed on the business opportunities in sustainability. Using Intel technology, she and her team are tackling our biggest environmental problems by increasing efficiency, driving systemic integration and empowering people with the tools to make smarter choices about their energy and resource consumption.

GoGreen Conference: Tell us about the connections between Intel’s penchant for chasing invention, ingenuity and discovery as a technology company, and sustainability. How does a greener mindset fit into that picture?

Lorie Wigle: It’s interesting because that question causes us to ask: What does sustainability mean? There’s a writer and proprietor at Greenbiz.com, Joel Makower, who has formed a framework to describe it in the context of business. His theory is that companies go through three stages of evolution in sustainability.

The first one is to do no harm. For Intel that’s very germane to the way we run our factories. Our factories use energy and water. If we want to do no harm, we have to figure out how to minimize our impact. Intel has actually been reporting our environmental footprint since 1994. We make goals well in advance of necessity and we look closely at our environmental footprint in order to ensure we’re meeting them across the board.