AMD slips on water goal, beats emissions target

Two months after resetting some of its goals with respect to environmental performance, Advanced Micro Devices has released the 16th version of its corporate responsibility report (a whopper at 83 pages).

Here are some highlights related to the company's global environmental goals and performance:

• For its non-manufacturing sites, AMD achieved a 6 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions during 2010. It did this despite a 1 percent increase in electricity usage. That's because it is using a cleaner mix of energy. This all means it is ahead of its five-year target, which calls for a 5 percent reduction by 2014 against a 2009 benchmark year.
• AMD's manufacturing sites are reporting a 16 percent decrease in emissions. That is normalized against the production index that the company has created. The facilities managed a 20 percent decrease in electricity usage, but AMD is expecting it to be hard to stay on track, given future expansion plans.
• Progress on the water front was more limited. While AMD reduced water consumption by 5 percent per employee in its non-manufacturing facilities, consumption actually increased in its manufacturing operations. And not by a small amount: it was up 27 percent on a normalized base. AMD is rethinking the cleaning processes that caused this increase. Long-term, AMD's aspiration is to reduce water usage by 20 percent or more by 2014. It is looking at this on a normalized basis (ie., per-employee and per production index).
• AMD's waste diversion rate increased to 51 percent in 2010, which was a pretty decent leap from the previous year. The focus has been on food composting, recycling and the like. The company's target diversion rate by 2014 is 70 percent. AMD is currently looking at its own impact on the waste, with a focus on recyclable content, reduced volume and minimized packing materials.
• In October 2010, AMD installed three electric vehicle charging stations at its Austin, Texas, campus that are completely powered by renewable energy. (Three more are on deck for the Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters in 2011.)
• During 2010, AMD's site in Suzhou, China, received approximately 33,781 kilowatt-hours of clean energy from a 25-kilowatt solar power generation project and a 6-kilowatt wind turbine system. The company is evaluating other alternative energy options for other sites in 2011.