Intel says it aims to run completely on renewable energy and stop sending trash to landfills by 2030
- The company released its environmental goals for the next decade
- Intel says it wants to rely completely on renewable energy by 2030
- In the same timeline it says it wants to reduce the amount of waste it sends to landfills to zero
Intel said it will make a push to convert all of its energy sources to renewable by 2030.
The company also outlined its ambition to reduce its waste to zero, meaning it will no longer send any materials to a landfill.
While the goals may seem overly idealistic, Intel says that it has managed to achieve many of its 2020 ambitions, including recycling 90 percent of its trash and drastically reducing the amount of toxic waste it sends to landfills.
intel says it wants to switch to entirely renewable energy by 2030 and stop sending trash to landfills altogether in the same period (stock)
The company says it also aims to reduce the amount of carbon emissions coming from its factories by 10 percent which last year measured 2.79 million metric tons.
As noted by The Verge, most of Intel’s emissions are actually a result of its indirect business including parts of its supply chain or through the use of its products.
Those emissions equate to about the same emissions generated by five coal-powered plants every year, The Verge notes.
While Intel says it’s working to make its products more energy efficient, the company has come up short on its goals of reducing the amount of energy used in its data center products.
The Verge notes that those product lines are now 8.5 percent more efficient as opposed to the 25 percent energy efficiency goal outlined previously.
Intel’s ambitions come as part of a broader push by large tech companies to reduce their environmental footprint drastically
Earlier this year Microsoft said it would strive to be ‘carbon negative,’ meaning it will attempt to remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than it emits using a mixture of renewable energy and carbon-cleansing technology that pulls emissions from the atmosphere.
When the company reaches zero, it then plans to remove all carbon it has emitted since it was founded in 1975.
While carbon capture technology exists, Microsoft has acknowledged that it’s not quite efficient enough to sustainably remove CO2 from the environment.