Todd Brady - Chief Sustainability Officer and Vice President of Community Relations and Sustainable Operations at Intel

Sustainable Nation

Todd Brady is the Chief Sustainability Officer for Intel Corporation, and Vice President of Community Relations & Sustainable Operations. As Chief Sustainability Officer, he leads Intel’s global sustainability initiatives including climate, energy, water, green buildings and circular economy. Currently, Todd’s organization is focused on achieving Intel’s ambitious 2030 sustainability goals and commitment to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions in Intel’s global operations by 2040.

Todd’s Community Relations teams oversee local stakeholder engagement, community relations, corporate volunteerism, and sustainability at the company's major manufacturing and office locations around the globe. These locations include Arizona, California, New Mexico, Ohio, and Oregon in the United States, as well as China, Costa Rica, Germany, India, Israel, Ireland, Malaysia, and Vietnam.

During his 25+ year career at Intel, Todd has represented the company in numerous public forums and led industry-wide initiatives in national and international committees. He has authored several papers in scientific journals and conference proceedings on a variety of sustainability topics. He was recognized with a lifetime achievement award by the National Association for Environmental Management (NAEM) and has been named by Scientific American as one of ten outstanding leaders involved in research, business or policy pursuits that have advanced science and technology and one of the world’s top 20 sustainability leaders by Sustainability Magazine.

Todd holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University and a Master of Science in Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He lives in Gilbert Arizona with his family, and in his spare time can be found running or biking the streets and trails of the Grand Canyon state.

Todd Brady Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss:

• Advice for approaching leadership about pre-competitive collaboration
• The challenges and opportunities of AI on sustainability
• Intel's progress toward 100% renewable electricity by 2030
• Advice and recommendations for sustainability professionals

Todd’s Final Five Questions Responses:

What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers?

Read as much as you can. Become knowledgeable, not only with your niche area, but broaden your horizons as much as you can. Learn as much as you can. Not only about sustainability, but across the business. Sometimes I've seen sustainability professionals be so passionate about whatever it is that they're working on, but they've lost sight of what the business imperatives are. So you always want to keep those two hand in hand, your sustainability focus along with the business imperative. When you can pull those two together, you're going to be the most successful.

What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability?

I'm super excited that sustainability is mainstream. I'm blown away, being in this field for almost 30 years. When I started, it was only us nerd sustainability people we're talking about. Now it's mainstream. Everyone's talking about it. Your kids are interested in it, your wife is interested in it, your book club is interested in it, as well the customers, the general public. I think we have to take full advantage of that and really drive our work with that in mind.

What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read?

I just reread Bill Gates' book on Climate (How to Avoid a Climate Disaster). If you haven't read that, I highly recommend it. It's apolitical. He's not taking a political stance. Instead he approaches it kind of like an engineer, maybe that's why I like it. I'm an engineer and it's just: here's the problem, here's the vastness of the problem. It's super challenging, we've got to get through these different areas, but here are some solutions that we can go do. I always like those very practical approaches.

What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work?

Several come to mind. One would be, read anything that you can get your hands on. Nowadays the various search engines are so good. As soon as you click on a few articles around sustainability, all of a sudden you're getting other recommendations. That's a simple way. Other industry associations: I do think it's important to pop your head out of your day-to-day within your own business to understand what others are doing. So join an association within your sphere, whatever that is. We have many within the semiconductor industry, SIA and others that are important to be a part of. I'm also a member of a group called Sustainability 50 with other leaders like myself. It's great to be able to benchmark and bounce ideas off. I'll put a plug in for GreenBiz. I think Green Bizz is a great forum as well that pulls a bunch of sustainability professionals together. They were the first kind to really do that on scale and they do a great job year over year with their conferences and newsletters as well.

Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work being done at Intel?

They can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to connect and you can follow me there. Then at Intel, go to intel.com/csr and you'll get to our corporate responsibility report. There's a number of pages you can follow there. I'll put a plugin for water. We're doing some really innovative things in water. Go to intel.com/water and see some of the restoration projects we're working on. By the way, we would love to partner with other companies in that area as well.