A green visionaryTerrence J McManus knows his work will never be done, and he likes it that way. McManus, the director of environmental health and safety (EHS) technologies for Intel Corp’s world-acclaimed EHS programme, is an inveterate problem solver.
   He’s a third-generation engineer, a native of upstate New York, a former high school and college distance runner, an early morning (as in 5:30 a.m.) bicyclist, and a former college instructor who is driven, in part, by a penchant for teaching courses with titles such as “Effective Meetings” and “Constructive Confrontation.”
   He was appointed to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Common Sense Initiative Council in 1995 to represent the electronics industry, was a consultant in the mid-1990s to the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, and has held various leadership posts in other industry organisations.
   He is one of only 36 of Intel’s 85,000 employees who have achieved the designation Intel Fellow, the most senior technical position in the company. McManus is now leading what is rated by independents as one of the world’s premier efforts to reduce and remove lead waste from electronic products.
   But rather than building bridges between Intel and consumer groups and governmental regulatory bodies, he might instead have been building real bridges in his native Albany, New York, today.
   His grandfather was the city engineer for Albany, his father was a civil engineer who headed a construction company, his brother operates a property development firm, and he grew up in the construction business.
   He was in his senior year as an engineering student at Union College in Schenectady, New York, happily headed for a career in the family business, when the school brought in a new professor to teach the emerging discipline of environmental engineering.
   McManus was hooked.
   He had always enjoyed solving engineering problems, but here was a new field that presented more of a challenge while still providing many of the same rewards.
   “It was still engineering, but it integrated biology, chemistry and engineering,” he says. “I really saw practical applications for solving pollution problems in the world by applying engineering.”
   Despite his fervour – evident in the enthusiasm and animation that McManus displays when discussing the field – he admits environmental engineering has a disadvantage.
   “The advantage of construction is that you can see your physical accomplishment,” he says. “Accomplishments in EHS are often visible only in reports on the number of days without an accident, the amount of wastewater discharged by a plant, or reductions in the amount of lead in products shipped.”
   But those reports can show significant progress over time, and McManus is armed with stacks of published studies that measure the company’s industry-leading performance, which has won it more than 40 EHS awards in the past three years.
   He flips open the latest Intel Environmental Health and Safety performance report to a page of statistics showing the company’s world-leading record in lost-day case injuries, far ahead of the electronics industry average.
   He says that this didn’t happen by chance. Intel’s performance was barely average in 1993, when management deemed EHS a top priority. He pulls out another report on the corporation’s environmental auditing programme and declares, “We don’t just audit for compliance, we audit for excellence.”
   McManus doesn’t grab credit in explaining Intel’s EHS success. He speaks of the corporate “we” unless pressed for his own opinions, and he points to Lew Scarpace, Intel’s EHS director, as the overall architect of the corporate EHS plan.
   To illustrate management’s commitment to EHS, he explains the company’s policy on injury. Any time an employee loses a day of work or is placed on limited duty because of an injury, the worker’s manager must submit a report to President and CEO Craig Barrett explaining why the injury occurred and what is being done to prevent future occurrences.

McManus came to Intel with the credentials and the proclivities essential for the broad spectrum of technical and non-technical issues that fall within the purview of an EHS technology director. He’s an engineer with a decidedly practical bent who also embraces the non-engineering roles he must fill in order to achieve his and the corporation’s goals.
   By the time he joined Intel in 1983, he had spent five years teaching environmental engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and 10 years as an environmental consultant to companies on the eastern seaboard.
   It was in the teaching post, he says, that he honed his communication skills, which are marked by a style that is energetic and enthusiastic without being bombastic or overwrought, all the while aiming to inform. It’s a style, he says, that was born of a practical need.
   “I was teaching a course that ran on Friday nights from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., so I had to keep the students awake,” he says.
   McManus is still teaching, specialising in courses for Intel employees on leadership, effective meetings and constructive confrontation. The latter offers guidance on how to interact successfully with groups that may be hostile to the company’s point of view.
   He considers effective communication among the most important of his talents because he is often called on to speak before community or consumer groups.
   For example, he was asked at the height of the California power crisis to speak to a consumer group concerned that personal computers in the home might be a contributor to the crisis. McManus told the group that a personal computer typically accounts for about 1 percent of the energy use in a home, compared with 15 percent for a refrigerator or a water heater. He was armed with surveys, facts and statistics to back up his remarks.
   He has also made presentations as part of a team looking into how to eliminate the use of lead and halogenated materials in Intel products and packaging, a goal that McManus considers absolutely essential.
   While the amount of lead in electronics is only a fraction of that produced by other sources (the amount of lead in 1 million personal computer microprocessors is roughly equal to the amount in 10 auto batteries), he says, “Electronics are becoming so ubiquitous that we should be concerned about any lead that enters the environment unmanaged.”
   Lead in many other forms exists in a closed system, like a car battery, McManus explains, or as part of a product that remains in place for a long time without being returned to the environment, like lead sheeting on buildings. Electronic products, by contrast, are often used for only a short while before disposal.
   Used electronics parts often wind up in landfills, so Intel helped launch the initiative Students Recycling Used Technology (StRUT), in which students refurbish old computer equipment. The programme diverted an estimated 50,000 pounds (22,730 kg) of electronic waste from landfills in its first year of operation.
   One of the initiatives McManus is proudest of is his role as manager of the company’s Signature Projects, which are environmental projects designed to increase the public’s awareness of Intel through partnerships with third-party organisations.
   An example is the company’s new Last Great Places project, in which the corporation joined with the Nature Conservancy to provide virtual tours of 200 “Last Great Places” (see www.lastgreatplaces.org). The conservancy has identified some of the most unusual and endangered nature preserves on earth.
   Several mornings a week, McManus takes to the streets around his home in Phoenix, Arizona, on a racing bicycle for a brisk, 25- to 50-mile (40- to 80-kilometre) ride with a group of friends. His view of how Intel ought to approach the task of operating profitably while also husbanding the environment might be summed up in the advice he gives to fellow bicyclists: “Ride hard, but ride safely.”

Bob Howard
   freelance journalist based in California
   photos Al Saddler