IBM's Systems Man

• Pages: 40-44

Page 40 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2010, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, Sept./Oct. 2010

IBM’s

Systems

Man

Wayne S. Balta has been on the

information technology company’s

environmental team since 1990, a period

during which it has become a global

leader in corporate responsibility

Pr o f i l e

Information technology giant IBM’s long-

standing recognition of the importance of

protecting the environment arises from two

key aspects of its business, says Wayne S.

Balta, the global f‌irm’s venerable vice presi-

dent of corporate environmental af‌fairs and

product safety. e f‌irst is the intersection

of the company’s operations and products with the

environment. at much is obvious. e second

is the enabling aspects of IBM’s innovation, tech-

nology, and expertise. e company doesn’t just

want to reduce its environmental impact, in other

words, but also to use its abilities in information

technology to improve environmental quality on

a global basis.

e f‌irm’s operations can have an ef‌fect on the

environment in a number of ways, Balta explained

in a recent interview. “For example, chemicals

needed for research, development, and manufac-

turing must be properly managed from selection

and purchase through storage, use, and disposal.

Data center operations are energy intensive and

some manufacturing processes are energy or water

intensive. IBM continually looks for ways to re-

duce consumption of these and other resources.”

In addition, “IBM designs its products to be

energy ef‌f‌icient and utilizes environmentally pref-

erable materials that are capable of being reused,

recycled, or disposed of safely at the end of their

useful lives. Moreover, as IBM has outsourced

more of its manufacturing, its supply chain has

changed. Evaluation of suppliers’ overall environ-

mental responsibility and the environmental attri-

butes of the parts and products suppliers provide

to IBM has become increasingly important.”

Or as the company touts in a recent corporate

responsibility report, “From the way we run our

operations to the products and solutions we sell

to the management of our supplier relationships,

IBM has been dedicated to protecting the envi-

ronment for nearly four decades.” And for nearly

three decades, Balta has been working at IBM to

help it meet its environmental goals, serving as a

leader in that ef‌fort for the last 20 years.

A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, Bal-

ta was in the middle of a two-year civil engineer-

ing program at Massachusetts Institute of Tech-

nology when he joined the company. He began

in the f‌irm’s Real Estate and Construction Divi-

sion, which embodied the environmental function

at the time, working on the erection of a new set

of buildings for its microelectronics business. He