There is a big difference between saying and doing.  All too often in business (or marketing) you’ll hear promises and claims that will unfortunately never be realized.  And this trend is not restricted to outrageous product claims; it can extend to how a corporation acts. 

At AMD we take our pledges to our stakeholders seriously, and this includes our constant focus on being a good corporate citizen. 

Earlier this year I blogged about some of the ways AMDers all over the globe are helping make good on that pledge.  Today, AMD released two reports that provide additional detail about our ongoing efforts to minimize our corporate footprint.  Better yet, they show concrete movement against our benchmarks.    

The 2008 Corporate Responsibility Report provides detail on our efforts in support of environmental protection, corporate governance and social responsibility. The Global Climate Protection Plan, meanwhile, outlines AMD’s strategy and goals for global climate protection and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

In addition to receiving a Climate Protection Award from the EPA and achieving LEED Gold certification for our Austin, Texas “Lone Star” campus, AMD is also on track to achieve our EPA Climate Leaders goal of reducing normalized emissions by 33 percent by the end of 2010.

We’ve also made great progress in enhancing the communities where AMD does business with efforts like the Green Power Group California Affiliates or the AMD North American Go Green commuter program that eliminated an estimated 1,027,000 miles of driving, conserved approximately 50,000 gallons of gasoline and avoided approximately 430,000 kg of CO2 equivalent emissions in 2008.

And as a global company, our efforts are worldwide. 

Programs implemented at AMD’s Suzhou facilities, for example, have reduced power consumption by approximately 4,655 Megawatt-hours (MWH), enough energy to power more than 2,000 Chinese households for a year based on a projected average annual energy consumption of approximately 1,800 kWh per household.  Similar efforts at AMD’s Markham, Ontario data center replaced 1,152 servers with 312 servers using new energy efficient Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processors, resulting in calculated annual energy savings of more than 1,750 MWH.

I encourage you to bookmark AMD’s corporate responsibility page for updates or stop by our page on social responsibility networking site JustMeans.com to share your opinion or engage in conversations in a place where business and social responsibility meet.

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.