Summer Interns Green Fortune 500 Companies

Many summer interns spend their days fetching coffee and filing paperwork. But for one group of MBA students, their summer internships consisted of fixing the planet and saving companies some serious dough.

According to a column on Grist.org, 26 MBA students recently completed summer internships under the Environmental Defense Fund's Climate Corps program. Under the program, interns work for Fortune 500 companies like Dell, eBay, Sony Pictures and even the Houston Rockets for 10 weeks, with one main goal: Research green initiatives that can help save the company some green, while also cutting down on carbon emissions.

This year's team of students proved to be quite successful in outlining green practices that could save companies money. If the 23 organizations involved instituted all the green practices suggested, the businesses could collectively save about $54 million. That figure translates into a savings of about 100,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases a year!

Granted, some of the companies already had green programs in motion, and whether the organizations will implement the suggested changes remains to be seen.

One student, Sarah Shapiro, interned at Cisco. While there, she implemented a power strip project suggested by a former Climate Corps intern and led an initiative to decrease the company's energy consumption by raising air temperature in labs and in water used to cool equipment. Those small changes would save the company about $1.8 million a year, not to mention reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Recent history suggests that when it comes to the planet, many businesses could care less. Maybe now that concerned students are finding ways to curb climate change and save money, corporate goals and environmental goals can live in harmony.

Photo courtesy of NASA via Wikimedia Commons.