Environmental Leader

An MBA program that embeds students into corporate sustainability roles for 10 weeks has expanded this year to include 23 companies, with 26 students enrolled.

The Environmental Defense Fund’s program, dubbed Climate Corps, last year featured seven fellows, who helped their host companies identify opportunities to save $35 million in net operational costs over five years while cutting 57,000 tons of carbon pollution annually. In addition, the seven Climate Corps fellows identified ways to conserve more than 119 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year.

Companies involved this year include Accenture, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), Ahold USA, Biltmore Farms, Cisco Systems, Dell, eBay Inc., EMC Corporation, Genzyme, Grubb Properties, Houston Rockets/Toyota Center, HP, Inuit Inc., National Instruments, North Carolina Central University, Raytheon Company, salesforce.com, Savvis, Shorenstein Realty Services L.P., Sodexo, Sony Pictures Entertainment, SunGard and TXU Energy.

MBA students were selected from schools including Cornell University, Rice University, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University and Yale University.

A full list of companies and schools is available here.

The Environmental Defense Fund recently held a three-day training session for the 2009 fellows to prepare them for their summer internships. They learned about energy units, conversions to lighting technology, as well as leasing structures and implications, according to a press release.

Follow the students’ progress at this Environmental Defense Fund blog.