On two business campuses spread over 40 buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area, and at sites in Massachusetts, Scotland, and England, some 15,000 people tap keyboards, test software and assemble components to power Sun Microsystems Inc.'s red-hot computer hardware and software business. Yet managing worldwide environmental health and safety for the $6-billion maker of engineering workstations, World Wide Web servers, and Java, a new computer language for the Internet, takes a staff of only four.
Sun Microsystems' Environment, Health and Safety Director Glenn Dirks and three associates at headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., handle strategic issues: regulatory compliance, new legislation, risk assessments for new business ventures, program development, data collection and analysis, and broad company goals -like raising ergonomic awareness among business units and versing Sun purchasing agents in environmental quality. But for day-to-day chores like hazard communication training, indoor air quality, repetitive strain problems at keyboards, groundwater monitoring, and hazardous materials disposal, Dirks relies totally on a San Jose consulting firm.