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The Environmental Cost of Silicon Chips
Col. Panic writes "Scientific American is running a small story about the amount of material required to produce silicon chips and the potential hazards of associated toxic chemicals." This combined with coltan mining processes sure paints a dark picture of the chip industry.
or, more likely--this is a reminder to all that are working on this sort of stuff to consider the environmental consequences of their actions.
basically, you could write the same case about the auto industry 30 years ago. then, people started becoming interested in environmental issues, and attitudes within the industry changed. While we're not at ideal yet, we're at least at where even SUV owners have embedded in their minds somewhere that such gas guzzling is not the best idea.
while there may be some environmental issues concerning chip manufacture. The benefit that the microprocessor has brought to human society far outweighs any environmental cost.
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. . Its just like any other period of mass adoption of technology in Human history . . I mean, look at the way England and the United states manufactured materials before the beginning of last century . . Smokestacks belching unfiltered by product into the skies and run-off pipes dumping raw sewage into the rivers and seas . . There's a honeymoon period where everybody's eating up the tech and the whole issue of 'cost' other than the bottom line for materials really isn't taken into account . . Only sometime after the initial binge do people finally standup with that hangover and see the potential damage that the consumption really causes . .Now Environmentalists will kvetch about it for a while and we'll go through the cycle of upgrading the process so its greener . . .Its the beauty of innovation :) . . And plus, its pure entertainment to watch both sides hurl statistics at each other with such vicious aplomb . . ;) . . .
The only thing that you can do - tax those who do not clean up their act.
A large company will allways try and producs cheaply . If it becomes too expensive to produce chips using "Dirty" methods you an just bet they will find "Clean" methods to reduce their margins.
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
Last time I checked, *everything* we do has some form of by-product that could be considered waste. Heck, I can turn a bowl of beans into a mean ol' cloud of gas.
What they fail to mention is the benefit of the chip manufactured. Cost/Benefit - sound familiar?
This article is just reason # 87 why I cancelled my SciAm subscription earlier this year after 15 years of subscribing. They've veered from true science and now feel the need 'preach' environment, evolution, abortion, etc. in the monthly Editor's Perspectives (and various articles).
10 MD
Yes but it doesnt have to be those countries that stand up to them. The consuming countries can do it just as effectively. The US and/or Europe alone could do it by simply saying "Show us an audited trail of how you produced these chips. For every gram of crud you produce thats an extra 10% sales tax".
The manufacturers need these markets. If the markets dont like the manufacturers methodds, they can force them to change.
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
. . Taxation would work in a perfect world, so would fining people for infractions, but we've all heard of firms just biting the bullet and actually budgeting for fines in order to dump waste. . .Also, in the case of taxes, I , at least, am so jaded with polititians that I don't believe their gonna use the revenue in any useful way (**cough** tobacco anyone?). There's got to be some kind of more creative and effective solutions to CONVINCE companies to clean it up . . . Taxation aint it . . I was thinking, since everything in business nowadays is the perception of reality instead of actual reality (e.g. the Stock Market) that maybe, since we're in the business of inventing numbers, we should invent a company 'karma' index or something like that . . . Maybe its been done already . .I dunno . .
The problem with reports like this is that you never know precisely what the unbias facts are. In a world where the majority of conservationist organizations are run by zealots who practically hate civilization altogether, you never know who you can trust.... and it only hurts their cause. In this case, nobody is going to stop using computers or even pay attention to this article.
Actually, damn good point. The Wintel strategy of requiring an 'upgrade cycle' (new hardware) every few years instead of coding more efficiently probably doesn't do the environment any good, besides the consumers.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
It's interesting that it takes just about the same 1.6kg of fossil fuel to drive 10 miles to a store and back to buy that chip. Curious.
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
No more computers.
No more cellphones.
And no more 'modern' plain phones, back to electromechanical POTS.
No more TV, VCR, DVD player.
No more stereo.
No more alarm radios.
No more electronic wristwatches.
No more car electronics.
No more microwave ovens.
No more hearing aids and pacemakers.
(BTW, did you know the very first chip ever - meaning more than one transistor on a single chip of semiconductor material - was a hearing aid amplifier made by [Dutch] Philips, a couple of years before the "official" invention of the integrated circuit in the US?)
No more work for most of us.
Every time I use conferencing over the internet, I am saving (typically) about 30lb of Diesel (and it would have been nearer 45lb of gas in my last car)
I'm not arguing that we should ignore the environmental costs of technology - places like the former Communist block and Texas are unpleasantly polluted as a result of doing just that - but that we should look closely at the costs and benefits. Given the potential of global warming and the eventual runout of oil, the more we use silicon to reduce the number of boring journeys we have to do, whether by mobile phone, networked computer, or whatever, the better it is going to be for us.
And for those who don't already know - substances like sulfuric acid and HF are widely used in the petrochemical industry. And what happens to all the sulfur they have to remove to get low-sulfur fuel? It surely doesn't get fired into space by a rail gun.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Our entire economy is based on the premise that the lowest bidder is always the best one.
That explains why everyone here drives a Yugo, eats Big Top-brand cereal, and writes their posts from an eMachine.
> You cannot drink fab quality water because it a large concentration gradient would form and minerals from the other fluids in your body would be depleted by the migration into the ultra pure water.
This has made my BS detector twitch. As soon as the pure water hits my mouth, it becomes impure because it mixes with my spit, so there's really no such thing as "drinking ultra-pure water." Water with the same concentration of saline as your body is actually much more dangerous than fresh water, and fresh water supplies all over the world have widely varying concentrations of minerals, yet people survive on them.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I invoke common sense to assert that as long as the mineral concentration of fresh water is reasonably low, the precise value is not important, and furthermore that the value of zero is not special.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
here in norway we allready have enviroment-taxes on things like tv's and pc's.
i only wonder if the taxes actually will help lower the pollution to the environment.
Important safety note: When working in such a place, always wash your hands up to the elbows before going to the bathroom, or rubbing your eyes. I've been told that sulfuric on the willy is an unforgettable experience...
Where on earth did you work with such shitty fab safety that you were likely to get any of those chemicals on you?
I've worked in fabs too, and wrote software to control PVD/CVD and etchers. When I started the job I went to about a week worth of fab safety classes where they scared the hell out of you from doing stupid things with chemicals. Probably my favorite line was "if you hear the gas alarm, leave the chemical storage room immediately. If you choose to linger, at least try to die within 6 feet of the door, because that's how long the hook is to drag your body out."
The chemicals being used in modern fabs are, indeed, incredibly, ungodly nasty. HF, arsenic, H2SO4, etc are the tip of the iceberg. We couldn't wear contacts in the fab because of a cleaning chemical in the floor with the trade name Pirhana. If something ever went wrong and the fans backblasted, Pirhana would melt plastic - and thus your contacts. To your eyes. So we got safety glasses. There were gasses in use that would kill you before they could be detected.
The point of all this is that safety procedures were taken very, very seriously. It didn't matter if it was deionized water or 80 molar HF - you didn't screw around with the chemicals. Having to "wash up to the elbows" wasn't necessary because there weren't going to be chemicals around that you could get on you. Not to mention that you were in a fab suit in the first place.
Damn, I'm glad I didn't work wherever you did. I value my health more than that.
You cannot drink fab quality water because it a large concentration gradient would form and minerals from the other fluids in your body would be depleted by the migration into the ultra pure water.
Except, of course, that osmosis works exactly the other way. The solvent (water) migrates accross the membrane (skin, stomach lining, etc) in order to equalize the solute concentration on both sides. In this case, that means the ultra-pure water would be leached into your body slightly faster than tap water would be, and no harm done.
If you read the NYT article it makes it sound more like those Africans would be sitting around starving or something if it wasn't for the coltan mining jobs. I mean god forbid someone should do manual labor in the outdoors... it's just horrid!
I'm not saying that people should be digging in animal preserves, but that is 'illegal' over there.
If you read the article, the author seems to think that self-righteous bans on material from certain countries, as well as the tech slump are causing more harm to people then the mining system.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Someone said elsewhere I was missing the point, and that silicon manufacturing processes need to improve. OF COURSE. But what drives the improvement is that it is invariably CHEAPER in the end to make things using best environmental practice, unless the State gives the manufacturer a dispensation from paying the costs of the environmental damage - a statist subsidy. And it is usually cheaper anyway because of the savings on materials and consumables. As an example, one project I looked at (to prevent the discharge of cesium by monitoring the composition of a bath and reprocessing it) had a payback of about a week based on the cesium savings alone: the management simply didn't know what was going on in their own plant and had accepted the costs blindly. In another project, a closed loop treatment plant turned out to be cheaper than open-loop because the cost of the electronics was more than offset by the smaller outlet holding tank that was required. I could go on and on...but then, I got into the computing business because you can, actually, do much more interesting things with silicon than make Word or Quake run faster.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
or perhaps a 'Regretfully True'
judging by some of the posts here there are a lot of people who think it doesn't really matter. As long as their CPU isn't burning a hole through their desk, who cares.
And when the computer's thrown away and the components start to leak out... ah well, it isn't my computer anymore. I threw it away. I have this new shiny computer with twice the RAM and 120GB RAID-5 blah blah blah blah blah...
My point isn't that we techies should stop using computers, but that we should at least be a little concerned about what it's costing us in the long run.
Sweaty
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
...that millions of people will upgrade from a PC using a 1GHz processor to a PC using a 2.5GHz processor even though they cannot tell the difference in performance at all. And in the process they put an old PC in a landfill and end up with one that uses more power than the last one.
I'm getting really, really, really tired of the extreme minority of PC users, such as people who annually put down $400 for a new video card, driving the entire PC upgrade cycle.
Such a disingeneous article.
I suppose the environmental cost of making 20 million vacuum tube will be LOWER?
The article doesn't discuss how the industry has reduced the cost of chemical per transistor down by a factor of over 10^8 or so (from wet etch to dry etch, increase integration). The semiconductor industry is actually getting GREENER.
You got that totally ass-backwards:
An industrial process which consumes fewer resources is cleaner because it consumes fewer resources. An industrial process which consumes fewer resources is less expensive because it consumes fewer resources.
More efficient methods of production are more profitable because they consume fewer resources to produce the same amount. So long as resources cost money, there will be financial insentive to conserve resources. (One corallary is that government giveaways promote wasefulness.)
If I adopt a new manufacturing process which yields two widgets from every one pound of raw widgiteum, whereas previoulsy I only produced one widget for each pound of widgiteam, then I lower my costs of producing a widget. The cost which I charge for widgets is unaffected. Therefore, my profit, the difference between what I spend in producing a widget and what I earn from its sale, increases if I conserve resources.
This can apply to public goods such as the air and the oceans just as it can to exchangable goods such as steel and oil. For example, with air, all that is neccessary is to charge air polluters in proportion to how much pollution they release into the air. Doing that provides financial insentive to pollute less, in the same way that the cost of a good provides financial insentive to consume less of it. The profit motive can work to lower pollution. If it costs money to pollute, then the profifit motive works for the environment, not against it. For those who understand such terms, all that is necessary is that the government internalize exterternalities.
(which we're not going to get under undisputed reign of George II)
If you look at who lines up on the side of tradable pollution credits, a way of charging polluters according two how much they pollute, it is conservatives. If you look at who is against that, it is liberals.
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