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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.
In line with protecting the environment, I choose to use environmentally friendly products in my cpu, such as compost and renewable timber.
Of course my computer doesnt work, but at least i'm helping the environment.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
I'm NEVER buying a CPU from DeBeers' ever again.
a typical two-gram chip takes 1.6 kilograms of fossil fuel, 72 grams of chemicals and 32 kilograms of water Does anyone know if this 'water' is resuable? Is it just for cooling?
I can't seem to find the link, but recently Wired published an article in their dead-tree magazine about replacements for many of the hazardous chemicals used in chip production. There are new ideas which will make most of the run-off biodegradable, and some companies are looking into building new factories to support these new techs in the long term. But there won't be any environmentally safe process anytime in the near future.
Developers: We can use your help.
Great, another in depth study to tell us how we're so enviromentally wrong. It says that "The team found that the materials involved in making a 32-MB RAM microchip total 630 times the mass of the final product." I bet everybody would quickly switch to 8MB ram if it only took 200 times the mass. You gotta love this academic+eviroment mix.
Karma: Bizzare (mostly affected by varying internal caffeine levels.)
What are the alternatives. I understand that people compain about other people using cars that use excessive amounts of fuel, but there is no better way to make microchips yet, or is there?
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...
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Complex chemical compounds can be harmful to your health and to the environment! (Wow!)
And, in related news, Bill Gates is incredibly rich and Saddam Hussein may not be such a nice guy after all! (Amazing!)
More information in our next news program... Film at 11.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Umm that's Silicone..
One of my pet peeves, when people mis-pronounce it, saying silicone when they mean silicon..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
which is manufactured in sweatshops in third world countries, like the Phillipines, from scrap wire, metal and plastic, so at least American doesn't get polluted.
A. Rightmann
Okay, it's not very funny. Don't laugh.
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
Not only is it FREE, but it also prolongs the useful life of your CPU, unlike other OS's that require a system upgrade as well.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
at least from the intel press release :D
The new manufacturing technology enabled by the 300-mm technology also provides significant benefits from an environmental perspective. The chips manufactured in Fab11X will require less water and generate fewer emissions per chip than other fabs. Water and chemical use will be more efficient. When compared to a 200-mm facility Fab 11X will produce 48 percent less volatile organic compound emissions, use 42 percent less ultra pure water and will use approximately 40 percent less energy.
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>
One thing I've often wondered is whether a typical solar cell produces more energy in its lifetime than it takes to manufacture it?
Don't worry, our grandkids can clean it up. Luckily, they'll have plenty of oil wealth to help them do it.
No, wait...
</sarcasm> aside, this just goes to show that capitalism means cutting off your nose to pay for your facelift.
Oh, sorry, my <sarcasm> must have been nested, along with a <mixed metaphore>. But really, why is this a suprise to anyone? Our entire economy is based on the premise that the lowest bidder is always the best one. Without artificial (read: gubmint) controls (which we're not going to get under undisputed reign of George II), using the cheapest process without regard for the consequences is inevitable. It's actually the fiduciary duty of the execs in these industries to do this! If they were to switch to using a cleaner (but more expensive) process, they'd be sacked at best, and quite probably sued by their shareholders.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
As our society ages, silicon implants will become safer for installations and thus will become more popular among woman and men (yes some men want to have the perfect chest). This leads me to think. Five-hundred years from now, when archeologists pull out the bodies of our children's children (~100 years from now), there would fidn several things. They would be the skeleton, a phone/PDA and two dried up sacks of silicon.
That is your food for thought. Those archeologists will do research how silicon was used in our lives and how it affected us.
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
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)
The Republicans and Democrats should merge and rename themselves the Green Party. They have far more green than the current Green Party. Then the current Green Party could change to maybe the People's Party... oh, that sounds communist. Well, Nader would come up with something.
Yeah, it's flamebait, but I'm so fed up with the system...
Developers: We can use your help.
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.
He means "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" (TANSTAAFL). This acronym was introduced by Robert Heinlein, who is sometimes also cited as the originator of the phrase as well. It features in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and several of his other books as well. Robert Heinlein was one of the most popular science fiction authors of the 20th century, especially in the US. It's not such an obscure phrase, given Slashdot's audience.
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.
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.
With enviroment it's always easy to look at the expenses but what about the benefits of microprocessors on the enviroment?
Think of waste-plants being monitored by computers so the waste is constantly being processed ideally.
But it's an interesting set of numbers, though.
And not only that, their waisting our precious "chemicals"!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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 should tell that to the bottled water folks!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Not just fabs. Circuit board shops are very dirty places. Board cleaning lines. Plating lines. Etc.
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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!
HF, H2SO4, etc. are nasty, but easy to neutralize. If you neutralize them, they become aqueous solutions of relatively benign salts. The problems are more with organic solvents that have to be burned at high temperature and with heavy metals that cannot be rendered safe, but must be segregated from the environment.
Now, many readers are not Americans and may not recognize the allusion to green. I believe the poster refers to iron-rich leafy green vegetables such as spinach, which research has show grow wonderfully in a unnaturally hot, stinking, polluted environment where all the humans have been reduced to compost.
:-P /SARCASM
Just thought I'd set that straight.
What's that -- our money is green, too? No, I think these industrialists find currency denominations too small and trade only in gold, platinum, diamonds, and the occasional dab of strontium-90. Out government is committed to the environment, one in which oil and gas are plentiful and burned inefficiently.
I'd grin but my teeth seem to be loose today.
Sorry, I'm grumpy since Tuesday, but I don't take all this too seriously. Besides, how much electricity is it that I read these Internet nodes consume? Logging off now...
Sorry, clearly I needed to spell out that "lowest bidder" means "lowest bidder actually tendering the desired goods". If you want to class eMachines and P4's in the same category, we'd currently all be trying to play Doom 3 on pockets calculators.
My point is that each person defines what "lowest bidder actually tendering the desired goods" and, therefore, it's relative. Some people will buy an eMachine because they need to send email. For those people, an eMachine is perfectly adequate. For most of us, an eMachine isn't adequate.
By the same token, some of us are more concerned about the environment or other variables, than the rest of us. For example, I refuse to buy anything from Sprint, ever. Besides being extremely annoying, every commercial with the guy in the trenchcoat implies that anyone without a Sprint PCS phone is an ignorant buffoon. It's important to me that a company that wants my money not imply I'm an idiot.
Because of the article, the manufacturing costs associated with making a processor are now known to me. Like most people, I've evaluated those costs versus my need/want for a faster processor. I decided it's worth it. Frankly, until I find out that for every P4 processor, Intel clubs a baby seal, I probably won't give a damn. That's not a defect in the principles of capitalism, it's a reflection of human principles.
here
actualy tells you about ways to use clean technology in chip business
Before you listen to Zathrus about worker safety, consider what he looked like at his last physical.
...ZathrAs? Are they related?
Oh, wait
If Dickens were alive today, he'd probably use a "shitty fab plant" as a setting for a novel!
I'd be interested to see the reaction in USA if gas prices were brought to European levels (in the UK we pay somewhat over 4 dollars a gallon). I think you'd see a shift towards more fuel efficient cars. Can't see it happening, mind...
...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.
And after you throw out your used mobo/computer/monitors, where do they end up? Most of it gets shipped to developing nations especially closest to the booming tech countries - southeast asia. There are entire villages in southern China and Thailand where poor families and their children spend 12 hour days meltiing down chips and boards for gold as well as raw materials to be recycled. The problem is, there is about as much gold in pcb etchings and chips as there is mercury, lead, and cadmium, not to mention melting plastic over an oven is not a very good idea.
This finding was published in Harper's Magazine a few months ago.
My favorite chemical to imagine working with (when I worked at Texas Instruments and wandered around the 3rd floor pipe space looking at labels) was Silane. With a chemical formula just like Methane, with Silicon in the place of the Carbon, you'd imagine it would be explosive but not otherwise interesting. Wrong! Silane can spontaneously explode when exposed to air. It has to be specially ducted and burned off or blown out quickly enough to prevent creation of a flammable concentration. A friend of mine where I work now, though, had more direct experience with Silane while working at another semiconductor manufacturer. He claims that he once liberated a small volume of silane in the air, and found that it formed a bubble... the silane reacted with the air on the edge to form a protective shield around the remaining gas. Of course, when the bubble burst... the explosion was deafening. Strangely enough, I don't think my friend ever found the opportunity to experiment further. But should you care to try it yourself on a smaller scale, go for it!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Jez, US public transport makes the UK system look good (how rude is that!).
I was over there in February and I tried to get a train from New York to Detroit. Kind of assumed I could wander down to the train station and book a ticket for the next day and it wouldn't cost too much. Bit like how you would pop into Kings Cross London and get a ticket for Edinburgh or Glasgow. Hmmm.... well it was going to take something like 12 hours for a start compared to an hour's flight and the cost was far worse than the flight. Would have to book my place on a sleeper.Nobody takes intercity trains over any distance as far as I can work out. Imagine if London to Edinburgh was going to take 12 hours by train, with only one or two a day going there? Even in the UK we'd get upset. As for what people think about Greyhound coaches...
I believe a city in the West Coast had a big bus service back in the 60s , all painted red, and the oil companies pretty well closed it down to force people into cars.
Long distance, it's the same as over here - flying - and guess what, same tax on air fuel - zero. Have you ever wondered why those flights across Europe are so cheap? zero tax on fuel. I think we'd be taking the ferry /Eurostar more often if the airlines had to pay equivalent taxes for all that gas.
Rant over! (In fairness I am pretty impressed by Santa Monica's blue buses and the New York Metro, they got me round ok).
I love it when people throw around words like "Chemicals" when they really mean "TOXIC chemicals".
Such as - "That hot dog you are eating has lots of chemicals in it! You shouldn't eat it!"
At which point, I slap the hippy herbivore and say "There's even more chemicals in your bean curds, you idiot. Chemicals like 'hydrocarbons', 'hydrogen di-oxide' etc. etc.....Did you know that Hydrogen Di-Oxide is a mild acid, typically in nature is a breeding ground for bacteria and infectious diseases? It's addictive! Once you take it once, you have to take it for the rest of your life...or the withdrawls will kill you!"
Specifically WHAT evil chemicals do they use in making microchips? How much as compared to making...the jars they sell babyfood in? What exactly is the environmental impact of these evil chemicals?
Until those questions are answered, this article is just running around screaming that the sky is falling....
BAh!
Still too much pressure in my spleen - gotta vent it on this....
IANAME (I Am Not A Microchip Engineer) but I would assume the "chemicals" they use in processing silicone would be something acidic (rinse away everything but the silicone) and then water to rinse away the acid. Those can all be neutralized easily.
Then there would be the pollutants in the silicone, but typically that shouldn't be anything REALLY bad in large ammounts. Then there's the germanium, gallium et al. that they dope the semiconductor with - but the idea is to keep those inside the chip. Then there's the lead solder.
If you want to bust some ass on heavy metals, how about we go after battery makers - you know - those HUGE batteries they want to put in gas/electric hybrid cars... How much "chemicals" do they produce as waste to make one of THOSE?
That should just about do it...
Fair comment on the size of the countries, perhaps a better analogy is Europe to the USA. I think we have a much better city - city infrastructure for trains and coaches (only way to travel London - Paris is Eurostar!).I agree people travel longer distances by plane, more of that later...! I think part of it is a difference in basic cultural attitude towards public transport, *but* heavily influenced by taxation on different fuels.
Ignore the social side of things for a moment, if gasoline *was* 5 dollars a gallon in the USA and there was nothing you could do about it, I really do think after a few years people would think about travelling in different ways.
New York - Detroit = 650 miles
London - Edinburgh = 496 miles
So actually I'd beg to differ that NY-Detroit = Lon-Edi-Lon. Cost is about 70 pounds for a return ticket by train, petrol for 1000 miles will cost approx 80 pounds, plane tickets go from about 60 if you get a cheap flight to about 120-150 for a standard scheduled. My personal rant is that air fuel has no tax on it, if it was taxed to the equivalent of car fuel, you can only imagine the price increases and how people's preference for travel modes might change.
A small aside - Edinburgh is in Scotland. Please don't confuse England and Britain/UK as being the same, it might get you into a bit of trouble when you are wandering around Edinburgh.
Oops Fat Casper,apologies, got my distances wrong. Lon - Edi 412 miles apparently so NY-Detroit approx 1.5 times Lon-Edi. Still sticking with the rest of my stuff though ;-) Happy travelling! and don't forget which bit is England, and which is Scotland !
You think England is somehow all of Europe? Europeans would be surprised. Ever hear of Norway, Spain, Poland, Italy? Those are the extremes you should be considering. Europe as a continent is basically the size of the U.S. You think Europeans only eat what is grown in their back yards?
The question is whether a similarly huge investment in rail would have resulted in more efficient rail service. For example, passenger rail service in the U.S. is, through some miracle, supposed to pay for itself, although it does so in no country that I know of. Highway expenditures are, however, huge and unquestioned. Gas taxes are low and unquestioned. Truck transportation is cheap, but only because the highway use is subsidized through government expenditure. Road use taxes and fuel taxes paid by trucks doesn't even come close to paying for the upkeep of roads.
Government expenditures subsidize trucks, they don't subsidize rail. That is obviously going to favor trucks.
I am not arguing that Europe is morally superior, simply that economic incentives are what determine the transportation mix, not some massive distance requirements alone. In fact, the longer the distance, the *greater* the inherent advantage of rail transport for goods.