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The Costs of Making a DRAM Chip
Anonymous Coward writes "Researchers at the United Nations University in Tokyo studied the physical and environmental costs to produce one 32-megabyte DRAM chip. Their conclusion? The UNU team found that to make every one of the millions manufactured each year requires 32 kg of water, 1.6 kg of fossil fuels, 700 grams of elemental gases (mainly nitrogen), and 72 grams of chemicals (hundreds are used, including lethal arsine gas and corrosive hydrogen fluoride)."
dont eat any old simms or dimms then kids...
MilkMiruku
No wait, then it'll sit in a landfill.... I know, I'll BURN it!
Ever needed a better reason to avoid throwing away old hardware? Just recycle it and improve both social justice and the enviromental impact.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
What about the random methane gas discharge?
Surely thats gotta add up to something.
1) Determine cost of DRAM chips
2) ???
3) PROFIT !!!
It's just the advent of technology. When it becomes unprofitable to continue the current means of production, a better way will be invented and applied.
Hopefully this will apply to oil within the next 30 years.
I read somewhere that the deployment of 12 inch fabrication technology will substantially reduce the amount of water and other stuff required for semiconductor production...
Just ddon't throw them out when you don't need it, give it to someone or donate it as a tax write off.
The publication itself:
Here.
...that the 32kg of water go away, and are never to be seen again? Oh no!!! We could run out of water!!!
How much of the water gets cleaned and reused, and how many of the chemicals aren't consumed in the process?
Just goes to prove how fast we kill ourselves for the sake of more megabytes, Can it be chaulked up to M$ poisoning the planet because the require so much Ram to run windoze.....
It may be lethal, but it's as cheap as beans!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
elemental gases
Those pesky gases. At least they're not elemental gasses.
Too bad there's not that big of a market for the old used 120ns 30 pin simms I used to toss in the tra-shish. I see no solution to the problem until better RAM technology has been developed for a reasonable price. Nice to know ya, planet.
Those numbers may be "used to make" a single microchip, but it doesn't say those numbers are what is CONSUMED. That's what's important... how much of that material is consumed in making a single chip.
I suspect that 32kg of water is reused for many, many chips. Same with the other material. Obviously, you'll have SOME material consumed when making a single chip, but I find it difficult to believe all that is CONSUMED when creating a single chip.
More info needs to be presented about the consumption of materials to make a chip that what is "used" to make a chip.
ok. so these things are what typically goes into a cost accounting type of report (what does it cost us to produce 1 widget assuming we're producing 1M per month.
:)
i'd like the article to sum it up in dollars and cents or even yen would be nice.
is that UNU's Not a University?
This is one example of how our society is breeding the destruction of mother earth. I'm not knocking technology as much as I'm saying that we will pay any price to have the newest technology, the biggest SUV, etc.
This is just like the Detroit project which states how SUV's love of gasoline is help putting the US into war.
Aren't there other means for chip production?
--------
Free your mind.
is bascially "don't chew on that DRAM module".
This PSA brought to you by MImeKillEr.
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming....
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Trixy! False! Thievzes!
They stolez it, my one DRAM -- my precious.
SL33ZE - Artificial Intelligence is No Match For Natural Stupidity -
How much pollution comes from making the anti-pollution robots... Do those exist?
you can't "use" all that water -- without putting it back. they make it sound like if we keep going, the oceans are going to dry up.
any manufacturing process has inputs -- and outputs too.
this is pretty misleading.
I would like to see *all* products analyzed like this. A producer would be required to put a sort-of "nutirition-information-style" label on all its products detaililng the environmental impact of its manufacture.
this would enable the advocates of "vote with your wallet" environmentalism to properly inform people to the point where their (ill-conceived (imho)) idea would require. I mean, what is the environmental cost of the plastic toy in your kids-fast-food meal? what about the CDs we buy? what about the thousands of other pcs of consumer garbage your average consumo-bot purchases each year..
Boycott all users of hydrofluoric acid gas -- use only clear glass incandescent bulbs!
They should move their operations to the USA where they will be elligible for huge tax breaks.
Uh oh, watch out for those black helicopters!
He can lead the campaign against any and all computers. We must stop these beasts before they pollute the whole world.
sPh
Yeah it uses 32 kg of water but most of the plant have water recylcing plants now. At least in the US. And what about the other stuff mentioned (except for the energy needed to run manufacturing), how much of these are recycled? Please spare us headlines that are alarmist and wrong - there are plenty that are alarmist and right. Don't confuse the issue.
"and those may be conservative estimates at that"...
It makes you wonder exactly how much we are effecting the environment based on the chemicals and fossile fuels used. Especially since chips in general (not just DRAM) are being used in many more things now and I would think is generally curving in an accelerated rate.
Consider this though, the person who can create chips using a less environmentally harmful meathod, and manage the costs could be the next big engineer....
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
What matters is how much of the toxic material escapes the factory and how the RAM is disposed. I personally use a special computer equipment recycling and disposal facility (yes, it costs) for my clients' old computer parts.
Don't forget about the hundreds of Pizzas consumed during R&D...
How do you 'use' 32kg of water? Is all that matter destroyed?
We're going to use up all our water and nitrogen, scarry!
Oh, wait, those are completely renewable, not to mention being two of the most abundant chemicals in our environment.
And all those toxic chemicals sound nasty, nevermind that they're surrounded by millions of dollars of equipment and sealed systems to make sure they're not hurting anyone (not to mention reprocessing them in modern fabs).
The complaint with the most basis in reality is the fossil fuel one. Yes, Fabs take alot of power. But I'd really blame the energy industry for the fact that they still use fossil fuels so universally when there are cleaner alternatives available (hell, what isn't cleaner? Even nuclear power has a much better record on safety and pollution than coal&oil)
who the hell cares?
Hey!, didja know that your computer isnt made up of hemp and soy?
Love these 'free karma' stories where all you gotta do is say 'wow thats terrible we are ruining our mother earth' and something about SUVs being bad, something about war on iraq being bad cause of oil, throw some global warming in there, and so on, get modded up +5 insightful.
(gort im looking in your general direction).
okay mod down now, thats why I posted ac. grrr.
The semiconductor business is a filthy one. As mentioned, a LOT of toxic substances are required to produce the computers that we enjoy. I don't like that fact one bit, but...
This is certainly the most effective & least expensive method to produce these things. Would you pay $129 for a piece of memory that claimed to be manufactured in an environmentaly friendly way, when the "regular" memory of the same type and size was only $59? I didn't think so. Do you think that corporations or government would pay a much higher price for what amounts to the same product? Doubt it. The key would be to produce "clean" computer components in a cost effective way. If someone could pull this off, I think that it could signal the beginning of government mandates and corporate policies requiring that all procured components come from "clean" manufacturers. But that isnt going to happen any time soon.
I'm not advocating the filthy practices, just viewing them from a practical point of view. It would take some serious R&D to come up with a cost effective and "clean" chip fab facility.
Just my 2 cents.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Hey you! Stop breathing. You are producing greenhouse gasses.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
that was a good troll until the last paragraph.
Yet another reason not to discard old or unused computer hardware.
Give it to a charity for a tax write-off, or sell it on ebay - someone, somewhere probably wants it.
Same goes for used batteries. Dont donate or sell these, but please don't throw them away! Collect them in a box or something and take them to a recycling center.
How many people bitching about toxic chemicals here even know where their local recycling center is?
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
My dad said he had to give my mom 3 shots of jagermeister to make me.
.cig
At the risk of feeding a troll, I agree, Moammar Qaddafi is quite the fundamentalist loony. However the strength and the weakness of the UN is the fact that is is made up of all members of the world community. This is IMHO a very good thing - you might not like Libya even when they have to avoid violating international law too blatantly, but try them without those restraints... Just what is it that the UN has done that you are so against? You surely cannot disagree that the world is more stable as a result of its existance.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
But seem to overlook the fact that once a microchip is made, it ceases to have an environmental impact short of a miniscule amount of heat emitted while in operation. Cars on the other hand produce all sorts of things in their exhaust which, I would bet, add up to much more than the "twice the weight of the car" figure that was being thrown around.
Also, how much of those chemicals, especially the water, are used up in the process of making a chip? I would think the water at least would get filtered and sent around the line again and again. Ditto for whatever catalysts or other non-consumable additives (forgive me, im not a chemist) are thrown into the mix.
If this article is supossed to make me feel guilty about my 512mb of PC2100, its not.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Marginal cost is the cost to make just one more unit (I think - I'm a programmer, not a whatever it is that invented a marginal cost.)
So, if it costs a million dollars to make 1000 computers, and if it would cost $50 more to make one more computer after that, then the marginal cost is $50.
We need to know what the marginal cost of resources is for making just one more DRAM chip.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I work for Micron in Boise. Since the day I started there (3 years ago) as an analyst I received weekly emails about our churn (the amount of wasted production material) and how much was reclaimed. What the article doesn't say is that nearly 70% of the materials listed are recovered and reused. This has become a standard in the industry so expect similar numbers from samsung and hynix.
Attention:
If you use RAM, then you are supporting Terrorists.
That will be all.
Ariana Huffington
P.S. Don't drive your SUV's with Osama bin Ladin in the passenger seat.
P.P.S. Drugs are BAD!
700 grams of nitrogen? But....the atmosphere is, like, 78% nitrogen or something. What happens if we use it all up? We'll have only 22% of the atmosphere left, and that's mostly oxygen, which is a lethally corrosive and highly flammable gas. We'll all die!
Who buys 32 Meg DRAM chips anymore?
Suddenly, I feel guilty for maxing out the ram on my Mac LC III.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Both forms are acceptable actually.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
The burden belongs to you, as a responsible consumer (if you subscribe to such a view).
I think your joking... but it's so hard to tell.
I think you should end each punch line with a *bum bum crash* or a "Wakka wakka wakka!"
hmm... how dos one spell "Wakka?"
-Derick
No such chips were built or developed by you.
"Gi" is about the only two-letter combination that isn't an element.
And helium, eh? Were they lighter than air?
...
I posted this reply last Tuesday!
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
So, should we do a breakdown on the amount of biomass is consumed by a pregnant human mother in the production of an infant? I'm sure a prodigious amount of animal and plant death is involved in the process (one can hear the cucumbers crying out as they're boiled in vinegar).
Are we supposed to feel guilty because of how expensive we or our tools are in terms of environmental impact? The last time I checked, WE evolved here, which makes us part of that environment. We are the product of that process. Furthermore, the really noble things we do revolve around the free exchange of information, which makes the expenditure of energy and resources supporting that endeavor noble as well.
Do you think an environmental impact study was done before the Mona Lisa was painted?
For those not used to standard units it may be worth pointing out that 1 kg of water is 1 liter. That is the definition of kg. Or at least it was originally.
It's a little weird that they use kg to measure water rather than liter. Does it seem more that way?
Um, "HeGi"? Which element is "Gi"?
What is the cost to the environment of making a foot-long hotdog, all the way, WITH slaw - - including the flatulence one hour later?
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
I thought this site was to be about news. I read this in a business publication months ago.
Geesh, the geeks are slowing down.
"Gi" is Gigantium, which is often used in the production of the human ego.
For every CD: .5kg
Aluminum Cans: 20g
Mountain Dew: 1kg
Plastic: 40g
Fossil Fuels: 1.5kg
Doritos:
Who measures water in kg? Maybe they were too lazy to convert it to liters. Wait, where's my calculator...
Adam Rightmann: "You would be better off using an AT&T branch of SYSV UNIX, at least people in New Jersey believe in God."
Not all of us.
-- bm59
"Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine." -- Patti Smith"electing noted terrorist and torturer Moamar Qaddafi to the UN Human Rights Committee is just more proof of the anti Democratic"
It is interesting to note that you mentioned "electing" by a "anti-democratic" organization
"anti Christian and anti American bias in that agency."
The UN was put together mostly by Judeo-Christian backing, but as it has taken on more members would obviously take on a more well rounded reflection of racial, ethnic, religious, cultural and political views of the countries around the globe (since it is after a GLOBAL body, not an American institution)
"I take those figure with a grain of salt, and look for the political movement behind them."
Do you dispute that blind (keyword there) technological advancement causes massive destruction to our environment?
"I just ask you to compare the amounts of fossil fuel used to make this Pentium I'm using with the amounts I would need to go to each and every one of you and try to bring you back to the True Church [vatican.va], and ask you what is the better bargain for the world our Creator Above gave us."
"I just ask you" to stop proselytizing period, and then we won't have need of your environmentally destructive Pentium or your gas guzzling SUV. Thank you.
It sucks to think about how our actions affect things and people other than ourselves. Right, as if there ARE other people and things. I'm usually too self-focused to notice.
And why don't these people propose a solution? I mean, I certainly won't waste my precious time trying to think of one. Why do people even bother researching facts just to publish them?! Reality is so icky. The mind boggles. Well, mine does anyhow.
Computers have been of great benefit, also. Gene sequencing. Weather prediction. Medical imaging. How many lives saved by computers? How much better has life on the planet been made because of computers?
It's not all gloom & doom!
As it isn't even required to label genetically modified foods in North America, just how do you think that idea would be received? How big would the 'nutrition information' label be on a car? Maybe they should be forced to list them really quickly at the end of TV ads (like they do with the list of side-effects of drugs)
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
I'm fairly certain that there is no significant quantity of fossil fuel used in the production of chips. What is used is electricity. However, it doesn't grab headlines to say that each chip consumes 2kwh in production. Instead, they look at how much fossil fuel is burned to produce that amount of electricity. But, the truth is that when you look at plants like Micron's in Boise, ID, the electricity is from hydro-electric plants, and in Korea, it's probably from nice clean nuclear plants.
Why do this when all the pollution is on the other side of the planet. Who cares.
I know you are nothing but a troll... but I just had to reply so that I could make an ignorant anti-tree-hugger comment.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
Organic (no pesticides or hormones used) fruits and vegetables cost noticeably more than "normal" produce and yet there are people who pay extra for it. Farmers must be organic for five years before they can put the organic stamp on so there must be some demand for it.
Think of free-range meat products and dolphin-safe tuna. If given a choice, and educated about that choice, many people will choose the more expensive alernative if it serves a purpose they agree with.
Government mandates would not necessarily be an issue for individuals. Corporate policies would be an issue though as corporations are ammoral money-making machines. They'll dump radioactive raw sewage infected with Ebola if it would help their bottom line and the government didn't stop them.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
All you whining liberal pansies with your silly little jellybean cars can go screw ... I am hurting the environment less with my 'goes fast and gets really shitty gasmilage' SUV than you are with you memory chips ! nyaaah!
1g caffeine
5g Pizza
1pt Alcohol (beer form)
5L oxygen
Consider this next time you post...
How many people bitching about toxic chemicals here even know where their local recycling center is?
;-)
Most of them? Hey, even a complete moron could find the blue (or sometimes green) bin sitting on the sidewalk on trash day.
Seriously, though, for a better question, how many people bitching about toxic chemicals understand that a DRAM chip weighing less than a gram does not "consume", in any meaningful way, 32kg + 1.6kg + 700g + 72g of material?
Yeah, the 72g and the 1.6kg you can argue have ceased to exist, in any way that we can still use. Ironically, however, they have mostly converted to something that helps offset the other numbers given, namely, water and assorted gasses.
As for the water and "elemental gasses" (700g of gasses? What does that mean, anyway? "Our manufacturing facility uses on the finest air availble"?), however, they haven't just vanished into the aether. They just need cleaning. And, you can *bet* that chip fabs do indeed clean them, since otherwise we'd hear about massive EPA fines, as well as a massive number of deaths in the region surrounding the manufacturing facility. Not to mention that, in most cases, it costs more to buy new raw materials than to recover as much as possible from what you would otherwise discard as waste.
I wonder how this compares to other industrial products? For example, I know the vacuum sealed sandwich I got at the 7-11 uses at LEAST that many chemicals and is having a HUGE impact on the environment, specificly the environment of my stomach...
(as the actual paper requires an ACS registration, which I don't have...)
C oreMem ory.html
The total weight of secondary fossil fuel and chemical inputs to produce and use a single 2- gram 32MB DRAM chip are estimated at 1,600 grams and 72 grams, respectively. Use of water and elemental gases (mainly N2) in the fabrication
stage are 32,000 and 700 grams per chip, respectively.
Plain english:
Energy consumed to create chip: approx 1,600g of fossil fuel.
72g of "chemicals", unknown recoverability.
Nitrogen and Water use (resuable), 32,000g and 700g.
So, it takes energy, reusable chemicals, and some (potentially) non-reusable chemicals.
As miniturization increases, so will the mass ratio (what is being compaired in the article) of the output versus the necessary inputs to manufacturing.
What do you thing the product weight of a 32M magnetic core memory (old school memory) would be? Pretty darn high. Manufacutring cost, not as high.
Core memory ref:
http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/
this sounds like a 'worst case scenario' type of analysis.
I'm not denying that the chip industry isnt doing Mother Nature any favors, but what exactly do these numbers mean?
I mean, I hear from environmentalist types that every glass of water you drink takes 2 glasses to wash and another 2 to rinse it. But, the water doesnt dissappear or become unusable. It makes its way back into the system.
So of 32 kg of water 'used', how much of that becomes contaminated to the point that it cant be re-used? If its a coolant that evaporates as steam, then I don't see the big deal. If its turned into toxic sludge with a half life measured in eons, then it probalby is.
And WRT to fossil fuels, are they directly used in manufacturing, or are we talking how much needs to be burned to create the electricity needed to manufacture? And why talk about fossil fuels, and not Uranium or solar/hydro/wind power? Because it gets more attention? Wouldnt kW/h would be a better measure? What matters is how much energy is expended.
I understand that we need to better watch and control our impact on the environment, but infactual data and meaningless statements like 'it takes 300 bananas to make a wingnut' don't help.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
My god, at this rate RAM production will consume all of Earth's resources! They must be stopped before Earth is transformed into a floating mass of DRAM!
Is good for the development of your teeth!
Are you claiming that it's the manufacturer's right to keep the environmental impact of its operations a trade secret? Or do I misunderstand your point?
Will I retire or break 10K?
700 grams of gases, 72 grams of chemical, 32kg of water, 1.6kg of fossil fuels...... and a par-tridge in a pear treeeee!
Maybe someone out there can provide some numbers to compare the environmental cost of producing a chip with the environmental cost of producing a hot dog, for example.
.oO0(?)
No offense to this guy or any of his interpreters (or supervisors), but surely this idea is flawed. Its quite a simple matter that putting in 34.3kg of stuff into something that is only weighs 2g is impossible. I understand he's on about USING things, but the article hardly realises that the water, gases and chemicals are REUSED!
The only thing that is a little worrying is the 1.6kg of fossil fuels, but then again, most of this is probably related to transport and has very little to do with manufacture. Even if it does, long live nuclear (or some kind of renewable).
The 1.7 Kilogram Microchip: Energy and Material Use in the Production of Semiconductor Devices Eric D. Williams,* Robert U. Ayres, and Miriam Heller United Nations University, 53-67 Jingumae 5-chome, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan, INSEAD, Boulevard de Constance, Fontainebleau, 77305 Cedex, France, and National Science Foundation, 4201 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia 22230 Received for review March 13, 2002 Revised manuscript received September 11, 2002 Accepted September 26, 2002 Abstract: The scale of environmental impacts associated with the manufacture of microchips is characterized through analysis of material and energy inputs into processes in the production chain. The total weight of secondary fossil fuel and chemical inputs to produce and use a single 2-gram 32MB DRAM chip are estimated at 1600 g and 72 g, respectively. Use of water and elemental gases (mainly N2) in the fabrication stage are 32 000 and 700 g per chip, respectively. The production chain yielding silicon wafers from quartz uses 160 times the energy required for typical silicon, indicating that purification to semiconductor grade materials is energy intensive. Due to its extremely low-entropy, organized structure, the materials intensity of a microchip is orders of magnitude higher than that of "traditional" goods. Future analysis of semiconductor and other low entropy high-tech goods needs to include the use of secondary materials, especially for purification. 1. Introduction We live in the semiconductor age. Microchips have become part of everyday life, playing essential roles in ubiquitous devices such as computers, cell phones and even automobiles. A global semiconductor industry has arisen to meet the demand for microchips, a business that has grown in leaps and bounds the past few decades. Estimates place the overall economic scale of the semiconductor at $140 billion in 2000 with an average 16% growth per year over the past few decades (1). The environmental implications of this new industry are a matter of potential concern, especially given its substantial economic scale and high rate of growth. Microchips themselves are small, valuable and have a wide variety of applications, which naively suggests that they deliver large benefits to society with negligible environmental impact. On the other hand, the semiconductor industry uses hundreds, even thousands of chemicals, many in significant quantities and many of them toxic. Emissions of these chemicals have potential impacts on air, water and soil systems and potentially pose an occupational risk for line workers. Historical incidents of environmental impacts on soil and water systems are discussed by Mazurek (2), and LaDou and Rohm review occupational hazards in the industry (3). Also, the industry is well-known to be intensive in its use of energy, water and materials. It is safe to assert that there is little consensus regarding impacts of the industry. While individual firms presumably understand their own practices fairly well, publicly available environmental data and analyses of the sector are scarce. Given rapid process change and evident effort the industry is making toward environmental protection (e.g. ref 4), it is plausible to believe claims that emissions issues have been largely addressed. However, little real evidence exists to support or refute this. Also, semiconductor firms are unlikely to have a complete picture of impacts associated with the supply chain for raw materials, which could be significant. It is thus appropriate that civil society, in particular academia and NGOs, put forth a community to work toward a wider understanding of and response to the industry's environmental issues. Materials flow analysis of the semiconductor production chain could make a valuable contribution to identifying the scale of environmental impacts and directions for further work. Materials flow analysis utilizes process material input-output data to characterize the use and emissions of materials within and between processes (5, 6). Materials flow analysis designed to characterize material use and/or environmental impacts associated a particular product or service is called life cycle assessment (7, 8). Starting with an earlier study (9), in this article we undertake materials flow analysis of the semiconductor production chain as well as a life cycle assessment of a computer memory chip. There is a limited body of publicly available literature relevant to materials analysis of the semiconductor industry. In its life cycle assessment of a workstation, the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) published results for electricity use, water consumption and aggregate chemical wastes for production of a complete set of microchips in a computer (10). The Electronics Industry Association of Japan (EIAJ) has carried out extensive work to characterize emissions trends in the Japanese semiconductor industry and also has reviewed inputs and waste management issues (11, 12). Their yearly waste surveys cover 98% of domestic capacity and report tonnage of emissions in the aggregate categories of sludge, oil, acids, alkali, plastic, metal, ceramics and glass (12). As part of the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) program, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) surveys U.S. firms annually for emission quantities of around 650 different substances, reported when the facility's annual throughput of that chemical exceeds a threshold level of 11.3 metric tons (13). This information is published along with an environmental review of process technology and pollution prevention issues for the industry (14). The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the United Nations Industrial Development Organizations (UNIDO) jointly published a report on the semiconductor industry surveying waste management issues, which included detailed data on materials inputs for "generic" integrated circuit fabrication process on a 4-in. diameter wafer (15). One would hope that data from environmental reports of semiconductor manufacturers could be useful in this context. However, publicly reported data on materials and energy use is only at the level of the entire firm (or regional division), which cannot be converted to the process level without additional information. There are many gaps in the literature; we highlight three outstanding ones. One is a lack of process data describing inputs and outputs. The UNEP/UNIDO work is the only report to quantify individual substances consumed, but specific quantities for many inputs are clearly missing. A second gap is the lack of comparison of different sources of process data. While comparison of results with those of other groups is de rigueur in the scientific community, this practice has yet to be generally adopted in reporting and analysis of process inputs/emissions. Last, there is as yet no publicly available materials/energy flow analysis or life cycle assessment addressing the production chain for microchips. We endeavor to address these three gaps. Recent process data from an anonymous industry source are presented and reviewed critically in the context of existing information. We analyze material input and outputs into industrial processes in the production chain in order to estimate total energy, fossil fuel use and aggregate consumption of chemicals in the manufacture and use of microchips. 2. Technology: Processes and Materials/Energy Use This section overviews materials use by processes in the production chain for semiconductors. We consider the subset of processes shown in Figure 1, which includes wafer fabrication, production of silicon wafers starting from quartz, the synthesis of a subset of chemical inputs to fabrication, and the assembly/packaging stage. The precise meaning of "included" materials and energy is relevant to the life cycle assessment and is elaborated in Section 3. Excepting for the UNEP/UNIDO report, all input data described below refer to net input of material to a facility, reflecting the amount required after recycling some portion back into inputs. Figure 1 Production chain for semiconductor devices. 2.1. Semiconductor Fabrication. Semiconductor fabrica tion, or wafer fabrication, is construction of a rectangular "die", a highly intricate set of patterned layers of doped silicon, insulators and metals that forms the functional heart of a microchip. The manufacturing processes are quite complex and we only describe materials use. Inputs to semiconductor fabrication are discussed below in terms of aggregate categories of chemicals, energy, water, elemental gases, and silicon wafers (process yields), summary results of which appear in Figure 2. Figure 2 Summary input/output table for wafer fabrication (16, 21-25, 27). Chemicals. Fabrication processes use a wide variety of chemicals, many of them toxic, whence potential impacts of emissions on air, water, and ground systems are major environmental concerns. One important element of tackling the issue is identification of how much of what substances are used and emitted. We used five main sources of data on semiconductor chemical use and emissions. Sources of data at the process level are the UNEP/UNIDO report (15), the MCC study (10) and anonymous firm data (16). The anonymous firm data will be considered the baseline from which to perform analysis. Two sources of information at the national level are the Electronics Industry Association of Japan (EIAJ) work (11, 12) and the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) in the U.S. (13). Given that nearly all chemicals used in semiconductor processing do not end up in the final product, mass balance dictates that use and emissions of chemicals should be nearly identical. The detailed input table of the anonymous source appears in Table 1, the primary data from all other sources is in the Supporting Information section. Summary information including energy, elemental gas and water inputs appears in Figure 1, all figures are normalized to square centimeter of input silicon wafer. We turn now to the task of comparing the different data sources, which is quite challenging given that they describe different mixes of processes from different years. Chemical use should be closely connected with the number of layers in a device, and thus could vary by orders of magnitude depending on whether one is fabricating a simple diode or a modern microprocessor. Rapid process change also sug gests that material and energy use is a moving target. The Semiconductor Industry Association, Electronics Industry Associated of Japan and many individual firms report large reductions in chemical emissions, and thus use, in the past decade. For example, the economic growth in the industry supplying wet chemicals is typically 8% per year as compared to the 16% growth of the semiconductor industry itself (17). These considerations must be kept in mind in the evaluation process. The types of data presented vary considerably, comparison thus requires identifying some quantity calculable for all sources. We use aggregate chemical use and emissions per cm2 of input wafer for this purpose. [Note that 1 cm2 of input silicon corresponds to 0.16 g of silicon wafer and a functional output around 20 MB of DRAM (varies according to wafer size and yield).] For studies reporting national use or emissions, silicon input was normalized by dividing total input/emission by the national consumption of wafers for the appropriate year (18). The relative aggregate chemical use per unit of input silicon for all data sources appears in Table 2. The results range from 9 to 610 g per cm2 for aggregate chemical input and 1.2-160 g per cm2 for aggregate emissions. UNEP/UNIDO and TRI sources represent the extreme ends of this spectrum, differing by a factor of 500. We first discuss the TRI figure as it stands out as particularly low compared to others. We believe that TRI significantly undercounts emissions. One point of concern is that the TRI figure is less than 1/10 of the EIAJ value for Japanese emissions. U.S. and Japanese semiconductor industries are of comparable size and structure thus the figures should be roughly similar. Also, scaling up the consumption figures from the anonymous facility (Table 1) to the level of U.S. national consumption (using national consumption of wafers), we estimate total use of sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, phosphoric acid, nitric acid, and ammonia to exceed TRI emissions by factors ranging from 10 to 96. Although the processes of the anonymous facility could consume more than the national average, the U.S. industry focuses on integrated circuits (as opposed to discrete,) thus one would expect them to be somewhat similar. The origins of the undercounting by TRI are not yet clear, the 11.3 ton cutoff may be so high that many toxic chemicals used in the semiconductor sector are missed by TRI. Further analysis of the data sources provided in the Supporting Information suggests that while it is not possible to assert figures for chemical use and emissions with a high degree of confidence, most of the spread in data sources, except the TRI, can be attributed to differences in process mix and time. For the life cycle assessment we assume that the anonymous firm data indicating consumption of 45 g per cm2 as the baseline. Expressed in different units, this corresponds to 280 kg of chemicals per kilogram of input silicon. It is clear from these figures that despite improve ments due to technological progress, semiconductor manufacturing remains extraordinarily chemicals-intensive. Energy. A substantial amount of electricity is consumed in semiconductor manufacturing. Examining first the structure of energy use in the fabrication stage, International Semiconductor reports that cleanroom heating, ventilation, and air conditioning are apparently major energy consuming operations, accounting for around 50% of the total, while wafer processing tools account for 30-40% (19). A Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory website reports the following structure of energy use: 35% for process tools, 26% for ventilation, 20% for chilling, 7% for production of liquid nitrogen, and 5% for purification of water (20). Various data sources provide information for electricity use, which represents the bulk of energy consumption. According to the 1997 National Technology Road map for Semiconductors, average electricity consumption was 1.4 kWh per square centimeter of silicon wafer processed (21). The 1993 MCC life cycle study reports that fabrication of semiconductor circuits on one 150-mm wafer requires 285 kWh of electricity, which corresponds to 1.6 kWh per square centimeter. The U.S. Census Annual Survey of Manufacturers reports yearly electricity consumption of sectors at the national level (22). Dividing the seven-year 1993-1999 electricity consumption by the total consumption of wafers yields an energy intensity of 1.52 kWh/cm2. A report from Japan Electronics Industry Development Association (JEIDA) reports the 1997 electricity consumption of the Japanese industry at 1.44 kWh/cm2 (23). Considering now direct use of fossil fuels, JEIDA reports that 83% of total energy consumption in semiconductor is electricity, the remainder a mix of heavy oil, gas, LPG and kerosene (23). The U.S. Census Annual Survey of Manufacturers suggests a similar ratio of electrical to fossil fuel use (22). In contrast to the chemicals data sources, there is reasonably close agreement among the different sources on energy consumption. We take the figure of 1.5 kWh/cm2 for electricity consumption and 1 MJ/cm2 for fossil fuels as a base for further calculation. Water. The semiconductor manufacturing process also requires large amounts of high purity water. Water is generally purified on site in order to remove contaminants such as dissolved minerals, particulates, bacteria, organics, dissolved gases, and silica. A typical purification system will generally take municipal water with impurity levels in the parts per hundred or parts per thousand to the few parts per billion level (24). A typical 6-in. wafer fabrication plant processing 40 000 wafers per month reportedly consumes 2-3 millions of gallons per day, which corresponds to 18-27 L per square centimeter of silicon (25). Two additional sources of data on water consumption were identified. The 1993 MCC study indicates that 10 600 L of water are used in fabrication of integrated circuits on one 150 mm wafer (10). This corresponds to a requirement of 58 L per cm2 (3.6 million liters per kg of silicon) of wafer processed, clearly indicating a huge consumption per chip. Results of a 1996 SEMATECH survey indicated that water usage at U.S. chip manufacturing facilities varied from 5 to 29 L per square centimeter, with a typical figure being 17 L per square centimeter (24). It is not clear why the MCC study reports a significantly higher figure. As with chemicals, technological improvements between data sampling times and differences in process composition could lead to significant variations. Elemental Gases. The use and emissions of elemental gases such as oxygen, nitrogen, or argon do not pose an environmental concern in and of themselves other than safety in handling. However, the energy associated with their separation and purification is perhaps significant. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory reports a 7% share of facility electrical consumption accorded to on-site production of liquid nitrogen (20). According to the anonymous firm data from 2000 listed in Table 1, aggregate use of elemental gases is reported at 445 g/cm2 of silicon input. The only other source for gas usage identified was the 1994 UNEP/UNIDO report, which reports a figure of 924 g per cm2 (15). The factor of 2 difference is perhaps explainable by technological progress that occurred during the 6 year gap in data collection between the two sources. While it would be desirable to be able to estimate the energy cost associated these elemental gases, process data for production of highly purified gases is not available. Process Yields. Achieving high yields over 100-200 complex process steps is a key challenge for the semiconductor industry. It is also important with respect to environmental performance, as the number of defective dies also significantly affects the environmental impact per output of functional product. Overall yield varies between 16 and 94% depending on the complexity and maturity of the technology (26). For the purpose of the life cycle assessment, we take the example of a mature product: a 32MB DRAM chip fabricated on 200-mm wafers. A report from the trade magazine Semiconductor International shows an overall process ef ficiency of 82% (27). Considering also the wasted area around the perimeter of a wafer, 75% of input silicon wafer ends up as functional DRAM. Each 32MB DRAM chip requires an input of 1.6 cm2 of wafer. Using this yield one can calculate the materials/energy requirement in production of a memory chip. For example, using a typical water and elemental gas use of 20 kg/cm2 and 0.45 kg/cm2 (to two significant figures), consumption to fabricate one 32MB DRAM chip is 32 000 g and 700 g respectively. 2.2. Silicon Wafers. With impurities in the parts per billion, a silicon wafer is the purest product manufactured on a commercial scale. The chain of processes yielding wafers starting from raw quartz is technologically advanced and energy intensive. A simplified flow of the transformations involved is The starting point is the reduction of quartz (mineral SiO2) with some carbon source such as coal or charcoal in an electric furnace. The resulting "raw" silicon is typically 98.5-99.0% pure and must be purified in order to meet the demands of semiconductor fabrication. [Typical applications of "raw" silicon include use in iron alloys and in production of silicone compounds.] Powdered raw silicon is reacted with chlorine to yield trichlorosilane (HSiCl3) (and silicon tetrachloride (SiCl4)) that can be can be conveniently purified via distillation (28). The resulting trichlorosilane is at least 99.9% pure with metallic impurities in the several parts per billion (ppb) (29). In the most commonly used Siemens process, trichlorosilane is reacted with hydrogen to yield pure elemental silicon via chemical vapor deposition, the result of which is 99.9999% pure (metals 0.4 ppb) (29). This hyper-pure silicon is referred to as polysilicon in the industry. Molten polysilicon is drawn into single-crystal ingots via Czochralski or Floating Zone methods, which are sliced into wafers (26). Wafers are polished and cleaned via Chemical Mechanical Polishing. We restrict the discussion of process input/outputs to consumption of electricity and silicon-containing intermedi ates. Table 3 displays the results of the data search and analysis, from which it is clear that purification and wafer preparation stages are very energy intensive. Also, significant silicon losses along the chain suggest that 9.4 kg of raw silicon are needed per kg of final wafer, increasing the total energy demand to yield wafers (29-35). The main result is that 2130 kWh per kilogram is used in the production chain for silicon wafers, some 160 times the amount used to produce "raw" silicon. Energy consumption in purification is thus much more important than in preparation of the starting crude material. Electricity consumption to produce one square cm of wafer is 0.34 kWh, nearly one-fourth that of the 1.5 kWh needed for fabrication, implying that wafer production is a significant factor in the life cycle assessment of a semiconductor device. For detailed discussion of silicon processing technologies and input/output data, the reader is referred to refs 8 and 36. 2.3. Chemicals. As mentioned in section 2.1, some tens to hundred of chemicals are used in fabrication. It is not within the scope of this article to describe the many processes that yield these materials. However, the general issue of purification must be discussed. To prevent contamination, all ingredients to the fabrication process must be extremely pure. For example, semiconductor grade ammonia is 99.999-99.9995% pure. Similarly, other chemicals, water, elemental gases, and quartz containers used in the industry allow impurities in the low parts per million, compared to industrial grades which run in the 90-99% range. All chemical inputs to semiconductor processes must thus go through rigorous purification processes, generally based on vacuum distilla tion. Distillation is well-known to be an energy intensive process, accounting for around 7% of energy consumption of the U.S. chemical industry as a whole (37). Achieving 95-99% pure grades of chemicals typically requires several megajoules per kilogram (37). On the other hand, the two-step trichlorosilane-Siemens process for silicon purification indicates that semiconductor grades may require energy in the tens or even hundreds of megajoules per kilogram. Data on production of semiconductor grade chemicals was unavailable. While it is possible to estimate such using simulations of distillation processes, this is a task left for future work. For the time being, we indicate a lower bound for energy used in producing input chemicals by using data for standard industrial grades. The Boustead database contains energy data applying to standard grades for a subset of chemical inputs accounting to 71% of the total input mass into semiconductor production (38). These chemicals and their energy data appear in the Supporting Information. Using the inputs given in Table 1 and adjusting energy requirements according to concentration, the energy investment in producing 71% (by weight) of input chemicals is calculated at 1 MJ per cm2 of input silicon. Assuming this average applies to the remaining 29%, the total energy input to produce input chemicals is 1.45 MJ per cm2. 2.4. Assembly. Assembly is the encasing of rectangular segments of fabricated wafer, called dies, into a protective package with external leads ("the black box with silver legs") (26). Plastic and ceramic packages are used; we describe only the former which in any case is by far the most common. A lead frame, made of iron-nickel or copper alloy, forms the physical skeleton of the package and also provides the external leads in the final chip. Quantitative information on input/outputs to the as sembly process is scarce. The MCC report states that energy use in the packaging stage is 0.34 kWh per cm2 of silicon (10). JEIDA publishes that 30 g of packaging material per cm2 of input silicon was consumed by the Japanese national industry (23). The relative aggregate consumption for lead frames and molding materials in 1995 was 61.4% and 34.1% respectively, the remainder in miscellaneous materials. A calculation of the energy investment in the structural materials of a DRAM chip is needed for the purposes of the life cycle assessment in section 3. We make a rough estimation based on a plausible construction of a memory chip. We assume a copper lead frame and epoxy package and that these two substances make up nearly all the weight of the package. The chip itself is 2 g, thus the respective contents of copper and epoxy are 1.2 and 0.7 g respectively. According to the Boustead database, energy to produce copper and epoxy resin are 64 and 140 MJ/kg respectively (38), thus the total energy investment in producing these materials is roughly 0.17 MJ per chip. It must be emphasized though that this is a lower bound, purification of these materials for semiconductor use likely increases the energy investment significantly. 3. Energy and Materials Use in Production and Use of a Memory Chip In this section we calculate life cycle energy and chemical use in production and use of a single 32MB microchip. A sample chip comes in a 1.0 cm × 2.7 cm rectangular epoxy resin package, containing a fabricated die with area 1.2 cm2 and a copper lead frame. The total packaged chip weighs 2.0 g. We use the representative process data and DRAM yields from Section 2 (e.g. 1.6 cm2 of input wafer per chip). Three quantities are estimated: total energy, weight of fossil fuels used and aggregate chemical consumption. Quantities of fossil fuel use correlate accurately with carbon dioxide emissions. Aggregate chemical use is suggestive of potential impacts of pollution on local air, water, and soil systems but is not an accurate indicator of such. Actual impacts depend on the types of chemicals used, waste management practices, and local conditions, analysis beyond the scope of this article. We should mention that the definition of chemical use encompasses deposition/dopant materials, etchants, acids/bases, and photolithographic chemicals but does not include elemental gases used (due to negligible environmental impact of emissions). The system boundary of the analysis is indicated in Figure 1. Energy use in production of chemical is marked as partially included according to the discussion of Section 2.4. Energy for water and pure gases is marked similarly because a reasonable fraction is onsite at fabrication facilities. Included materials for chip assembly are constitutive copper and epoxy only. Use of chemicals in stages other than wafer fabrication is not included. We begin with life cycle energy use. Combining process energy consumption data per cm2 of input wafer with wafer yields for 32MB DRAM chips gives the total energy use in the production stage. The use phase energy is obtained by multiplying the wattage consumption by the total time the device is used over its lifetime. Chip manufacturer product specifications report that a 32MB DRAM chip consumes about 0.32 W of electricity while in use. For total usage time, we use a scenario of typical home use: 4-year lifetime with 3-hour use per day 365 days per year. This yields 1.4 kWh energy consumption over the chip's lifetime. We convert all Kilowatt-hours of electricity to mega joules of fossil fuels using a factor of 10.7 MJ per kWh, which assumes average global mix of electricity generating technologies (39, 40). Figure 3 shows the final results for fossil energy consumption in different stages of chips production and use. Wafer fabrication (48%) and the use phase (27%) are the two dominant factors. Energy use to produce the main structural materials in the chip, copper and epoxy, represent a tiny share of the total (0.3%). The energy investment in a chip is thus mainly in its complex form rather than bulk substance. The third point is that the preparation of silicon wafers has a substantial share (10%). Purification of materials thus substantially affects the result. The figure for chemical production reflects the energy investment for the industrial grade of only a subset of the chemical inputs. 2.3 MJ (4%) is thus a lower bound on the contribution of chemicals and is expected to significantly increase if purification processes are accounted for. Figure 3 Energy consumption in production and use of a 32MB DRAM chip. Next the mass of fossil fuels and chemicals use is estimated. To convert electricity use into mass of fossil fuels, the global mix of electricity generation technologies and European process input/outputs to calculate a conversion factor of 320 g of fossil fuels per kWh (39, 40). For nonelectrical fuel inputs (a relatively small share), we assume an average energy content of fuels of 40MJ per kilogram. The result of the calculation is a mass input of 1200 g of fossil fuels to produce a 2-gram DRAM chip, and 440 g during the use phase. For chemicals, we multiply the aggregate input of 45 g per cm2 by the yield of memory chips per input silicon, 1.6 cm2 per chip. This yields a 72-gram chemical input per chip. Postponing further interpretation until the next section, we comment on uncertainties in the above results. The contribution of wafer fabrication to energy use is probably accurate to at least one digit, as there was reasonable agreement among several sources for base data. There was only one data point for energy use in some steps in the silicon processing chain (Table 3), thus that factor is somewhat suspect. However, the largest uncertainty by far is in the energy use in producing input chemicals and packaging materials is the most uncertain, as no data was available for semiconductor grades of these materials. Thus the above results should be interpreted as a lower bound on the energy and secondary material use to produce a memory chip. We suggest a plausible estimate of the order of magnitude of this factor by assuming that distillation of semiconductor grade chemicals requires the same energy as for trichlorosilane, namely 50 kWh per kg (see Table 3). Presuming this is the case, energy to produce 72 g of input chemicals jumps from 1.5 MJ to 39 MJ and the secondary input of fossil fuels to manufacture a 32MB chip increases from 1200 g to 2300 g, nearly doubling the result. 4. Discussion The lower bound of fossil fuel and chemical inputs to produce and use one 2-gram microchip are estimated at 1600 g and 72 g, respectively. Secondary materials used in production total 630 times the mass of the final product, indicating that the environmental weight of semiconductors far exceeds their small size. This intensity of use is orders of magnitude larger than that for "traditional" goods. Taking an automobile as an example, estimates of life cycle production energy for one passenger car range from 63 to 119 GJ (42). This corresponds to 1500-3000 kg of fossil fuel used, thus the ratio of embodied fossil fuels in production to the weight of the final product is around two. Why should the secondary use of materials be so comparatively high for semiconductor devices? The fundamental explanation lies in the realm of thermodynamics. Microchips and many other high-tech goods are extremely low-entropy, highly organized forms of matter. Given that they are fabricated using relatively high entropy starting materials, it is natural to expect that a substantial investment of energy and process materials is needed for the transformation into an organized form. At the general level, we hope these results stimulate a greater awareness of the importance of secondary materials and energy use in production of microchips and other high-tech products. For energy, the production phase becomes more relevant than the use phase, a reversal of the situation for products such as automobiles and many household appliances. The analysis also has specific implications for: the future practice of life cycle assessment and materials flow analysis, the debate on dematerialization, and environmental policy. With respect to the practice of life cycle assessment and materials flow analysis, the result that silicon wafer produc tion requires 160 times the energy of "raw" silicon suggests that the issue of the quality of materials used requires greater attention. Purification processes are routinely overlooked in most life cycle assessments; current process databases (such as Boustead) do not even refer to the purity of materials. Dematerialization is the idea that technological progress leads to radical reductions in the amount of materials (and/or energy) required to yield goods and services in the economy (42). The microchip is often assumed to be a prime example of dematerialization since value and utility is high while the weight of the product is negligible. As the relative use of secondary materials is much higher for the microchip than for traditional goods, our analysis suggests that this may not be the case. From a broader perspective, the results indicate the existence of a possible counterforce to dematerialization, a trend we term secondary materialization. Secondary materialization is the proposition that increasingly complex products require additional secondary materials and energy to realize their lower entropy form. While thermodynamic considerations dictate that this trend exists to a certain degree, it is as yet unclear if the additional secondary materials required are significant compared to savings gained through process improvement. In this work we can only assert a specific case of inter-sector secondary materialization: the semiconductor sector displays much higher economic growth and degree of secondary use of energy and materials compared to many "traditional" sectors. Further consideration of this issue is a task for future work. The most direct application of the work to environmental policy relates to the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI). The results of section 2 showed that national emission figures from TRI are far below what one would expect based on process data. Other studies have also suggested that TRI vastly underestimates emissions (43). Though currently flawed, we believe TRI is a valuable initiative that can become a much more reliable tool given appropriate actions to fix it. We suggest three such actions. First, the TRI survey should also include the economic value of the output of the facility, with some appropriate aggregation of results so as to protect anonymity. This economic value can be used as a weighting to estimate what fraction of economic output, and thus of total produc tion, is reflected in the survey. The second point is another addition to the survey: inclusion of purchases of TRI chemicals as inputs to the facility. Including both inputs and outputs forces a mass balance check at the facility level. Third, the academic community should analyze TRI data for various industries using process data and sector statistics in order to check reliability and provide feedback on how the system can be improved. Acknowledgment This research was financially supported by the Japan Foundation-Center for Global Partnership, the Takeda Foundation, the United Nations University/Institute of Advanced Studies and the Fulbright Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation. Supporting Information Available Section A, discussion comparing data sources on chemical use and emissions in semiconductor fabrication; section B, input/output data on wafer fabrication processes; section C, details of estimation of energy required for production of chemical inputs to fabrication of integrated circuits, and section D, reference tables. This material is available free of charge via the Internet at http://pubs.acs.org. Note Added after ASAP Posting This paper was released ASAP on 10/25/02 with a mismatch between data in the text and data in the table. The third paragraph of Section 3 was updated, and the last sentence of the Acknowledgments was added. The correct version was posted 11/14/02. * Corresponding author phone: 81-3-5467-1352; fax: 81-3-3406-7246; e-mail: Williams@hq.unu.edu.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
...programmers consumed 2700 hamburgers, 1503 pizzas (276 vegetarian, 1227 containing meat or meat by-products), 16204 cans of soda (assorted), 790 bags of microwave popcorn and 1 office chair. Three programmers were temporarily blinded while downloading movies & images for research. No animals were harmed...Oh, hang on, I forgot about the ones in the burgers & pizza.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Though it's a far cry from labelling, Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things goes into enough detail to make your average "vote with your wallet" environmentalist hide under her petroleum-synthesized polyester pillow (with chlorine-bleached pesticide-sprayed cotton pillowcase).
Just as foods probably have GMOs unless otherwise labelled, all that crap we buy has a certain index of pesticide-ridden foreign-assembled non-biodegradable impact unless produced by local organic hippies past the age of majority from locally-grown organic hemp. And if it is, you can be damn sure it'll be labelled as such so that the rest of us sucker consumer environmentalist pseudo-hippies can be sure to get it.
It all comes back to the timeless grocery-store question. Sure, the paper bags biodegrade within a few rainstorms, but they require 600 times as much wastewater to produce.
"Think about it!" -- Brenda Blue, Jay-Jay the Jet Plane
hi, I like pancakes -.-- -.-- --..
In 97' I worked at Samsung's fab in Austin, Texas as a chemical technician, troubleshooting and maintaining the pumps that sent liquid chemicals up to the fab. I also pushed a lot of drums and hooked up tanker trucks of sulfuric and other nasties to the hungry fab.
As the average slashdotter knows, every chip is composed of multiple layers, each masked and etched, bathed in various acids and bases and then neutralized and cleaned before the next layer can be applied.
Then these waste chemicals are pumped out, neutralized (in theory) and diluted before being dumped into the same waste water stream that eventually hits streams, rivers and ground water.
There's a whole lot of water indirectly consumed in the manufacturing process - but a whole order of magnitude more water consumed and dumped to dilute the hopefully neutralized (ie, salts) waste products.
So I believe the numbers - kgs (ie, liters!) of water per MB does not set off my bullsht detector.
To me, it also brings into question the whole drive of chip research. It's all focused on performance. There are some articles on research into environmentally friendy chips. But when did you hear of a chip marketed as enviro-friendly? We're tempted into buying the another chip just a tick faster but not even given the choice. For consumers to even be able to make the choice for a more sustainable product we have to have the information.
But companies don't even want us to know what we're injesting - that isn't important to them and is contrary to their creation of demand for more stuff. Why would we think they would tell us something against their own short-term interest?
. This sig unintentionally left blank. I meant to put something here, but I'm busy.
The job of a reporter is to present the facts as they are capable of seeing them. If it outrages the audience, the more likely solutions will come, and the best solutions will almost certainly come from the audience. When reporters try to come up with solutions to the problems they are reporting on, they typically have too little domain knowledge. Their solutions are often simple minded at best, and misguided at worst. This is why they are called "reporters" and not "solvers".
The article provides some details -- the most vital of which were echoed by the submitter -- but doesn't give us any clear idea of how good or bad this fact is. How does the environmental impact of microchip production compare to other goods?
Fortunately, the study itself -- linked to by another poster first -- provides some more useful details.
This is more useful than the article, but still does not give a clear idea how microchip fabrication stacks up against lower-tech items in terms of environmental impact. I mean, that automobile that he uses as an example is an non-trivial machine. More to the point, all modern cars incorporate microchips. In order to properly compare the environmental impacts of car and microchip fabrication, you'd have to factor in the environmental costs of all of their respective parts. I'll bet that a car has a much higher environmental impact once you add in all its microchips, pieces of plastic, and so on.Furthermore, both microchips and cars have a greater environmental impact than merely that caused during their production. In both cases, you should also consider what sort of impact their use will entail. Microchips require electricity to function; that electricity has to be generated somehow, and the methods of its production have an environmental impact. Microchips also need to be disposed of once they are no longer useful, as happens all to frequently. I personally have found a good computer recycler, but lots of other pieces of equipment are thrown into landfills, where they remain indefinitely. They may also leak toxic substances as they begin to fall apart (Lead from CRTs, for instance.) Likewise cars have a HUGE environmental impact during their use -- just think how much gasoline a car can burn in a year of normal use.
But I digress. The study did not consider the entire lifetime of the chip, merely the circumstances of its production. In which case, I find it less than satisfactory. It's a good starting place, but doesn't follow through.
The production of microchips is not environmentally friendly. This is true. What we need to know now is how dirty the process is, and how great of a problem it is compared to other areas of production. Comparison with a car alone isn't too useful, especially as it doesn't figure in the environmental costs of the car's components. What would be useful would be a comparison with lots of other objects, ranging in complexity from a table knife to a bicycle to, say, the space shuttle, with the environmental costs of the components of the more complex items figured in. Then we could use that study to see what areas are worst, and where we most need to improve.
Lastly, lest I sound too harsh, the article does mention that this is only the first installment of research that has taken several years to complete. It is entirely possible that the team will put out exactly the sort of report I envision here sometime in the future. So overall, I'd have to say this is a good start, but needs a lot more analysis to be especially useful.
It was something like this:
The energy to make one solar panel is more than the energy that panel will make in it's lifetime.
Actually, I can believe that.
J.
I have come to the conclusion that I should stop giving my gf DRAM for birth control. Not only are birth control pills cheaper to make, they are environmentally friendly!
The US representative to the formation of the UN, Alger Hiss, was later discovered to be a Soviet agent. Stalin actually controlled both sides of the discussion. The entire purpose of the UN, from its inception through today, has been to convert the United States into communism through international treaties, which it is doing now.
If you want information on the movement to get us out of the UN, and get the UN out of the US, go to http://www.getusout.org.
For every single retail copy of Windows XP you need:
1.45 kg monopoly
3.5 inches FUD whitepaper
2.5 ml fresh blood from a GNU developer
133 million miles Gates evangelizing tour
7 outrageous "OSS = anarchists"-type lies
4,51 GW Ballmer "Developers, developers!" scream
5 spelling errors from Cmdr Taco
Are we supposed to feel guilty because of how expensive we or our tools are in terms of environmental impact?
Guilty, no. Responsible, yes. There are a bunch of non-human, low-intelligence animals on this planet which don't have the capabilities of protecting themselves from us. Free exchange of information is nobel; being responsible caretakers and guardians of the environment is also nobel.
Do you think an environmental impact study was done before the Mona Lisa was painted?
Yep. 2000 years ago, the Romans had environmental impact studies.
Pliny reports on ecological disasters and effects of pollution from refining of metals in his Natural History (check books 8, 11, 19, & 33).
Strabo reports on the effects of clearcutting forests for fuel and on pollution from refining in his Geography. (14.6.5; 3.2.8)
Xenophon reports on pollution from refining of silver in Memorabilia. (3.6.12)
Lastly, Plato talks about the deforestation of Greece in Critias. (111b-c)
That's a common misperception. While we may be able to make life difficult for humans and dogs, cockroaches and bacteria will survive.
For example: Water shortage forces court to pee in bushes
if the numbers here seem high, particularly when you compute how many ram chips are on a single waffer and so how much resources they claim are used for each waffer, take some comfort in knowing that 92% of all statistics are made up, including this one.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Other interesting sources about this are: Paul Kennedy's work, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, which is critiqued here, with the same sort of criticisms that Mr. Kennedy (and others) made about malthusian principles. Yes, technology can answer some of the problems that we create for ourselves, but only if we WANT to do something about it. It's all about balance, like everything else, and the problem there is it's too damn easy to ignore environmental problems.
most of you seem to underestimate that values... in environmental accounting everything is summed up and divided through the numer of products. so of course transportation to factorys, the recycling/neutralizing resources and a lot of energy in the production itself counts too! and that is what it is all about. what has to be done to produce ram: you need the basic materials, helping materials (in this chase lots of chemicals) and energy. ... sum up and divide.
one big word for all this is "lastingness"
everything that is consumed should be replaceable or be gained back somehow. oil that is burnt surely is not. water probably is, but that again needs energy and other chemicals and most important: the structures/machines/stuff that costs money... a perfect production chain would give you a product and everything else you have put in at the beginning or during the processing. with renewable energy sources and a closed water/chemicals/gases ciryle this could be done... everything a matter of money.
i personally guess the values determined here are too low.
Coal power, Bush-2, McMansions, and ANWR drilling. As long as I can stay fat and happy as a Republican ignoramous, with my dividend tax-cut.
...that you are supporting terrorists! When you use DRAM chips, you're computing with Bin Laden.
Scare tactis here much? And that's directly from the article, quoted in context by the submitter.
corrosive hydrogen fluoride
Yeah, that's nice, but you're almost guaranteed that you need to use a strong base (sodium hydroxide) or a strong acid (hydrogen fluoride, hydrocloric acid, etc.) in any manufacturing process, if for nothing else than cleaning. Arsine gas is frquently produced in the process of creating flux, a cleaning agent, which is necessary for soldering. Pretty much any device with a circuit board (TV, microwave, remote control) is going to require solder and therefore involve the same agents.
For further perspective, look at the ingredients of your shampoo or conditioner some time, and you're likely to see HCL, NaOH, as one of the last few ingredients. If not, you're almost certain to see sodium chloride, the result of titrating with one or the other. Doesn't make them much more dangerous.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
These researchers are misleading people by emphasizing the ratio weight in materials used to material produced. Since the emphasis on microchips is to be, well, micro in scale, of course they will have a large ratio here. If they really intended to look at this area in an objective way, they should look at the materials used per unit of capability of the chip over time. I'm sure a 32M ram is more environmentally friendly than ENIAC, and has thousands of times the performance.
He also doesn't mention if packaging is considered in the final product weight (since he uses this ratio), thus migrating from a SOIC package to a QFN, you would make your product 2-3X worse for the environment?! Quackery.
So those pansies that have to buy the new voodoo 3XXX or latest P5Billion might be a bigger environmental problem than Joe bob driving his SUV... Funny, we never hear about people smearing manure on computer keyboards. Perhaps we can get some granolas toegether and pull and elf stunt.. burn some computers!
Hell, even if they make millions of these chips it is still a THOUSAND times less then your average coal fired power plant, which will burn about 4,000,000,000 kg's of fossil fuel a year to light 200,000 homes.
he gets it!!! someone here FINALLY gets it!
Helium doesn't cancel gravity, it just happens to have a low density
The one true bit in your post.
BTW, there aren't "many" Helium containing compounds. At least not as compared to other elements, or even other noble gases. There are no currently known stable compounds of Helium.
Second, I would assume the "Gi" was a typo
Or would you assume the "Hi" later was actually HI? And he actually did mean Germanium the first time?
clearly meant "HeGI", which is Helium Gallium Iridide and is widely used in chip manufacture
I is Iodine. And before any compound can be widely used it has to exist in the first place.
Not that it matters, you are a known trollbuster and should be modded down
It's always funny seeing a troll whining about a troll buster. Your standard MO is no different from the original poster's.
And yes, you may now be happy that you got some attention. Your life as a troll has been fulfilled for today.
Frankly, I'm bored and it's rather fun debunking your posts. They're at least somewhat better than Jack Wagner's.
The UNU team found that to make every one of the millions manufactured each year requires:
:)
32 kg of water
Okay, and what happens to this water? I'm presuming it's released as waste water back into the environment where it eventually gets recycled by mother nature. So it's not really used as such.
1.6 kg of fossil fuels
So it requires the energy equivalent of 1.6 KG of fossil fuel. So they could use environmentally friendly energy sources for this if they were available and cheap.
700 grams of elemental gases (mainly nitrogen)
That's easy to come by given that whole atmosphere thing
and 72 grams of chemicals
It'd be nice to have a little more details on what chemicals were involved. Sure they use some highly toxic chemicals here, but what portion of that 72 grams is the really nasty stuff? What happens to those chemicals after the process is the more important question.
A few thoughts this brings to my mind:
With every generation of computers, the capacities of the system increase, but do the resources requirements involved increase? Not to my knowledge. So it's really pretty impressive that for the same inputs we can get increasingly powerful devices.
What is the impact on our ability to more efficiently manage the resource we have because we have computers with these memory chips in them?
Basically this information lacks any useful context to measure its real impact on the environment as a whole. It's an interesting statistic, but relatively meaningless for figuring out the practical impact of computers on the environment around us.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
RAM is a meaningless thing on a PC. If someone has a 32MB video card and a game is slow, then people cry "You need a 64MB or 128MB card!" not even thinking that the problem could lie elsewhere. Ditto for main system memory. Dell tells people that a 256MB 1.8GHz machine is good for email and web surfing, but not for games or multimedia.
I'm not going to launch into a "programmers need to make better use of their resources" tirade. The trouble is that there's really no way for programmers to do so, because everything in a modern computer is so completely abstracted away from what's really going on. You can request that you get a certain video mode, but if you request 8 bits per pixel you might end up with 32. This is why console games can run happily in 24MB--what's on the Game Cube--but equivalent PC games need 256MB.
At the same time, there's a constant push for "bigger, better, more" even if it doesn't make sense. I'm not saying that 640K is enough for everybody, but does everyone working in an insurance agency need a 32MB video card--the miniumum standard in most machines--that runs in 32-bit color? The hardcore 3D geeks insist that 32-bit color is better than 16, but they forget that it depends on what you're doing. When you double a size like that, you need more memory, more bandwidth, and more processing power. That's a big tradeoff, one that shouldn't be as casual as it is, and it certainly doesn't mean "go for it at all costs."
This isn't about wether X pollutes more than making computer chips. I reason that its more important to stop coming out w/ a 800 MHz, 1000 Mhz, etc processors every few months and changing the Ram every 6 months for a minute change in benchmarks. Of course companies are seeking better profit margins and increased sales so limiting upgrade cycles for them is counter-productive.
If people didn't throw out old systems so quickly, companies would change upgrade cycles and we could find ways to recycle old computers ( literally, not giving to charity ) we wouldn't have this mess. Our landfills, in 2 years are going to be full of perfectly functional PIIs, PIIIs and Athlons and the arsenic and mercury will seep into the water supply.
My computer is 3 years old. Still works well and I'm happy w/ it. Only upgrade I'll make is with HDs since I'm sure they're about to crash sooner or later.
Of course, I'm an optimist.
Thank goodness I use 256 MB DDR chips. For a second there, I thought I might be helping to kill the earth.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
- How little we are aware of the true cost of things
- How easy it is to be conned into believing everything is OK
Here's another good example that is little more than an attempt to grab government pork: Ethanol fuel for internal combustion engines. Here's a quote from a good link. You can easily find more:The cost of producing ethanol varies with the cost of the feedstock used and the scale of production. Approximately 85 percent of ethanol production capacity in the United States relies on corn feedstock. The cost of producing ethanol from corn is estimated to be about $1.10 per gallon. Although there is currently no commercial production of ethanol from cellulosic feedstocks such as agricultural wastes, grasses and wood, the estimated production cost using these feedstocks is $1.15 to $1.43 per gallon.
From Biomass Energy's Bottom Line
So it costs more to use ethanol than gasoline? Of course, you will find different numbers for different methods, you should compare with other possible fuels, you should not look just at cost but also at the overall energy balance, you should take into account whether it is renewable or not, you should see what might occur if large scale production and consumption were to be set up, you should compare combustion emissions, and so on.
Makes you want to scratch your head, don't it?
What's missing here is that the "higher cost" of the environmentally friendly product is really just an "front end" cost as opposed to a "back end" cost of the environmentally un-friendly product.
For example: Chip A costs $60/per unit but deforests and poisons 0.0001 acres of land per unit. The cost of cleanup isn't realized until after a noticeable impact has occured. Chip B costs $90/per unit but damages nothing.
Which chip costs more? For the moment, let's exclude stuff like human life because $priceless is a hard figure with which to work. Instead, let's be cold hearted economists and analyze it in terms of insured lost, depreciation, etc. To a certain extend you can monetize human life (as nasty as that sounds) and IIRC the figure is something like 1.8 million $ on average.
At any rate, from a financial point of view, chip B looks like an early loan payment. Most people don't want to pay the loan right away, even when it's prudent. They'd rather "borrow against the future" sometimes at great cost.
At any rate, for many types of environmental damage we should be able to calculate which is better. If it costs $5/per unit to clean up 10 years from now, then there's an argument to be made for using chip A. OTOH, if it will cost $100/per unit to clean up 5 years from now then it's prudent to regulate the industry and require that they install the necessary polution controls.
Of course this is a dramatic oversimplification (I'm throwing out stuff like the benefit of the product itself; chips are used by environmental scientists to study and find remedies for damage!)
The point I wanted to make is that it's wrong to say the environmentally friendly chip "costs more". If it's the difference between killing the Yellow River and keeping it fishable, the friendly chip actually costs less to society overall.
There are two basic solutions: 1. regulate, and pass the cost on to the consumer (tough because the industry lobbies against it and unless the whole world regulates the consumer will just switch markets) 2. subsidize the improvements (tough, because misguided free trade agreements have given subsidies a black eye, you have to sell it to taxpayers, and you have to make sure the companies are using the money for the intended purpose).
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Apparently you are wrong.
The kilogram originated in the reforms of the French Revolution. Conceptually, it was to be the mass of a cubic decimeter of water at water's maximum density. It was originally called a grave, but the name was changed to kilogram in 1795.
You can read about it here: kilogram
1g caffeine
5g Pizza
1pt Alcohol (beer form)
5L oxygen
and
24 oz Mountain Dew
10 L burping & farting
If the "clean" chip really saves the environment, the real cost of the chip is lower; it's just that it's an upfront cost. If you have to spend $trillion of R&D to avoid 10 deaths over the next 20 years, would you do it? It's cold hearted, but decisions like that are made all the time. OTOH, when you get to the point of spending $billion to prevent 10,000 deaths, it's definitely worthwhile.
As for all the people on /. saying they'd pay more, that's irrelevant. What matters is what the market will collectively bear, and what you can squeeze through the political process.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Look further down at my Dolphin-safe tuna example. There you have a "cleanly manufactured" product that won't affect you any differently than a standard one. And it cost more than the alternative. And people bought it en masse.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
It doesn't taste any different and it costs more, but people buy it because they think the issue is important.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
It is a no-brainer that making that chip is so evironmentally favorable when weighted against the resources we'd have to consume to equal it's productivity.
Oh no! Not nitrogen! Has any ever studied the effects of breathing nitrogen?
Best Buy can have you arrested
Wrong! You have to work to get paid. It just means that sucking your boss dick won't get you promoted higher than your coworkers. Faggot!
I mean, what is the environmental cost of the plastic toy in your kids-fast-food meal?
What is the environmental cost of your kids period?
Having kids is a choice with just as much environmental impact as me deciding to upgrade my RAM. Which choice is more moral or justified?
If you expect a manufacturer has to provide a "nutrition label" so we can make an informed choice to justify our consumption, should we require similar labels for babies?
Let's just be consistent with all the lifestyle choices we choose to demonize.
According to my calcs- if they built a billion chips and used 32kg of water for each chip it would only result in them using .032 km^3 of water. Which I can tell you isn't crap....
Ethanol is the same way. And it is being pushed hard in MN by lawmakers.
Capitalism: unequal distribution of wealth
Socialism: equal distribution of poverty
FreeGeek, in Portland, Oregon, does a good job of recycling. I've visited their facility a couple of times - they have rooms full of computers, drives, monitors. They have bins in the back of the building for scrap metals, etc., whatever they can't make into a computer for someone else, they try to recycle, responsibly. In fact, I think that's why they have to charge money to accept monitors from people, because of the losses they incur in getting them recycled properly (shipping them to remanufacturers, etc.)
Everyone please list similar efforts in other cities, if possible.
Get off my launchpad!
Who the hell still uses 32mb DRAM anyway?!
How do they keep the cost going down so much!
The secret is that they do it in bulk!
Go chip manufacturers!
About a decade ago, when I was involved in the design of a 4Mb DRAM shrink, I went to the company store to buy some chip-earrings for my mom for Christmas. At that time, they took chips that failed test and made jewelry.
I paid more for duds glued to an earring post than I would have for fully tested and packaged DRAMs.
It's worth noting that 'things in nature' are essentially worthless. Air is worth nothing. Water is worth nothing. For that matter, oil is worth nothing. For the start, the human labor required to make these things usable (both form and location) is valuable. Beyond someone manages to own the source of something, it becomes 'scarce', and then we assign it intrinsic value.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I say to you that we don't want any of people's obsolete and broken computers. It's more of a hassle trying to get them to work than they're ever worth.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Just analyze the total costs of manufacturing ANYTHING and you get amazed! Entropy rules! ... pretty soon it becomes pointless to do anything at all. Move to a tropical island and fuck the native girls! More fun, while not very environmentally friendly.
Toothpicks...grow the trees by letting them alone for say 50 years, harvest the trees, using dozens of men and machines to cut and haul and process the wood into tooth picks. Remember the support this entails, food, lodging, clothing, tools, plans ad infinitum. This is for each man, who is supported by dozens of industries. Farming, mining, refining, textile
Is this news to ANYONE? PC's cost a ton per individual part...but with mass production, the costs come down. These Einsteins are really not all that smart.
you fukkin hippie.
"Think of free-range meat products and dolphin-safe tuna"
I'd rather not.
I *love* the "tang" that dolphins add to a can of Tuna. Tastes delicious. So, really, dolphin-free tuna is less valuable because it doesn't taste as good.
Make beer, not DRAM.
The Environmental Cost of Silicon Chips - posted by Cowboy Neal citing a Scientific American article
32 gallons of water: Needed to make an ounce of beef
1.6 kg of fossil fuel: needed for 3 pounds of beef
72 grams of chemicals: Needed to produce 2-5 grams of beef
So may i ask, "where is the beef"?
The reason oil factors in is that a dictatorship is not an efficient method of government (and so a dictatorship cannot easily build nuclear weapons), unless there is a virtually unlimited source of income, the oil. We aren't going to war with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc. Even North Korea is not training people to kill us.
We do not go after "oil." We go after dangerous people that are using large resources to do dangerous things.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
I see a lot of posts saying, "oh but those 32kg of water and 700g of nitrogen just get reused," as if "reusing" it was magic or just happens by itself, and so is negligable.
The point is, you need to inject that much material into the system to get the product. Obtaining that material (and pre- and/or post-processing it to make it suitable for consumption/disposal) requires more energy and resources. Just because the atmosphere is ~80% nitrogen doesn't mean one can simply extract 700g of pure nitrogen from the ambient air by snapping their fingers! And moving 32kg of water (oops - have to make sure it's deonized water, how much energy does that require?) to where you need it, and then removing it afterwards (oops, better remove those nasty poisons first), takes some effort as well.
There's this little thing called entropy, maybe you've heard of it. Much of the water used in processing ends up polluted. Unpolluting (unrandomizing) the water requires lots of energy. Most of our energy sources (power plants) cause more pollution. Light bulb coming on yet?
Of course if you don't mind, we could just pipe the waste water output from plant right into your home's water supply. If you don't mind it would really save everyone a lot of trouble.
That's right, folks. Need some memory for your machine? Got a few people around you don't like? Don't want their water? Well, come on by my shop! I'll take those spare water rings off your hands, and with the addition of just a few chemicals, produce for you lots and lots of desktop-runnin', gcc-compilin' RAM! No more annoying neighbors, roomies or anything!
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
That's funny that the UN is achieving its mission even though the Soviet Union aint' around anymore.
The average car uses several tons of fossil fuel per year. In comparison the 1.6kg for making a dram chip is minute. Remember you only buy a PC at most every couple of years.
Similarly the water used would be less than a week's worth of showers.
The big users of energy are transportation, particularly cars, and heating and cooling. Don't sweat the small stuff.
And PCs make life more efficient thus saving energy.
The biggest and best thing you can do though, maybe more important than reducing your own energy consumption, is to limit the number of children you have.
Overpopulation causes poverty, hunger, disease and war. Has done for thousands of years.
Anyone who has a large family but claims to be environmentally aware is a hypocrite.
Tim Josling
HF may be used for that purpose in low concentrations, but I believe that HF is mainly used for etching Si.
There is no way to count the Total Cost of Ownership for almost anything complicated.
First of all, what is the cost of not producing the microchips?
Second, what is the cost of producing the DRAM with fewer megabytes? More megabytes?
Third - what is the cost of building a factory?
Fourth - what is the cost of building all parts used to build the factory?
Fifth - what is the cost of building all the machines that were used to build the factory?
Sixth - what is the cost of mining all the primary elements used to build all the parts of the factory and of the machines?
Seventh - what is the cost of shipping all the parts of machines and parts of factory?
Eighth - what is the cost of building the shipment hardware that was used to ship all the parts and machines?
Ninth - what is the cost of engineering of all the hardware involved in all parts? How much of everything was used while engineering all details of everything?
Tenth - what about the people involved? What is the cost of every person - the food, the housing, the transportation, the waste? etc.?
Etc. etc. etc. At some point you start wondering - what is the difference? Everything affects everything else and from less complicated systems more complicated systems arise. At some point we will have to completely order every single unordered element on this planet and that will take as much energy as we can possibly consume and it will redistribute and will transform every single available resource into an integrated part of the entire complex machine that we will call civilization.
You can't handle the truth.
Actually, the United Nations was designed by the Soviets with the goal of achieving the old dream of global communism.
And I suppose the Jews and the Gnomes of Zurich were also involved?
Da Blog
So that's why PCBs are green.
Here's an attempt at fossil fuel consumption estimates during the lifetime use of a car and a ram chip.
For the chip: I found one 32mbyte chip with a power consumption of 0.7 watts. It's a low-power chip, but let's use it. Say it's life is 25000 hours -- that's 17.5 kwh. Say that's generated with a gas or diesel engine -- unlikely, but it allows a direct comparison to a car. The examples I know come out on the order of 50 hp-hours per gallon of fuel (don't trust this number -- does anybody have a substantiated one?), which means 66kwh per gallon. That means about a quarter gallon of fuel, which is about 1 kg. If we believe the manufacturer's claim that most ram chips use 5x the power, then about 5 kg. So somewhere between 60% and 25% of the total fossil fuel is used during production.
For the car: say a life of 100k miles at 30mpg -- sounds like about 13000 kg fuel. That means that the energy used in production is between 10 and 19% of the total.
I agree that it isn't very meaningful to compare these numbers. And I wish this information were widely available, for many kinds of objects. I'd like to see it in front of people when they're buying.
OK, in an effort to improve the environment.. yeah, thats it... send me ALL of your RAM.
Actually, I prefer DDR 2700 at present. In 256, 512, or 1G configurations.
...go back and live in a cave.
o 2500+ gallons of water to produce one pound of edible beef (about 1/2 of the water use in the US 0 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat And so on. It doesn't matter so much how much it takes to produce something, but rather what happens to the waste products. And that is one of the few areas where I don't mind government regulation. Use all the resources you can justify, but clean up your mess afterwards. Economics will take care of the rest.
Really? I have a ceramic filter - i just pump it with my hands. I have a charcoal filter - i don't even have to pump it. Perhaps on a large scale it requires a lot of energy, but on a personal level it's very simple.
Lets revert all progress and go back to hunting and gathering. This is obviously the most environmental solution. We should not waste any energy or produce anything for ourselves. Just live off what the earth gives us naturally. Of course we are going to have to kill off about 5.8 billion humans to do this, since the earth only can support about 200 million humans in this context. We should only expect to live 30-40 years too. And have lots of kids, because only a couple are going to live to child bearing age. Sound like fun?
Right now the sun dumps enough solar energy on the earth in less than 2 hours than all the humans on the earth use in a year. It is true that we are capable of polluting the earth in all sorts of ways, but it is also true that the energy and resources we need are in abundance. The trick is figuring out how to best use our resources without destroying them (sustainability). Computers play a huge role in helping us to establish the technologies necessary to reach this sustainability. Sure there are high costs for the production of silicon chips, but there are also all sorts of concievable long term payoffs.
The standard of living for humans today has improved significantally from the past. Despite all the pollution and environmental damage, we have done a lot of good too. We should not dispel the facts of this study as worthless, but realize that the production of a silicon chips has a lot of societal benefits too that might justify the environmental damage.
As far as the companies making the products are concerned, life is cheap, even human life. (As long as there is no evidence _directly_ linking them.)
Do you think you pay for the cost of the 100+ people killed a year by the coal power plant that (most likely) produces your electricity? No, because nobody who gets lung cancer sues the power company. If you absorb the cost for their deaths at all, it's in higher health insurance premiums and doesn't impact the power company at all. And that's assuming that you can even assign a value to human life.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I'm selling my computer and buying a hamburger.
The point is, chips are not recycleable. Turning them back into sand and trace toxins--and let's not forget the clay, gold, aluminum, plastic and other packaging materials--does nothing for the entropy equation. Once a chip stops being used, it is truly useless. So, the justification for the disproportionate mass of consumables to finished goods must lie in the actual advantage conferred during a chip's useful life...plus some measure of belief to grease the skids of socializing cost and risk. Actual advantage would manifest itself in entropic payback--do those chips help save labor? energy? time? enable a future where such savings are possible for more people? Making chip-making clean is a technical problem. Making chips entropically worth the price is what keeps most Slashdotters in the chips.
The cost of NOT making a DIMM chip is much higher than actually making one. I mean, jeez, if you don't make them, terrorists will; then you're screwed.
Thanks for telling it like it is for those people who think we should throw out all the computers.
I don't think you're really addressing the point of the study, though, which is to find out what harm we might be causing and see if there's a better way to do it. I'm going to take a wild guess and say that going back to 1995 isn't the only way of addressing pollution.
If you saw a study about the pollution caused by cars, would you explain why cars are useful things to have or look into making them more efficient?
If you saw a study about overfishing would you talk about the vital protein provided by fish or would you start figuring out how to let any of them survive?
If you saw a study about the rate at which rainforests are disappearing, would you start telling me how useful paper is?
Lots of things -- whether its sneakers from Nike sweatshops or CDs from the RIAA -- are useful and good. You know what? That doesn't get us off the hook from thinking about where they came from and what kind of harm they might be causing.
With the upcoming superbowl, I sure do appreciate seeing folks warming up their armchair quarterback skills.
Short of weather, taxes, sports and personal hygiene, it seems like environmentalism just brings out the stupidest and hastiest when it comes to holding-forth-like-an-expert.
I mean, I've just read comments from people that worked in a fab (who claim to therefore know all the details of the fab's environmental remediation processes), people inventing an environmental impact metric based on goods/fuel ratio comparisons between cars (largely steel and plastic, with a per-device weight in the tons, and ironically containing many microchips) and microchips (which weigh tens of grams... the comparison is ABSURD), and lots of people advocating all sorts of half-assed remedies.
It's good to explore ideas, but frankly I haven't seen this much evidence at how unscientific techies can be since I taught a freshman physics lab. C'mon, be as critical of your own methodology as you are of the facilities involved.
The fabs I have toured or audited all had room for improvements, but seemed to:
- Have existing and prototype materials-reuse mechanisms implemented to minimize environmental impact. Solvents, the most obvious and arguably the most hazardous, almost always cost so much in terms of purchasing and RCRA-compliant disposal, that a distillation or recovery mechanism costing six figures (dollars) pays for itself easily. This means there are financial benefits and PR benefits, so companies are very open/willing to clean things up.
- Admittedly use an insane amount of water. A large chunk of this is a byproduct of Reverse Osmosis distillation to get water to Megohm pure and better. My point is, the water isn't just pumped thru their wastewater stream to dilute things. It comes in, is superduper-distilled (basically), and then used at an insane rate for processes & rinsing. Water consumption is the biggest environmental problem of most fabs, but the problem isn't how dirty they make it... it's the regional impact of so much water being consumed.
- Either directly treat all wastewater (including their own special steps to precipitate out metals or other problem materials, and are constantly testing/evaluating water quality) or discharge it to a community-owned facility that they work extensively with (to get all the above items). My experience is that much of the water pollution is precipitated out, sludge-pressed, and shipped/handled as low-grade hazardous waste.
- Are, by all the environmental engineers I've ever worked with, greener in most every sense of the word than most other industries. By this I mean the staffs always seem to be proactively reducing their environmental impact. They've started since the US's environmental awakening around 1970, so they don't have to struggle to keep up with competitors grandfathered in doing things some old/cheap/dirty way, etc.
Last of all, the head story mentions HF and arsine. I've been out of this a long time, but if memory serves both are very reactive in a way that they readily degrade into safer compounds and are generally considered to have *NO* long-term environmental impact. They can't survive in the wild enough to be a community/wastewater/landfill concern. The moment I hit this part, I felt like I was reading an econut's rant about highly-radioactive long-lived isotopes... all scientific credibility goes to hell when you spout off half-truths to make a headline. The only people that need to worry about HF or AsH3 are people in the room when it leaks and emergency responders. Anyone else (even a block away) has zero risk short- or long-term to these. Nasty? Hell, yes. Silane (common in fabs) scares me even more (it absorbs thru tissue and makes swiss cheese out of your bones, I'm told). But a community's worst fear from their local fab should be DNAPL's (Dense Non-Aqueous Phase Liquids). TCE, Perc and other DNAPL's can pollute a town's groundwater for a few hundred years, costing the town tens of millions of dollars for air-scrubbers or other remediation hardware.Just to dodge the karma damage a bit, I'm very very much an environmentalist. But I'm an engineer. And I feel environmental protections suffer when people use half-truths and poor science like this. We need to treat it like racism or other societal ills... question everything (including proposed remedies) and stick to an ethical high road that demands that we NEVER sneak by a scientific half-truth. Otherwise, we risk losing our credibility and accidentally creating a legal framework that strangles the innovations and self-improvements we need to advance.
</soapbox>
---advaitavedanta
I'd like to point out that you're wrong. I go to a church that also has a "Christian School", and they have only 1 machine over 500mhz, the other 6 are low pentiums. The Firewall is a old school IPFW firewall on a 386 running isdn on demand. And this was setup by a Medical Surgeon. Granted, he's a genious, but that's a pretty wierd setup.
I still agree with your point. The problem we are facing is, nobody really wants a 486, and why should they? Right now we have way too many 486's because so many first generation pentiums were kept around when they probably should have (or at least were in the past), dropped.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I don't doubt their figures at all, but as mentioned a million times earlier, where's the data mentioning "Consumed materials" as opposed to what simply gets passed through the system? Are they dumping toxic chemicals into the rivers which I eat fish from?
I'm quite sure with the obscene number of tree hugger groups out there, this problem does not go overlooked. The article doesn't seem to provide any relevant information. What is the impact on the environment? Why should this matter? The fact is that I drink on average 1-3 liters of water each day. I also drink an additional 1-3 liters of coffee each day. Although the majority of people would assume that I urinate, the amount which is returned to the environment is unclear. Therefore I can't make any interesting assestment on the cost of my living to the water supply.
Do me a favor and make a real effort to provide useful information in the future. This article is nothing more than a scare tactic that is bound to get the tree and whale huggers in a spin.
Several researchers and a computer with many DRAM chips.
Sounds like an Alanis Morrissette song to me.
.. for buying 1GB DDR SDRAM sticks.. since buying in high capacity means the environment suffers less :D
The real cost of C++!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Indeed, entropy rules, especially in the long run.
That 32 liters of water will eventually evaporate and rain down as potable water again.
The rest of the ingredients will eventually randomize into something quite like the rocks they were refined from.
In the short run, we have people who may be harmed by the waste, and people who will be helped by having a job building the devices, or cleaning up after them.
We may lose some things that are hard to replace, such as certain species, or people we care about.
One proposed solution is to try to account for the actual costs of things, and make sure that the buyers of a product are charged for the harm it does. That way the marketplace will ensure that we buy things based on the true costs. The crisis of the commons is at work here.
I don't know if such a scheme can be made to work. What we usually see is the opposite -- subsidizing oil instead of renewables. It's hard to get someone to pay for trash removal when it is so easy to throw the stuff in someone else's yard.
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
The real FreeBSD died a couple of years ago when it went out of business. The worthwhile parts were bought up by Wind Vendor and made proprietary. Then the parts which were not useful were released into the public domain. So what is left are some hobbyist types who play around with the leftovers. But the real (i.e. original) FreeBSD itself is dead. What is now called "FreeBSD" is not the same thing. It is only a hobby pastime.
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!!! And it somehow supports terrorism, and a Columbian drug cartel, and I've heard it can be linked to Kevin Bacon in one degree. What is the world coming to? It's almost as if we were living in one global closed environment, where everything was somehow linked to everything else? WOW! Wouldn't that be just wild if that were true?
Before you've made up your mind about an issue, go read about it for yourself. http://www.anwr.org/
Ok. Computers are bad. But how many CPUs and how much Memory does it take to equal the pollution lifecycle of a single SUV? There are worse things than computer parts out there (even gold mining is a horribly toxic process).
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
http://turmeric.freeshell.org/storytext/how_open_s ource_software_harms_the_environment.html
here i have layed out how open source software harms the environment w the increased physical cost of no powersaving modes.
The word is predator.
Both live off another, but a parasite doesn't completely destory its host.
As far as the metaphore goes about us destroying the earth. *shrug* I don't really buy it either. You can't be a parasite to a habitat, you can only change it.
I do agree however with the seniments that we tend to not consider the world surounding us (quite frankly everything does).
I had a physics prof at uni who suspected, without running the numbers, that the average solar cell used more energy in its production (combined direct and indirect energy) than it would produce in its lifetime...
Umm, no. You're just ass wrong about that history.
Bring your own bags. Yes, I know it doesn't map well to the original question, but investing in three or four canvas grocery bags can save literally hundreds of paper or plastic bags over their lifetime.
So, nyah, there's a good solution to "paper or plastic".
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
[a very clever man] could be the next big engineer...
Wait, who was the last big engineer?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Uh, water at STP is at its freezing point, and is very liable to turn into ice if any heat-energy is removed from it.
(Remember, kids, "standard temperature" is not the same as "room temperature".)
But, then again, since water doesn't expand much in that range, it's nearly the same anyhoo.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Free exchange of information is nobel
You get a prize for it? And here I just thought you got the {MP,RI}AA knocking on your door...
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
When you upgrade your server, you compute with Bin Laden!
I'd say "With apologies to Bill Maher", but then I'd have to actually care, wouldn't I?
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
I remember some wise man once said: "good is dumb"
it's quite different in countries where computers aren't everywhere. remember commodore 64? that would be enough to teach programming, in fact, any kind of computer with general purpose comm port, display and keyboard is enough. ok, so some higher level tool than assembler would help some, too.
One of the recent studies of EPA discovered that the average Fart contains about 7g of H2S which is known as being a toxic product (who doesn't beleive it, fart and then watch the persons around you). So EPA recommends that you buy a buttplug and save the planet.
why bother with 32mb? I mean geeze if you going though all that trouble may as make one worthwhile
--image
Java is my blade
c++ is my sword
beer is my shield
I'm really suprised none of the linux zealots have mentioned this yet, but one of the best uses a school could have for an old PC is to rip out the hard drive, hook that sucker up to a network, and use it as an X terminal thin client with its display managed by a bigger backroom server.
This is much more reliable and effective than you might imagine. Over 10baseT, X is plenty fast. An old pentium is more than enough power for an X server (even a 486 works very nicely, with a decent vid card). Eight or 16 megs of ram is enough. For the server, to run basic office and net apps you need much less power than you think, because most of the time the processor is sitting idle (what you really need is ram). Plus, you get all the additional benefits of thin-clients in their easier administration and much lower TCO. No more running around to Windows (or even Linux) PCs all over the school--you can forget they exist.
This is already quite a popular way of doing things in cash-strapped schools, and it's growing.
Be evangelized.
The biggest deployment of this kind I know of is in Largo, Florida, with 400 terminals. See also here, and here, aw heck just Google.
LTSP is a very popular package for serving mini X server distros to storage-less PSs over a network.