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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)."
The publication itself:
Here.
The problem is... At one point I was trying to recycle a bunch of old hardware and did some research. I recall reading at one point (I forget exactly where, unfortunately) that many of the companies that recycle old hardware don't.
:-/
What they do do is put it on a slow boat to China where it is dumped into the rivers. Rivers that locals rely upon for drinking water. And then, to supplement their income, some of the chinese people will take the hardware and pick out the copper and other metals to sell. But they don't wear any appropriate protective gear, not even gloves.
So, basically, "recycling" is just a long process by which we make it someone else's environmental problem
Not all recycling companies do this, but many do. If you want to go this route, be sure you research the companies thoroughly. I ended up not recycling (yet), but found some buyers who had a use for the old hardware.
Government IS the problem.
Maybe you should take a look at this site then. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1839997.stm Computers sent to recyclers in America, and other countries for that matter are ending back in Asia. yes, some is recycled and that's good, but a lot of toxins are leached out... We should recycle ours here where we have regulations to control this, but then again, if we did recycle while being responsible, then it would cost more than it's worth..
Mine means my own, but how can this be if I owe for it?
certainly some of tme can be reused (H20 as you and others correctly stated for example). But here are typical applications of different chemicals:
I am inclined to believe that most of the chemicals are not reused, at least in the traditional sense. H2O is cleaned and returned to the ocean, and N2 is cleaned (through air-handling systems) and returned to the atmosphere, but many of these chemicals probably are neutralized (read "made somewhat safe") and disposed of in your local land-fill, or into your local air.
Chips with higher densities are more fragile, and therefore will give lower yields.
Tell that to Intel They seem to have increased the circuit density, wafer size, performance and yield, all while reducing consumption.
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.
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."
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