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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)."
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."
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.
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?
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Free your mind.
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.
They should move their operations to the USA where they will be elligible for huge tax breaks.
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.
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.
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.
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?
...
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"?
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.
(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/
I've also heard that it takes dozens or even hundreds of people just to get that chip into your hands too. Engineers, Manufacturers, Accountants, Deliverymen, Salesman!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!! Think of the PEOPLE!!!!
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
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.
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)
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.
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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.
I think that's a great idea to help the starving peoples of the world. Use capitalism to induce farmers to produce less yield for more money. That way, everybody wins.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
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.
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
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