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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.
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.
(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/
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)
Yeah, but what's the cost of not making the chips?
Suppose we threw out all the chips - went back to pencil and paper? How many kilowatt-hours would we consume in heating and lighting the rooms full of green-hatted accountants scratching figures onto paper with pens?
OK, perhaps that's a little too far. (But lots of enviros really hate it when we take their premises - that chipmaking is Evil - to their logical conclustions.)
Suppose we just threw out the 32M chips and 8-inch wafers and 0.13u processes. No new fabs after 1995. We'll stick with 4M chips on 4-inch wafers and 0.35u instead. That would give us a quarter of the memory (and our CPUs would top out at about 300 MHz), and (ta-dah!) use pretty much the same amount of resources as we're using today.
Throwing away that fab that builds 80486 chips and 16M sticks of FPM RAM (and throwing away the products it produced), and replacing it with a fab capable of cranking out 2.4G P4s and 512M sticks of DDR is a good thing, because you can do more with the P4 than you could have dreamt of doing with the 486s.
For running Office, maybe a '486 would be OK. Forget about Doom III, though. Or rendering Lord of the Rings.
And if those aren't "green enough" things to justify building faster/better computers (because, after all, if it's not Greener Than Thou, you Just Shouldn't Do It, Ever!), I'll remind you that you can also forget about the climate simulations and ozone hole analysis, and image processing for weather prediction and crop analysis. Scrap the weapons technology that turns "dumb" 500-pounders into GPS-guided missiles so that one bomb can do the job of 100 - back to carpet-bombing a whole city to powder with a fleet B-52s to hit just one bunker. No more passenger airplanes with wing and engine designs for low fuel consumption and low noise. No more fuel-efficient combustion chambers that help you get more power out of your 4-cylinder than your uncle got from his '68 Malibu. Gotta save the environment, y'know!