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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)."
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...
How much of the water gets cleaned and reused, and how many of the chemicals aren't consumed in the process?
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?
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..
"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..."
"This is one example of how our society is breeding the destruction of mother earth."
The problem IMHO isn't that the chips use a lot of resources to create, it's that they're disposable and lose their value in a few years. I wouldn't be bothered so much if this level of resources was spent on a durable good, but within 5-10 years (being optimistic) most of these chips will be trashed. A house requires a lot more resources to build, but can last decades (or hundreds of years) if well-constructed.
How many people (and companies) have sticks of RAM that they can't use, either because all of their motherboard's slots are full, or because it can't be used in the latest and greatest computers?
"Aren't there other means for chip production? "
I'm sure there are -- if you want to pay significantly more.
Well-known flaw of the (unadorned) capitalist system. The manufacturing cost of a product does not include the costs incurred by its manufacture which are borne collectively. Example: if there was no fuel tax (and there is no significant fuel tax in the US), the cost of petrol and cars would not include the environmental cost of pollution, because it wouldn't be paid for by oil companies and car makers, but by everyone.
It's not a case of "brushing it under the carpet", more a case that the system isn't in place to make manufacturers accountable for the collective costs caused by their products. Such a system would be an extra tax on polluting products or tax incentives for less polluting ones. This is all old hat but governments tend to be too scared of being accused of being "anti-business" (or "anti-american" ;-) ) to actually implement such measures.
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.
Actually, reusing this water is one of the priorities of a few notable chip manufacturers right now. Not only are we learning how to reduse the amount of water used, but we're cleaning as much of it as we can afterward.
If you ask me, I think the biggest news in this article is that people aren't aware of what goes into making products that they take for granted. It's not like it takes alot of effort to realize that alot of energy and chemicals are required to make microchips. It's just that only a small minority of us actually pay attention.
It's probably mixed with chemicals and sprayed on at some point and then dribbles through catchbasins.
Actually the majority of it is probably used for cooling.
>This is all old hat but governments tend to be too scared of being accused of being "anti-business" (or "anti-american" ;-) ) to actually implement such measures.
;-)
Actually, IMHO, governments are too scared of being accused of non-impartiality in these matters.
So, lets see, you tax environmental pollution because people don't like it. How about noise pollution? I know people who had to live next to a factory after the city re-zoned the land. How about smell pollution? Again, I know people who had to live next to a pig farm after the farmer's request to turn his dead hay farm (or whatever it was) into a pig farm.
And what about class pollution? There are some who aren't interested in living near kids (think retirement communities). Should we tax the young whenever they work in a high-tech business near a retirement home?
Heck, what about luddite pollution? There are those who find luddites despiseable, and would never want to live in a luddite community. Yet, especially in California, they keep sprouting up. Should these luddites not be forced to pay a tax as well?
On a more serious note, do we force truckers to pay a tax for the roads their trucks destroy? Do companies and cities that use salt to keep their roads from being snowed over pay a tax to support people with their rust-ridden vehicles?
There's so many taxes you need to implement to do this impartially, you may as well become socialist if that's the intent. The clear way to keep a country Environmentally friendly (or Sound, smell, whatever friendly) is to let people have the freedom to avoid spending money at companies that don't support certain basic values that the people do. That is, if you want to remain capitalist. Not that socialism is a particularly bad thing (there's much worse), it's just that I don't vote for them.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
This is a good point - I meant recycling not only in the sense of actually extracting the materials etc, but also recycling the complete PC by donating it to a school, relative etc. This is especially the case of you tend to go from very slightly outdated box to cutting edge lovelyness like me ;).
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
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.
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!!!!
The assumption that a tax on something is a good way to "Pay for the cost" of cleaning up byproducts is highly suspect.
1) Taxes are paid by the consumers and manufacturers in proportion to the elasticity of consumer demand, so in this case pretty much "collectively".
2) Taxes are rarely used to do what they are supposedly for: ie. cleaning up things. These taxes would undoubtedly be used for prisons, drug wars, social security, and medicaid leaving us to clean things up anyway out of remaining pocket change.
3) The reduction in demand for some consumer electronics due to price disincentives might be quite high, but there are lifetime issues that are fundamental to the technology industry. eg. A 1980's laserdisc player is just not very useful today. Scanners from 4 years ago provide far less quality than those purchased this year. etc.
4) My biggest concern is that the investment of labor, capital, and resources in electronics may have led to an economy where fundamental necessities or high priority items are relatively more expensive in terms of hours worked than in the past (such as housing, food, clothing, certain machines), but we are able to suck it up because we can get so much "more" with our marginal remaining money, which is used for entertainment and enjoyment via cheap consumer electronics.
Is the real cost of the electronics boom that we can't afford to live comfortably, work less, or commute less, because we have overinvested in electronics production and entertainment?
I certainly have a share of electronic gadgets, but I'm willing to bet that I'm below the 30th percentile for slashdot readers, and below 50th percentile for consumers in general (note I have only ever had one second hand TV shared between 4 people for example).
Can we afford to keep investing in electronics production at ever faster rates at the expense of other forms of production, or will we wake up one day with even larger debts, and even larger rent, utilities, and food bills, and wonder why it is that we can't live the quality of life that people in the 60's had? Note that this is a consequence of production meeting the market desires. It's the market desires that seem out of whack to me.
Of course lots of this have to do with population density increases, especially housing and food costs.
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
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.
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.
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 read about how Texas Instruments used to wash all their circuit boards in CFCs when there was awareness of the environmental impact they decided to try water. It turned out to be cheaper. But you're right, that's why we should shift some of our taxing from income and payroll taxes to resource depletion taxes. This would make labor cheaper and while by slowing resource exploitation. The taxes would have to be introduced slowly to not kill industries by the shock, but instead allow them to adapt. Suspending patents on environmentally effective techniques, like washing things in water, might be needed to allow better techniques to spread quickly, though a manditory licensing scheme may work (like for songs on radio).
If the chip costs $59, it might just cost us $100-$200 more in the future in cleanup costs. But I'd rather not pay $129 if we could keep the price down to $69 and raise my income through reduced taxes 20%. Leaving me with a little left over for another cup of coffee...
BTW The old school "just stop it" method has worked for CFC's, the holes are starting to shrink now. Though my countrymen in Iceland still have to apply sunscreen in winter, their grandchildren probably won't have to. Even so, with a better tax system TI might have saved that money sooner. Business can be ingenious in finding ways to drastically reduce the cost of their products. (Assuming they don't have a monopoly that isn't affected by price. But even those eventually fall if they aren't protected by their government. Bribery laws are a different issue...)
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
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"?
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
Similarly the water used would be less than a week's worth of showers.
That's not the point. Not at all. This is the Everyone Else is Doing it argument. And this isn't about overpopulation. The link you've created shouldn't have been created at all.
Indeed, people fuck far too often not caring about pregnancy. But that doesn't mean microchips still don't use copious amounts of water, or be recycled, or ever used again once past useful life.
Don't Sweat Missing the Point. This isn't small stuff. This is small stuff on a large scale. It's not about third world sex, eating beef, or driving a Lincoln Navigator. It's not about stop and go driving.
This is a big deal. The copious production of ram chips for foolish reasons. My internet porn never felt so good as it does with a new computer.
There's nothing wrong with caring about the environment.