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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...
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..
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.
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 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.
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