Slashdot Mirror
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)."
dont eat any old simms or dimms then kids...
MilkMiruku
No wait, then it'll sit in a landfill.... I know, I'll BURN it!
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."
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...
The publication itself:
Here.
...that the 32kg of water go away, and are never to be seen again? Oh no!!! We could run out of water!!!
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.
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?
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?
--------
Free your mind.
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..
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.
"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..."
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.
Don't forget about the hundreds of Pizzas consumed during R&D...
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.
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.
Attention:
If you use RAM, then you are supporting Terrorists.
That will be all.
Ariana Huffington
P.S. Don't drive your SUV's with Osama bin Ladin in the passenger seat.
P.P.S. Drugs are BAD!
700 grams of nitrogen? But....the atmosphere is, like, 78% nitrogen or something. What happens if we use it all up? We'll have only 22% of the atmosphere left, and that's mostly oxygen, which is a lethally corrosive and highly flammable gas. We'll all die!
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?
>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
You must work for NASA. 32kg of water at STP = 32 liters = a tad less than 8 gallons, not 1.7 gallons.
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.
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/
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!!!!
In other news, each beer sold generates on average one toilet flush. In areas with a lot of old large-sized toilets, that can be almost 32kg of water per beer.
I feel bad, because I've consumed many more beers than memory chips in my life.
My god, at this rate RAM production will consume all of Earth's resources! They must be stopped before Earth is transformed into a floating mass of DRAM!
...programmers consumed 2700 hamburgers, 1503 pizzas (276 vegetarian, 1227 containing meat or meat by-products), 16204 cans of soda (assorted), 790 bags of microwave popcorn and 1 office chair. Three programmers were temporarily blinded while downloading movies & images for research. No animals were harmed...Oh, hang on, I forgot about the ones in the burgers & pizza.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
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.
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.
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.
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.
For every single retail copy of Windows XP you need:
1.45 kg monopoly
3.5 inches FUD whitepaper
2.5 ml fresh blood from a GNU developer
133 million miles Gates evangelizing tour
7 outrageous "OSS = anarchists"-type lies
4,51 GW Ballmer "Developers, developers!" scream
5 spelling errors from Cmdr Taco
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)
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.
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.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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."
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
Make beer, not DRAM.
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"?
That's right, folks. Need some memory for your machine? Got a few people around you don't like? Don't want their water? Well, come on by my shop! I'll take those spare water rings off your hands, and with the addition of just a few chemicals, produce for you lots and lots of desktop-runnin', gcc-compilin' RAM! No more annoying neighbors, roomies or anything!
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
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
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.
I'm selling my computer and buying a hamburger.
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
.. for buying 1GB DDR SDRAM sticks.. since buying in high capacity means the environment suffers less :D
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