Environmental Impact of the Ubiquitous Microchip

TimWeigel writes "The Japan Times is reporting the results of a study by the United Nations University on the environmental impact of michrochip production. We've already seen the impact of disposal practices, but is the manufacturing more environmentally friendly? Turns out it ain't necessarily so - according to the study, producing and using a 32MB DRAM chip weighing 2 grams requires 32 kg of water, 1.6 kg of fossil fuels, 700 g of elemental gases, and 72 g of other chemicals, many of which are hazardous. I'm no environmentalist, but this looks like it might add up to more bad news when you consider that these things are cranked out by the millions each year." Update: 01/26 16:31 GMT by J : Yep, it's a dupe.

Comments

Alternative

[benevold]

What's the alternative? I seriously doubt microchip production will be shutdown because it is environmentally unsafe.

ah harmfull chemicals

[linuxislandsucks]

guess what else porduces and uses harfull chemicals in its production?

Chemicals are: Sulfar, Nitrogen, Nitrate, Slicon, Oxygen, and etc..

Whats your guess?

Try the Hman body and its cells..

Just becasue something is manufactured with harmful chemicals doesn't in of itself mean tis harmfull to the environment at alarger amount or lower amount than the biological creatures who already use this earth...

You guys need to wake up and anlyze soemthing once in awhile :)

Not by the millions

[Penguinoflight]

32mb dram chips are not produced at all any more. For this research to be of any use at all it needs to be more current. Why? because, it doesn't take 16x as much resources to make a 256mb dram chip as it does to make a 32mb chip.

What to do about it? Dont buy ram in small quantities. Buy the biggest chip on the market (currently 1gb for most modern platforms). This will also help costs for these new chips

That said, I wouldn't think about going that extreme, (you can buy 3-4 512mb chips for the price of 1 1gb chip) but I wouldn't buy 64mb either.

Also, how MUCH "environmental damage" was that?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

producing and using a 32MB DRAM chip weighing 2 grams

And storing 32 MB of data. In the '60s (decades into the computer revolution) 32 K by 36 bits cost around a million bux (in '60s currnecy, of which $24 would buy a troy ounce of gold) and worth every penny. It occupied one standard IBM 70x cabinet - roughly 3' x 6' by 8' or maybe more, just barely fitting into a standard elevator car, CHOCK FULL of circuit boards soldered with lead and wired with copper ...

requires 32 kg of water,

And what happens to that water? Is it disintegrated into its compoent subatomic particles and beamed into outer space, never to be heard from again? Is it sealed into a vault with the radioactive waste and buried for geologic time? Or is it cleaned up back to super-purity and reused to make ANOTHER chip, and ANOTHER ad-infinitim, until it finally evaporates and comes back as rain?

1.6 kg of fossil fuels,

3 1/2 pints of fuel oil - enough to make about 1 3/4 pints of gasoline. Call it five chips to the galon. You probably burned more gas per chip just to GO PICK 'EM UP the last time you upgraded your RAM.

Of course that's assuming all the energy came from fossil fuels - which are still used because they're so abundant that they're cheaper than most alternatives. But the last time I looked the windmills at Altamont Pass were still spinning, and the hydroelectric dams were still generating, etc.

700 g of elemental gases,

Yeah - liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen. And any that doesn't end up in the chip itself (i.e. the oxide layers), like, say, the liquid nitrogen used to supercool gas traps or purge ambient air and its contaminants, eventually goes back to the air from which it was extracted.

and 72 g of other chemicals,

2 1/2 ounces.

many of which are hazardous.

And some of 'em (such as the doping gasses, used in microscopic amounts) are SO hazardous - both to humans and to the next step of the process - that any excess is destroyed at the end of the step where it is used. Others (like the cleaning solvents and etchants) can also be supercleaned and reused, destroyed, or disposed of in other safe ways. That's where a lot of that energy goes. Want to cut its use?

Of course if some cheapscate wants to dump used solvent, that's what the threat of the EPA is for: to make it more expensive to dump it than to deal with it properly. Meanwhile, the solvents are the same class of stuff that your auto mechanic sprays on your (toxic!) brake pads every time you get a brake job. Any bets on whether the chips in a 1/4G SIMM, built by a hypothetical scumbag manufacturer who dumps ALL his used solvent, would pollute the environment more than your last brake job?

And how much modern RAM would it take to match the pollution and resource consumption of building, or operating, that '60s-era 32Kx36 RAM box?