The Environmental Cost of Silicon Chips 201
Col. Panic writes "Scientific American is running a small story about the amount of material required to produce silicon chips and the potential hazards of associated toxic chemicals." This combined with coltan mining processes sure paints a dark picture of the chip industry.
Re:And what are we supposed to do? (Score:4, Insightful)
or, more likely--this is a reminder to all that are working on this sort of stuff to consider the environmental consequences of their actions.
basically, you could write the same case about the auto industry 30 years ago. then, people started becoming interested in environmental issues, and attitudes within the industry changed. While we're not at ideal yet, we're at least at where even SUV owners have embedded in their minds somewhere that such gas guzzling is not the best idea.
Benefit too great (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And what are we supposed to do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And what are we supposed to do? (Score:3, Insightful)
A large company will allways try and producs cheaply . If it becomes too expensive to produce chips using "Dirty" methods you an just bet they will find "Clean" methods to reduce their margins.
I make waste, too (Score:4, Insightful)
What they fail to mention is the benefit of the chip manufactured. Cost/Benefit - sound familiar?
This article is just reason # 87 why I cancelled my SciAm subscription earlier this year after 15 years of subscribing. They've veered from true science and now feel the need 'preach' environment, evolution, abortion, etc. in the monthly Editor's Perspectives (and various articles).
Re:and... (Score:5, Insightful)
The manufacturers need these markets. If the markets dont like the manufacturers methodds, they can force them to change.
Re:And what are we supposed to do? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And what are we supposed to do? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:New Linux Add (Score:2, Insightful)
1.6kg fossil fuel (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Alternatives (Score:2, Insightful)
No more computers.
No more cellphones.
And no more 'modern' plain phones, back to electromechanical POTS.
No more TV, VCR, DVD player.
No more stereo.
No more alarm radios.
No more electronic wristwatches.
No more car electronics.
No more microwave ovens.
No more hearing aids and pacemakers.
(BTW, did you know the very first chip ever - meaning more than one transistor on a single chip of semiconductor material - was a hearing aid amplifier made by [Dutch] Philips, a couple of years before the "official" invention of the integrated circuit in the US?)
No more work for most of us.
Cost benefit analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time I use conferencing over the internet, I am saving (typically) about 30lb of Diesel (and it would have been nearer 45lb of gas in my last car)
I'm not arguing that we should ignore the environmental costs of technology - places like the former Communist block and Texas are unpleasantly polluted as a result of doing just that - but that we should look closely at the costs and benefits. Given the potential of global warming and the eventual runout of oil, the more we use silicon to reduce the number of boring journeys we have to do, whether by mobile phone, networked computer, or whatever, the better it is going to be for us.
And for those who don't already know - substances like sulfuric acid and HF are widely used in the petrochemical industry. And what happens to all the sulfur they have to remove to get low-sulfur fuel? It surely doesn't get fired into space by a rail gun.
Oh, I absolutely agree. (Score:5, Insightful)
That explains why everyone here drives a Yugo, eats Big Top-brand cereal, and writes their posts from an eMachine.
Re:save some for the fishies!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
This has made my BS detector twitch. As soon as the pure water hits my mouth, it becomes impure because it mixes with my spit, so there's really no such thing as "drinking ultra-pure water." Water with the same concentration of saline as your body is actually much more dangerous than fresh water, and fresh water supplies all over the world have widely varying concentrations of minerals, yet people survive on them.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I invoke common sense to assert that as long as the mineral concentration of fresh water is reasonably low, the precise value is not important, and furthermore that the value of zero is not special.
taxes? (Score:3, Insightful)
i only wonder if the taxes actually will help lower the pollution to the environment.
Re:The chemicals (Score:5, Insightful)
Where on earth did you work with such shitty fab safety that you were likely to get any of those chemicals on you?
I've worked in fabs too, and wrote software to control PVD/CVD and etchers. When I started the job I went to about a week worth of fab safety classes where they scared the hell out of you from doing stupid things with chemicals. Probably my favorite line was "if you hear the gas alarm, leave the chemical storage room immediately. If you choose to linger, at least try to die within 6 feet of the door, because that's how long the hook is to drag your body out."
The chemicals being used in modern fabs are, indeed, incredibly, ungodly nasty. HF, arsenic, H2SO4, etc are the tip of the iceberg. We couldn't wear contacts in the fab because of a cleaning chemical in the floor with the trade name Pirhana. If something ever went wrong and the fans backblasted, Pirhana would melt plastic - and thus your contacts. To your eyes. So we got safety glasses. There were gasses in use that would kill you before they could be detected.
The point of all this is that safety procedures were taken very, very seriously. It didn't matter if it was deionized water or 80 molar HF - you didn't screw around with the chemicals. Having to "wash up to the elbows" wasn't necessary because there weren't going to be chemicals around that you could get on you. Not to mention that you were in a fab suit in the first place.
Damn, I'm glad I didn't work wherever you did. I value my health more than that.
Re:save some for the fishies!!! (Score:1, Insightful)
You cannot drink fab quality water because it a large concentration gradient would form and minerals from the other fluids in your body would be depleted by the migration into the ultra pure water.
Except, of course, that osmosis works exactly the other way. The solvent (water) migrates accross the membrane (skin, stomach lining, etc) in order to equalize the solute concentration on both sides. In this case, that means the ultra-pure water would be leached into your body slightly faster than tap water would be, and no harm done.
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not saying that people should be digging in animal preserves, but that is 'illegal' over there.
If you read the article, the author seems to think that self-righteous bans on material from certain countries, as well as the tech slump are causing more harm to people then the mining system.
Re:Oh, I absolutely agree. (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, that's a good point - people do consider a little more than money when making decisions. Quality of product is definitely a concern (if you can afford it).
Yet, the question then is, do people still consider everything they could? Have we perhaps learned, at some time in the 20th century, that there might be some costs we tend to overlook, that we weren't even aware of before?
But of course, it may be too costly to worry about hidden costs...
Re:Cost benefit analysis (Score:2, Insightful)
People who love a certain tech, whose lives are wrapped around that tech, will always complain when others start pointing out the downsides of said tech. Yet they should see calls for improvement as nothing more than calls for improvement; certainly if they love the tech, they should jump at the challenge to improve it!
Yeah, some people will start going around saying "down with microchips - back to the trees", but you can safely ignore them (or at least their "solution").
Re:It's an add-subtract thing! (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone said elsewhere I was missing the point, and that silicon manufacturing processes need to improve. OF COURSE. But what drives the improvement is that it is invariably CHEAPER in the end to make things using best environmental practice, unless the State gives the manufacturer a dispensation from paying the costs of the environmental damage - a statist subsidy. And it is usually cheaper anyway because of the savings on materials and consumables. As an example, one project I looked at (to prevent the discharge of cesium by monitoring the composition of a bath and reprocessing it) had a payback of about a week based on the cesium savings alone: the management simply didn't know what was going on in their own plant and had accepted the costs blindly. In another project, a closed loop treatment plant turned out to be cheaper than open-loop because the cost of the electronics was more than offset by the smaller outlet holding tank that was required. I could go on and on...but then, I got into the computing business because you can, actually, do much more interesting things with silicon than make Word or Quake run faster.
If only there were a 'TRUE' moderation (Score:3, Insightful)
judging by some of the posts here there are a lot of people who think it doesn't really matter. As long as their CPU isn't burning a hole through their desk, who cares.
And when the computer's thrown away and the components start to leak out... ah well, it isn't my computer anymore. I threw it away. I have this new shiny computer with twice the RAM and 120GB RAID-5 blah blah blah blah blah...
My point isn't that we techies should stop using computers, but that we should at least be a little concerned about what it's costing us in the long run.
Sweaty
And the stupid part is... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm getting really, really, really tired of the extreme minority of PC users, such as people who annually put down $400 for a new video card, driving the entire PC upgrade cycle.
environmental cost of making 10^6 vacuum tube (Score:1, Insightful)
I suppose the environmental cost of making 20 million vacuum tube will be LOWER?
The article doesn't discuss how the industry has reduced the cost of chemical per transistor down by a factor of over 10^8 or so (from wet etch to dry etch, increase integration). The semiconductor industry is actually getting GREENER.
Re:Yeah, but whatcha gonna do? (Score:2, Insightful)
You got that totally ass-backwards:
An industrial process which consumes fewer resources is cleaner because it consumes fewer resources. An industrial process which consumes fewer resources is less expensive because it consumes fewer resources.
More efficient methods of production are more profitable because they consume fewer resources to produce the same amount. So long as resources cost money, there will be financial insentive to conserve resources. (One corallary is that government giveaways promote wasefulness.)
If I adopt a new manufacturing process which yields two widgets from every one pound of raw widgiteum, whereas previoulsy I only produced one widget for each pound of widgiteam, then I lower my costs of producing a widget. The cost which I charge for widgets is unaffected. Therefore, my profit, the difference between what I spend in producing a widget and what I earn from its sale, increases if I conserve resources.
This can apply to public goods such as the air and the oceans just as it can to exchangable goods such as steel and oil. For example, with air, all that is neccessary is to charge air polluters in proportion to how much pollution they release into the air. Doing that provides financial insentive to pollute less, in the same way that the cost of a good provides financial insentive to consume less of it. The profit motive can work to lower pollution. If it costs money to pollute, then the profifit motive works for the environment, not against it. For those who understand such terms, all that is necessary is that the government internalize exterternalities.
(which we're not going to get under undisputed reign of George II)
If you look at who lines up on the side of tradable pollution credits, a way of charging polluters according two how much they pollute, it is conservatives. If you look at who is against that, it is liberals.
Re:I make waste, too (Score:3, Insightful)
But I really don't like the way the magazine is going. It has long had a bit of a political skew (it frequently ran articles on nuclear deterrence, for example, which is hardly a scientific policy).
But it is really sad what is happening now. The percentage of science articles to environmentalist articles is declining. Sure, there are scientific issues with the environment, but it is a small part of overall science. Where are the major physics articles? Why are most biology articles now about species diversity or global warming impact on the biota, or whatever?
The answer is simple: the magazine has become a shill for a particular viewpoint.
If one wants to see how biased it has gotten, and how the editors consider pushing their viewpoint more important than informing the public on science, just look at how they handled the debate over "The Skeptical Environmentalist." They spent 14 pages debunking it, with articles that were more venom and ad-hominem than scientific. They forced the author to take down his point-by-point refutation from his website (copyright violation, they said, even though it was obviously fair use).
Another example is how they treated Forrest Mims on the Amateur Scientist issue. Forrest Mims is an anti-evolutionist, which is unfortunate. But he is also very good at the sort of thing that the Amateur Scientist used to be known for: doing practical science experiments and building interesting scientific gadgets. They hired him for the job, then found out he was anti-evolutionist, and promptly dropped him.
I see no place for anti-evolutionist views in Scientific American, but he had promised not to put those views into his work. It appears that he was sacked just because they couldn't stand to have a person whose *private views* disagreed with them.
The result of the bias and changed focus at SciAm shows. The magazine is shrinking. Obviously they are having financial troubles. I am afraid that this 150 year old American classic is doomed to extinction. Its great tradition is being destroyed by those who want to inject their political views into every aspect of life.