Apparently computers are not as environmentally friendly as we thought. According to Stephen Hesse,
This article claims
I have my doubts, and I don’t know enough about chip manufacture to argue about this, but I wonder if it is based on sound engineering analysis. Anyone have another view, or should we all chuck our computers in the nearest landfill so we can smell the roses and avoid an agonizing and premature death?
Damn. Must be the fumes from the chips baking in my oven. Left off an important link. Here it is:
http://www.japantimes.com/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fe20030123sh.htm
The nitrogen was a stretch since it’s everywhere anyhow. And I think the positive aspects of computers outweigh the negative - won’t computers lead to the development of safer, more efficient & advanced environmental clean-up methods, or more efficient automobiles that use less gas?
I don’t know if I really buy the alarmist attitude that the article seems to take. Computer chips do have some rather exotic materials that go into their construction. You basically grow a silicon wafer and while it’s growing you add impurities like arsenic and gallium, which aren’t some of the healthiest things to be around (there’s a short article I wrote about the basic process here: http://home.supernet.com/~sokos/e24.htm).
You can’t just have a vat of this stuff and some guy mixing it with a wooden spoon. The individual transistors and such (in the case of memory chips they are basically small capacitors) are so small and so densly packed that a single speck of dust will basically ruin most of the memory on a memory chip. This means that they have to use a very precisely controlled and highly automated manufacturing process. This is where the fossil fuel bit from the article comes into play. All they are saying is that it sucks down a lot of electricity, but the same could be said for a lot of other manufacturing processes.
The one thing that really puzzles me in their analysis is where all the water is being used.
It costs about 50 million or so to set up a semiconductor fabrication facility for a modern computer chip, so there’s a huge layout of equipment setup and initial resources. Once the chip is in production though, the resources used are fairly minimal. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to sell 741 op amps for 50 cents apiece. The big difference between 741 op amps and computer memory chips is that the old reliable 741 hasn’t changed much in years, which means that 50 million setup fee (which translates into resources used to set up the line) was paid a long time ago. Computer chips change every couple of years, which sucks down a lot more resources since you have to rip apart the assembly line and add in a bunch of new equipment. If we didn’t change chips quite so often (like for example we continued to produce pentium 4 chips for the next 20 years) then their cost would drop to about a buck or two also, which tells you that the resources that go into each chip can’t be all that much when compared to other things we buy.
The really negative impact comes from all the heavy metal elements leeching into ground water if just dumped into landfills. Computer components need to be recycled first.
The main thing is we shouldn’t just upgrade computers willy-nilly. 90% of the time we don’t need to upgrade. Hell, even a Pentium 133 is powerful enough for office use.
It occurred to me that the water total might include the H[sub]2[/sub]O consumed by employees from the drinking fountain.
Don’t laugh – there have been weirder calculations used in statistics. Whenever there is a strike, the Chamber of Commerce reports so many dollars are being lost per day. I’ve heard this stat is derived by adding up not only the lost wages, but the cost of all the Starbucks coffees and croissants that the workers would have bought had they been on the job. :dubious:
Highly doubtful. I suspect a lot of water is used in the photolithography process.
You’re off by 2 orders of magnitude. A smallish modern fab facility will run you at least $1 billion. The top of the line Intel plants are several times that. The plant Intel had in plans before the Net bubble burst was the largest civilian construction project, ever. They have cut it back so it’s only going to run $2-3 billion for the part they are building.
Chip fab can only have environmental impact due to 2 causes:
Consuming scarce resources. Not all that relavent here.
Producing harmful byproducts. This one is the problem. Too many localities don’t press chip makers to clean up their wastes.
If chip makers stopped releasing solvents, etc. into the air and water, there would be no significant environmental impact. So it’s not an issue with the tech, it’s an issue with resolve.
Chip plants use an enormous amount of water for cooling purposes. If this water is taken from the drinking supply, it sometimes just gets wasted. There was a lot of controversy when Intel opened a plant in Albuquerque–even though the economy needed the jobs, people were worried about the plant’s water usage, as water is quite a scarce resource in the desert.
My goodness, this reminds me of the Dihydrogen Monoxide scare.
Gimme a break, making dinner require more water and fossil fuels than that. You can’t make anything with less than that. The article just shows how ignorant some reporters are of numbers.
Somehow I doubt that the 32kg of water is the net water usage; it’s probably the total amount used in the processes. Water’s expensive. A plant that uses that much water will recycle almost all of it.
Damn right. I’m using one to type this right now.