I have read a lot of statistics about water use and one that doesn’t make sense to me is that it takes over 1000 gallons of water to make a computer. I do know water is used to cool hot metals, but there isn’t a huge amount of metal in a computer. Do plastics take a lot of water to produce?
Having worked in the semiconductor business for over 20 years, I can tell you we use massive amounts of (DI) water. So it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
Semiconductor manufacturing uses a lot of water:
“One manufacturing plant uses anywhere between 2 to 4 million gallons of very, very pure water—we call it ultrapure water—per day”
There are quite a few ICs in a computer, so it would not surprise me if that’s where most of the use comes from.
So what is it actually used for?
The workers in the clean rooms get really thirsty.
Rinsing. They make a lot of wafers and chips; each wafer and each layer of every chip requires polishing followed by copious rinsing to remove every trace of everything that is not wafer or chip.
Does it get recycled? Do IC manufacturers have water purification systems on site, or is the water trucked in from somewhere?
This is fascinating. I had no idea.
It get’s recirculated through a filtering pump, but depending on the process, the water that’s in that particular tank has to be dumped and replaced.
We get our water from a separate company. But it’s piped in directly from their plant to ours.
Can the water, thus used, then be used for any other useful purpose. Like flushing the toilets or watering the landscaping? Or is it too contaminated? Does it all just go down the drain? Or is it too toxicly contaminated for even that? Where does all this water go when they’re done with it?
No, it’s too contaminated. chock full of chemicals like hydrofluoric acid, nitric acid, etc… It’s an endless list of chemicals really. Speaking of which, we use a shit load of those too.
But, at least you cut back on the trichlorotrifluoroethane.
My friend wrote this article on the topic a few months ago:
Another thing to consider. It’s not thousands of gallons to make one computer, it’s thousands of gallons to make thousands of computers. Computers aren’t one-off artisan products.
That’s a pretty interesting article, I had no idea about the chain of toxic waste, never even thought about it before.
That’s just in the USA too. It’s probably much worse in China. We’ve become super reliant on tech, and even the liberal greenies are afraid to ask how it’s all made. What few answers we have really aren’t pretty.
From the Guardian article posted by Reply:
Just as physicians once used the harmful practice of bloodletting as a remedy for disease. So too is federal regulation and agencies making an existing problem worse.
The obvious thing to do would be to fire the regulators who in the course of doing their job are inflicting more harm. Next retire federal regulations and agencies that have been causing untold environmental and economic damage.
Unfortunately, the central planners and their disciples will call for more regulation. And you’re, like, racistsexisthomophobic, or something if you disagree. We let out a pint of blood and you’re not getting better, so we’re going to take out another pint! Yay us!
This may be in the running for worst analogy ever.
I worked for about ten years, including about five years in the basement of a Silicon Valley office building in the middle of the Mountain View TCE plume. I try not to think about it too much. I’d be more worried if I lived in the townhouse neighborhood that was built up around the office in the 10 years while I was working there.
So what is the per-computer usage of water when manufacturing them in large quantities?
I thought about that too and decided it’s it’s damn near impossible to quantify.