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Science Technology

The Costs of Making a DRAM Chip 474

Posted by michael from the paying-the-price dept.
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)."
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The Costs of Making a DRAM Chip More

The Costs of Making a DRAM Chip

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  • eep.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by miruku ( 642921 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @01:58PM (#5144303) Homepage
    dont eat any old simms or dimms then kids...

  • Take action! (Score:4, Funny)

    by LiftOp ( 637065 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:00PM (#5144315) Homepage
    I'm gonna throw my box away, pronto!

    No wait, then it'll sit in a landfill.... I know, I'll BURN it!

  • Recycling (Score:4, Insightful)

    by James_Duncan8181 ( 588316 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:01PM (#5144322) Homepage
    Ever needed a better reason to avoid throwing away old hardware? Just recycle it and improve both social justice and the enviromental impact.

    • Re:Recycling (Score:5, Informative)

      by eglamkowski ( 631706 ) <eglamkowski AT angelfire DOT com> on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:31PM (#5144633) Homepage Journal
      The problem is... At one point I was trying to recycle a bunch of old hardware and did some research. I recall reading at one point (I forget exactly where, unfortunately) that many of the companies that recycle old hardware don't.

      What they do do is put it on a slow boat to China where it is dumped into the rivers. Rivers that locals rely upon for drinking water. And then, to supplement their income, some of the chinese people will take the hardware and pick out the copper and other metals to sell. But they don't wear any appropriate protective gear, not even gloves.

      So, basically, "recycling" is just a long process by which we make it someone else's environmental problem :-/

      Not all recycling companies do this, but many do. If you want to go this route, be sure you research the companies thoroughly. I ended up not recycling (yet), but found some buyers who had a use for the old hardware.

      • Re:Recycling (Score:3, Interesting)

        by James_Duncan8181 ( 588316 )
        This is a good point - I meant recycling not only in the sense of actually extracting the materials etc, but also recycling the complete PC by donating it to a school, relative etc. This is especially the case of you tend to go from very slightly outdated box to cutting edge lovelyness like me ;).

        • Re:Recycling (Score:3, Insightful)

          by battjt ( 9342 )
          Is that any better? What can a school or church do with a P133? (That's what I'm throwing out right now.) What are they going to do with it when they are done. We need a strategic plan, not a plan that makes us feel good today.

          Joe

    • Re:Recycling (Score:4, Informative)

      by simi-lost ( 639853 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:34PM (#5144661)
      Maybe you should take a look at this site then. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1839997.stm
      Computers sent to recyclers in America, and other countries for that matter are ending back in Asia. yes, some is recycled and that's good, but a lot of toxins are leached out... We should recycle ours here where we have regulations to control this, but then again, if we did recycle while being responsible, then it would cost more than it's worth..

    • Re:Recycling (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Forgotten ( 225254 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @04:51PM (#5145758)
      Actually, this is a reason to avoid buying new hardware.

      Remember kids, "Recycle" is a distant third among the three Rs. They say "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" in that order for a reason.

  • 12 inch fabs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:02PM (#5144337)
    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 downside of 12 inch fabrication is that a 32 meg DIMM will have to be sixteen feet across, and will weigh seven tons. On the other hand, traces can be laid by monkeys with paint rollers. Leave me my 0.18 micron processes, thank you.

      Yes, that was a joke.

  • Full text: The 1.7 kilogram microchip (Score:5, Informative)

    by dietlein ( 191439 ) <(dietlein) (at) (gmail.com)> on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:03PM (#5144348)
    The publication itself:
    Here [acs.org].

  • Does that mean..... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:03PM (#5144349)
    ...that the 32kg of water go away, and are never to be seen again? Oh no!!! We could run out of water!!!

  • "Used to make..." (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NitroWolf ( 72977 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:05PM (#5144369)
    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.

    • Amen -

      If those numbers where comsumed... Then we would not be seeing chips are the current cost.

      We lose a little in every transaction, but we make it up in volume!

    • Like a marginal cost (Score:2, Interesting)

      by PD ( 9577 )
      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.

    • Re:"Used to make..." (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Illserve ( 56215 )
      I think it's fairly obvious what they mean. Obviously 32 kg of water do not fit into a chip (simple test, does a chip weigh 32 kg?) and therefore are not "consumed" in the way that you are thinking.

      However, I suspect that what the article means is that 32 kg of water are combined with said noxious/toxic chemicals to create each chip. Such water would be useless unless purified by some expensive process and should be considered consumed for all practical intents and purposes.

      And no, I doubt very much that the water is reused for different chips. It's probably mixed with chemicals and sprayed on at some point and then dribbles through catchbasins. It would be fairly foolish of them to reuse said water for such a delicate piece of hardware, who knows what particles of impurity it might pick up.

      • Re:"Used to make..." (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ivan256 ( 17499 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:32PM (#5144637)
        Actually, reusing this water is one of the priorities of a few notable chip manufacturers right now [theinquirer.net]. Not only are we learning how to reduse the amount of water used, but we're cleaning as much of it as we can afterward.

        If you ask me, I think the biggest news in this article is that people aren't aware of what goes into making products that they take for granted. It's not like it takes alot of effort to realize that alot of energy and chemicals are required to make microchips. It's just that only a small minority of us actually pay attention.

        It's probably mixed with chemicals and sprayed on at some point and then dribbles through catchbasins.

        Actually the majority of it is probably used for cooling.

    • Re:"Used to make..." (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ivan256 ( 17499 )
      Similarly misleading, the inclusion of the useless "32MB" number. Are they trying to make you think that it's worse for bigger chips? There must be a reason they put that 32MB number in there, because chips with the same physical size but a higher storage density require the same materials or less if the process becomes smaller. Wouldn't it have been correct for them to specify how much waste there was per square inch of chip instead?

      While they're pointing out how evil we all are for buying memory, why don't they repeat the study for a square inch of solar panel, or better yet, give us some ideas on how to fix the probelm instead of just pushing this crap out there.
      • There must be a reason they put that 32MB number in there, because chips with the same physical size but a higher storage density require the same materials or less if the process becomes smaller.



        bzzt, wrong. Chips with higher densities are more fragile, and therefore will give lower yields. I would expect that -per working chip- higher density components use more raw materials.

      • Similarly misleading, the inclusion of the useless "32MB" number.

        I think they are trying to put the research into a context the people might understand. They say that one 32MB chip equates to X amount of resources used. Now Average Joe looks inside of his computer and sees Y chips implying that it took X * Y resources to make his computer. This is more for dramatic value than anything else.

    • Re:"Used to make..." (Score:5, Informative)

      by the_pooh_experience ( 596177 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:34PM (#5144666)

      certainly some of tme can be reused (H20 as you and others correctly stated for example). But here are typical applications of different chemicals:

      • H20: the vast majority of this is used in cleaning baths. It is always deionized water and ususally is operated in a "flow-through" manner such that there is a big tank where they put wafers and water flows into and out of this tank. 32 Kg of water likely accounts for the fact that these baths are probably kept on (because water is cheap) while wafers are not in there. The other use for this is to create steam, which when exposed to Silicon, creates silicon-dioxide (SiO2) which is typically used as an insulator.
      • N2: Okay, this is probably not reused primarily because of the manner it is used. Typically the N2 is used like a hose to dry off wafers (like a gun). This N2 typically is simply added to the 80-some percent of N2 in the ambient air. N2 is used in lesser quantities for replacing bad gasses in vacuum chambers (known as "flushing"), but the fact that this "pure" N2 is mixed with other "bad" gasses, it is probably difficult to use without large amounts of purification. Finally, production facilities probably use this in their storage area (wafer storage) as to avoid unwanted oxides growing on the surface (see below).
      • As: this is really bad (as most of you kiddies know) and is used in doping the Si to make it more conductive, etc (along with other chemicals). This is one of the gasses that N2 is used to flush out of the vacuum system.
      • HF: This is (afaik) the primary technique (as outlined in the RCA cleaning process [mit.edu] to remove native oxides on the surface of the Si. As stated above, when Si comes in contact with water vapor (rich in oxygen), it forms SiO2. Well when Si comes in contact with O2 in ambient air (at a lower concentration), it will also create thinner films of SiO2, and this needs to be removed with something, which HF works very well for. This is typically neutralized and disposed of.

      I am inclined to believe that most of the chemicals are not reused, at least in the traditional sense. H2O is cleaned and returned to the ocean, and N2 is cleaned (through air-handling systems) and returned to the atmosphere, but many of these chemicals probably are neutralized (read "made somewhat safe") and disposed of in your local land-fill, or into your local air.

  • 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? :)

  • All those fossil fuels! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gortbusters.org ( 637314 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:05PM (#5144374) Homepage Journal
    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 [gortbusters.org] which states how SUV's love of gasoline is help putting the US into war.

    Aren't there other means for chip production?

    • "This is one example of how our society is breeding the destruction of mother earth."

      The problem IMHO isn't that the chips use a lot of resources to create, it's that they're disposable and lose their value in a few years. I wouldn't be bothered so much if this level of resources was spent on a durable good, but within 5-10 years (being optimistic) most of these chips will be trashed. A house requires a lot more resources to build, but can last decades (or hundreds of years) if well-constructed.

      How many people (and companies) have sticks of RAM that they can't use, either because all of their motherboard's slots are full, or because it can't be used in the latest and greatest computers?

      "Aren't there other means for chip production? "

      I'm sure there are -- if you want to pay significantly more.

      • Re:All those fossil fuels! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @03:45PM (#5145190)
        > The problem IMHO isn't that the chips use a lot of resources to create, it's that they're disposable and lose their value in a few years. I wouldn't be bothered so much if this level of resources was spent on a durable good, but within 5-10 years (being optimistic) most of these chips will be trashed.

        Yeah, but what's the cost of not making the chips?

        Suppose we threw out all the chips - went back to pencil and paper? How many kilowatt-hours would we consume in heating and lighting the rooms full of green-hatted accountants scratching figures onto paper with pens?

        OK, perhaps that's a little too far. (But lots of enviros really hate it when we take their premises - that chipmaking is Evil - to their logical conclustions.)

        Suppose we just threw out the 32M chips and 8-inch wafers and 0.13u processes. No new fabs after 1995. We'll stick with 4M chips on 4-inch wafers and 0.35u instead. That would give us a quarter of the memory (and our CPUs would top out at about 300 MHz), and (ta-dah!) use pretty much the same amount of resources as we're using today.

        Throwing away that fab that builds 80486 chips and 16M sticks of FPM RAM (and throwing away the products it produced), and replacing it with a fab capable of cranking out 2.4G P4s and 512M sticks of DDR is a good thing, because you can do more with the P4 than you could have dreamt of doing with the 486s.

        For running Office, maybe a '486 would be OK. Forget about Doom III, though. Or rendering Lord of the Rings.

        And if those aren't "green enough" things to justify building faster/better computers (because, after all, if it's not Greener Than Thou, you Just Shouldn't Do It, Ever!), I'll remind you that you can also forget about the climate simulations and ozone hole analysis, and image processing for weather prediction and crop analysis. Scrap the weapons technology that turns "dumb" 500-pounders into GPS-guided missiles so that one bomb can do the job of 100 - back to carpet-bombing a whole city to powder with a fleet B-52s to hit just one bunker. No more passenger airplanes with wing and engine designs for low fuel consumption and low noise. No more fuel-efficient combustion chambers that help you get more power out of your 4-cylinder than your uncle got from his '68 Malibu. Gotta save the environment, y'know!

    • Let's see what all is wrong with this.
      • While the Earth may become uninhabital for humans, it will still be here.
      • Which society are you referring to? The US? Last I checked, many other countries in the world were using microchips.
      • You mention nothing of overpopulation, such as in India or China, or unsustainable agricultral practices in places like Africa and South America.
      • While SUVs may love gasoline, I am sure you and many others love plastic and electricity, both made with fossil fuel and both contribute to all those bad environmental effects.

      Yes, there is environmental damage being done. But, one can not point at on thing or even one group of things as say "The fault lies there."

      From the clear cutting of trees for construction and firewood, and the resulting, drought, famine and polution from fires in third world countries to lax pollution controls, corruption, and overpopulation in second world countries, to over-consumption in first world contries, we are all at fault and there is no easy solution. Banning SUVs and developing a better chip making technology may be steps in the right direction, they are only two steps on a very long road.

      And, all this to make the environment save for humans. Remember, pollution may kill off humans and other species, but the Earth will outlast us. Other species will survive and arise to take the places emptied by pollution. Mother Earth will live on even if some species do not, humans included.

      • I am referring to any society/culture that does not live in harmony with nature. Not to get all native-american on ya or other aboriginal society, but there is a clear disction to be made: humans lived for thousands of years without destroying the earth. We (meaning everyone from the past 2000 years, or even more recently) are screwing that up.

        Take a look at ishmael.org [ishmael.org], Daniel Quinn breaks it down into Takers and Leavers. aka, Gorts [gortbusters.org], and Gortbusters.

        In regards to the other species, we should note that given the natural course of history the planet's natural animals are huge dinosaurs. They lasted for millions of years, the earth was a jungle planet for longer then we can imagine.
        • humans lived for thousands of years without destroying the earth.


          Bullshit, pure and simple, as anyone even mildly aquianted with the mass extinctions and deforestation of Australia, or the desertification of the Middle East can tell you.
    • I'm fairly certain that there is no significant quantity of fossil fuel used in the production of chips. What is used is electricity. However, it doesn't grab headlines to say that each chip consumes 2kwh in production. Instead, they look at how much fossil fuel is burned to produce that amount of electricity. But, the truth is that when you look at plants like Micron's in Boise, ID, the electricity is from hydro-electric plants, and in Korea, it's probably from nice clean nuclear plants.
      • Well, it's not just the small amount in making one chip, it's in making thousands [or millions?]. And it's not just the fossil fuels, it's all the chemicals and other ingredients.

        It's not the fact that this sort of thing is just in chips, but it's in almost every part of society.
    • Oh brother. How on earth is using 32 KG of water to make a chip "breeding the destruction of mother earth"? Do you actually think there is a shortage of water on this planet? So what if it uses 1.6 KG of fossil fuels- despite what the bleeding heart left says, there is no iminent shortage of fossil fuels, and there is no solid evidence of a human-induced "global warming" problem. The article doesnt even imply that these resources are consumed during the production of the chips- most of them are very reusable.

      And I have news for you- SUV's are not pushing us towards war. Iraq's tyrannical dictator that is intent on terrorism and genocide is.

  • all products (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SubtleNuance ( 184325 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:07PM (#5144391) Journal
    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..

    • 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.

      Perhaps we should also include a run down of the factories that it was made in, so as to avoid nasty things like child labor. Also, we should include similar information for the materials that went into the product. We should make sure that all information is traced back to the origin of the substance. We wouldn't want to find out that the substance that went into the substance that is used in making CDs was mined by children who get emphysema from the mines.

      Now, I hope Best Buy, CompUSA, et al have the shelf space to add a 1000 page tome next to each and every product. I also hope that consumers can get a little more time off work so they can read all of this information about every product they buy. I hope that extra time off work doesn't mean that companies have to employ children in Malaysia to type up and print this new information.
    • What are you gonna do with 'em?

      As it isn't even required to label genetically modified foods in North America, just how do you think that idea would be received? How big would the 'nutrition information' label be on a car? Maybe they should be forced to list them really quickly at the end of TV ads (like they do with the list of side-effects of drugs)

    • You're assuming that this analysis is accurate. Does it incorporate materials used in making the factory, what about running the plant or even the fuel used to generate power that eventually reaches plant or the vehicles the employees drive to work? Are any of the materials reused? How do they dispose of them, can they be recycled, are they being recycled? What are the actual damages caused by those materials?

      I think putting too much faith in this analysis is very dangerous as you're taking something which would seem easy to quantify but in reality may turn out to be an entirely inaccurate measurement. While it may be interesting to look at I wouldn't put enough trust in these numbers to influence my buying decisions.

    • During the making of this software... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Chocolate Teapot ( 639869 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @03:00PM (#5144868) Homepage Journal
      ...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.

    • Would you really? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by tahini ( 151131 )
      Though it's a far cry from labelling, Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things [northwestwatch.org] 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.

    • Re:all products (Score:3, Interesting)

      by rrkap ( 634128 )

      We already have a mechanism to do this its called price. At least for products where multiple manufacturers make the same product, or where several similar substitutes exist, the price is very close to the total of the inputs required to make a product.

      This mechanism can break down in several circumstances. The most important is that there isn't a good pricing mechanism for a shared resource (such as air, water, grazing land or highway capacity). Working to ensure that common resources are paid for would do more to help the environment than requiring silly lablels (which in themselves carry a significant cost).

    • by Paul Hawken. Here's a review [scottlondon.com] of the book. To quote from it:
      In this eloquent and visionary book, Hawken describes a third way, a path that is inherently sustainable and restorative but which uses many of the historically effective organizational and market techniques of free enterprise.
      I've seen lots of other stuff out there about how many resources go into what we think are "clean" devices. Computers don't SEEM like they're polluting a whole lot, but all that extra power they use (see many other articles, /. and elsewhere) adds to overburdened power grids: it's usually coal plants that have to be turned on to pick up the slack, at least in North America. Nasty sh!t.

      Other interesting sources about this are: Paul Kennedy's work, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, which is critiqued here [shareintl.org], 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.
  • They should move their operations to the USA where they will be elligible for huge tax breaks.
    • They should move their operations to the USA where they will be elligible for huge tax breaks.

      Alot of people don't know about these tax breaks: I was going broke paying taxes on my small consultimg firm, when we found about one of the better tax-breaks avaialbe:

      All we had to do was kill a new-born baby harp seal for every hour of billable time, and presto! No taxes for us!

      We get special credit for killing only the cute seals, the deformed ones have less of a tax-break.

      It's good for the environemnt too, because we only want cute seals, we cut the six-pack rings each and every time. We woulden't want one to cause a deformation in one of the seals - there'd go money right down the drain!

      It's a win for us: no taxes
      It's a win for the governemtn: keep the seal hords ay bay
      It's a win for the seals: the get to see fun-time sparkles in the back of their eyes when we bludgon them.

  • He can lead the campaign against any and all computers. We must stop these beasts before they pollute the whole world.
  • 32 kg of water per chip? I would think the oceans around Taiwan and Korea would be sucked dry if that were the case.

    sPh

    • 32 kg of water per chip?

      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.

  • 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....

  • What's news? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by davidstrauss ( 544062 ) <david@@@davidstrauss...net> on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:10PM (#5144428)
    Going from high-entropy materials to low-entropy materials has always been energy consuming (2nd Law of Thermodynamics). Furthermore, the mass of the products over the mass of the materials and the quantity of toxic chemicals used are hardly measures of environmental impact.

    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...

  • Clean Machines (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chunkwhite86 ( 593696 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:13PM (#5144460)
    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.

    • Organic produce (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ttfkam ( 37064 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:40PM (#5144711) Homepage Journal
      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 just want to dump a different perspective here:

        Organic fruits cost what, (out of my ass guess) 99 cents per pound? Versus, say, 50 cents per pound of not-so-organicly grown fruits.

        Those numbers aren't based on anything, but they're in the range of produce, with the same margin quoted be the author of the top level thread (dirty ram for $59, and clean ram for $129).

        Now look at these numbers: If it costs me 50 cents more (even if it is twice as much), I'll hardly notice over the course of this one transaction. If I track it over several months, I may notice a significant difference, but most people don't track things that granularly.

        My point is this: a 50% markup on clean fruits and stuff is feasible, because it's 50% of a MUCH smaller number. People don't notice that half a dollar as much, because it is not an all-at-once purchase (that is, you may notice if you were to buy $50 worth, but who does that?).

        I may go with organic if its 3 dollars versus 4 dollars. But I won't buy clean computer hardware at that same margin: a $300 video card is $400 for no performance bonus? No way.

        The information and "clean" versions would be nice, but I think, this considered, it won't work.
      • 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.

        That's a different issue. People like organic foods for personal health reasons (no hormones, etc. in the finished product). A "cleanly manufactured" computer isn't going to affect me any differently than a standard one.

        As far as buying the green product for moral reasons, it's all about how much more expensive it is. If it costs twice as much, you might get 2% of consumers to buy it. If it only costs 10% more, however, you could probably get a majority of consumers interested.

    • Re:Clean Machines (Score:3, Interesting)

      by zenyu ( 248067 )
      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 read about how Texas Instruments used to wash all their circuit boards in CFCs when there was awareness of the environmental impact they decided to try water. It turned out to be cheaper. But you're right, that's why we should shift some of our taxing from income and payroll taxes to resource depletion taxes. This would make labor cheaper and while by slowing resource exploitation. The taxes would have to be introduced slowly to not kill industries by the shock, but instead allow them to adapt. Suspending patents on environmentally effective techniques, like washing things in water, might be needed to allow better techniques to spread quickly, though a manditory licensing scheme may work (like for songs on radio).

      If the chip costs $59, it might just cost us $100-$200 more in the future in cleanup costs. But I'd rather not pay $129 if we could keep the price down to $69 and raise my income through reduced taxes 20%. Leaving me with a little left over for another cup of coffee...

      BTW The old school "just stop it" method has worked for CFC's, the holes are starting to shrink now. Though my countrymen in Iceland still have to apply sunscreen in winter, their grandchildren probably won't have to. Even so, with a better tax system TI might have saved that money sooner. Business can be ingenious in finding ways to drastically reduce the cost of their products. (Assuming they don't have a monopoly that isn't affected by price. But even those eventually fall if they aren't protected by their government. Bribery laws are a different issue...)
  • This article is the result of 5 years of research? If they has used a computer I'm sure they could have obtained their statistics much faster. Seriously though, although the story may be interesting, it offers no alternatives, and is therefore pretty redundant. I'm sure we could list any number of everyday, essential items and shock everyone by pointing out the environmental cost of producing them. Will that eliminate the need for those items?

    Hey you! Stop breathing. You are producing greenhouse gasses.

  • Yet another reason not to discard old or unused computer hardware.

    Give it to a charity for a tax write-off, or sell it on ebay - someone, somewhere probably wants it.

    Same goes for used batteries. Dont donate or sell these, but please don't throw them away! Collect them in a box or something and take them to a recycling center.

    How many people bitching about toxic chemicals here even know where their local recycling center is?

    • Local recycling center (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pla ( 258480 )
      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.
  • But seem to overlook the fact that once a microchip is made, it ceases to have an environmental impact short of a miniscule amount of heat emitted while in operation. Cars on the other hand produce all sorts of things in their exhaust which, I would bet, add up to much more than the "twice the weight of the car" figure that was being thrown around.

    Also, how much of those chemicals, especially the water, are used up in the process of making a chip? I would think the water at least would get filtered and sent around the line again and again. Ditto for whatever catalysts or other non-consumable additives (forgive me, im not a chemist) are thrown into the mix.

    If this article is supossed to make me feel guilty about my 512mb of PC2100, its not.
    • .. you think that electricity that comes off from the wall socket and goes to your cpu doesn't make environmental impact?

      yeah sure it could be some non fossil-fuel generated .. then again it possibly isn't.

      the heat is just a plus in countries where heating is necessity anyways most of the year..

  • Terrorists. (Score:3, Funny)

    by miTTio ( 24893 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:26PM (#5144572)
    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!

  • Save the Nitrogen! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:26PM (#5144575)
    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!
  • Who buys 32 Meg DRAM chips anymore?

    Suddenly, I feel guilty for maxing out the ram on my Mac LC III.

  • Kg = liter (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gorimek ( 61128 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:29PM (#5144613) Homepage
    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?
    • No, they're just being exact. The volume (litre) can change with pressure, temperature, and other factors. The mass (kg) always stays the same for the needed amount of water.
  • 1g caffeine
    5g Pizza
    1pt Alcohol (beer form)
    5L oxygen

    Consider this next time you post...

  • From the abstract (Score:5, Insightful)

    by guido1 ( 108876 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:45PM (#5144746)
    (as the actual paper requires an ACS registration, which I don't have...)

    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/C oreMem ory.html

  • How bad is it really? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:45PM (#5144753) Journal
    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.

  • RAM makers will consume the earth? (Score:4, Funny)

    by mveloso ( 325617 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:49PM (#5144786)
    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!

  • I worked at Samsung - Believe the numbers (Score:5, Informative)

    by redbeard_ak ( 542964 ) <redbeard@NOSpAm.riseup.net> on Thursday January 23, 2003 @03:03PM (#5144894) Homepage
    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 [newswise.com] 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. [slashdot.org]

    But companies don't even want us to know [thecampaign.org] 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?

  • Not an especially useful indicator as-is (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Selanit ( 192811 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @03:09PM (#5144930)

    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 [acs.org] -- linked to by another poster first -- provides some more useful details.

    The lower bound of fossil fuel and chemical inputs to produce and use one 2-gram microchip are estimated at 1600 g and 72 g, respectively. Secondary materials used in production total 630 times the mass of the final product, indicating that the environmental weight of semiconductors far exceeds their small size. This intensity of use is orders of magnitude larger than that for "traditional" goods. Taking an automobile as an example, estimates of life cycle production energy for one passenger car range from 63 to 119 GJ (42). This corresponds to 1500-3000 kg of fossil fuel used, thus the ratio of embodied fossil fuels in production to the weight of the final product is around two.
    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.

  • It was something like this:
    The energy to make one solar panel is more than the energy that panel will make in it's lifetime.
    Actually, I can believe that.
    J.

  • Software ingredients (Score:3, Funny)

    by S.I.O. ( 180787 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @03:13PM (#5144966)
    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

  • Analyzing the stats... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sterno ( 16320 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @04:02PM (#5145298) Homepage
    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.

  • No attempts at all to convserve RAM (Score:3, Informative)

    by Junks Jerzey ( 54586 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @04:03PM (#5145308)
    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."

  • beer for comparison (Score:3, Funny)

    by brer_rabbit ( 195413 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @05:13PM (#5145979) Journal
    For comparison, to produce a single pint of beer an efficient brewery will use 5 - 7 pints of water for heating, cooling and washing. (source: Fullers Brewery [fullers.co.uk])

    Make beer, not DRAM.

  • where is the beef? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by u19925 ( 613350 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @05:21PM (#5146064)
    A typical computer has about 36 DRAM chips. Assuming people use computer for 3 years before buying a new one, we are talking about 1 chip per month per computer.

    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"?

  • TCO (Score:3, Insightful)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @06:02PM (#5146389) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Enough of the armchair environmentalism! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ediron2 ( 246908 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @07:05PM (#5146785) Journal
    <soapbox>

    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

  • Yay, justications! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Large Green Mallard ( 31462 ) <lgm@theducks.org> on Thursday January 23, 2003 @07:44PM (#5147037) Homepage
    .. for buying 1GB DDR SDRAM sticks.. since buying in high capacity means the environment suffers less :D

  • SUVs? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Prof.Phreak ( 584152 ) on Thursday January 23, 2003 @10:54PM (#5148185) Homepage
    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).

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