The Costs of Making a DRAM Chip 474
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)."
eep.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:eep.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Entropy rules (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed, entropy rules, especially in the long run.
That 32 liters of water will eventually evaporate and rain down as potable water again.
The rest of the ingredients will eventually randomize into something quite like the rocks they were refined from.
In the short run, we have people who may be harmed by the waste, and people who will be helped by having a job building the devices, or cleaning up after them.
We may lose some things that are hard to replace, such as certain species, or people we care about.
One proposed solution is to try to account for the actual costs of things, and make sure that the buyers of a product are charged for the harm it does. That way the marketplace will ensure that we buy things based on the true costs. The crisis of the commons [sonoma.edu] is at work here.
I don't know if such a scheme can be made to work. What we usually see is the opposite -- subsidizing oil instead of renewables. It's hard to get someone to pay for trash removal when it is so easy to throw the stuff in someone else's yard.
Take action! (Score:4, Funny)
No wait, then it'll sit in a landfill.... I know, I'll BURN it!
Recycling (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Recycling (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Re:Recycling (Score:3, Insightful)
Joe
Re:Recycling (Score:5, Insightful)
You see, most schools can't keep ink in their printers, let alone figure out how to install Linux on an old PC. Hell, this is my hobby and it can take days to get an old PC running Linux. (I'm using a 386DX2/40, 486/66, and PP200 as firewalls and routers, so I'm experienced in using old junk.)
A school isn't going to teach word processing on anything less than a 500 Mh PIII.
A school teaches applied computer use, not CS, so an account isn't much help.
What is net access if it doesn't include a current graphical browser and anything less than a PIII/500 isn't going to run much of a browser.
A school isn't going to use a linux firewall.
This still doesn't address the long term problem. What do we do with the old PCs in 5 more years (when all the schools have old PCs)?
Joe
Re:Recycling (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realise that you are talking from the perspective of someone from a developed country, where any school can afford to use a PIII/500?
You do realise that there are countries where all that a public school would have is probably ONE computer which all the students get to SEE and not work on?
A school isn't going to teach word processing on anything less than a 500 Mh PIII.
I think Office 97 did indeed run very happily on an 133 Mhz system? My dear friend, applied computer use does not necessiate the use of the latest bleeding edge graphical OS with the latest bloated word-processing app.
A school teaches applied computer use, not CS, so an account isn't much help.
Don't be too sure. Hell, I learnt Basic and Dbase in my 4th and 5th grade in school. That would again depend on your school.
let alone figure out how to install Linux on an old PC.
Here in India, the use of Linux is being spread in several small schools without enough funds.
What are the benefits? You have 8th grade kids who are familiar with the command line and 10th and 12th grade kids who can whip up Perl scripts. They have an environment to explore. And they are learning a technology that is here to stay.
A school isn't going to use a linux firewall.
Duh! And why not?
Is it because its too complex? If it helps, my high-school project for my final CS paper was an Parallel Operating System.
Is it because its not widespread? If you are talking about a school without resources, hell they'll take just about anything you give them.
In MANY schools that I know of with a single dial-up connection being shared by many computers, guess what OS runs the machine connecting to the Internet?
This still doesn't address the long term problem. What do we do with the old PCs in 5 more years (when all the schools have old PCs)?
Well, don't you know? We would have a BEOWULF CLUSTER of those!!!
Re:Recycling (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Recycling (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
Re:12 inch fabs (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, that was a joke.
Full text: The 1.7 kilogram microchip (Score:5, Informative)
Here [acs.org].
Re:Full text: The 1.7 kilogram microchip (Score:2)
Does that mean..... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Does that mean..... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've also heard that it takes dozens or even hundreds of people just to get that chip into your hands too. Engineers, Manufacturers, Accountants, Deliverymen, Salesman!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!! Think of the PEOPLE!!!!
Re:Does that mean..... (Score:4, Funny)
Soylent DRAM is made from people!
"Used to make..." (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:"Used to make..." (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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.
Re:"Used to make..." (Score:2)
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.
Re:"Used to make..." (Score:4, Informative)
Tell that to Intel [theinquirer.net] They seem to have increased the circuit density, wafer size, performance and yield, all while reducing consumption.
Re:"Used to make..." (Score:3)
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:To reiterate in different words... (Score:2)
I was also pointing out that they were quick to lash out against a technology that they didn't consider worthy, but they're also the same type of people who advocate technologies they think are important while themselves not thinking of the impact.
So, to reiterate in different words: It's easy to point out the flaws in others if you don't have to look at yourself, and you're not interested in a solution, but only in creating outrage by exposing the problem.
Re:"Used to make..." (Score:5, Informative)
certainly some of tme can be reused (H20 as you and others correctly stated for example). But here are typical applications of different chemicals:
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.
material and energy inputs.... (Score:2, Interesting)
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)
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?
Re:All those fossil fuels! (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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!
Re:All those fossil fuels! (Score:3, Insightful)
First - an emotional objection - who died and made you arbiter of what "we" need? Who's "we"? If you don't need Doom III or LOTR, don't buy computers to play the game, and don't see the movie. I am quite capable of deciding what I need. You're free to try to convince me I don't need those things - but if you fail and subsequently attempt to use laws to prevent me from getting those things, you can go stuff it. :)
Second - a better objection - given the actual cost-per-chip of DRAM, calculating the environmental remediation costs of the chips used in rendering LOTR could well exceed the cost of the chips, the movie, and the remediation combined. It's the micropayment problem - the time/effort spent in calculated the electricity/bandwidth charges for making this post to Slashdot - would likely exceed any revenue recouped. And those are costs that are (in principle) easily-measured.
Third - and this is really just the rational phrasing of my gut objection - how do you propose we compute the "environmental cost" in any meaningful fashion? It's hard enough to compute a micropayment for the bandwidth we're using here, but Slashdot gets a (giga)byte-count every month with its bandwidth bill. How do you propose to factor in the costs of site remediation for chemicals leaked -- when you don't know (a) how much leaked, (b) how much it'll cost to clean up, (c) ...because it may be cleaned up today at $10M per square mile using backhoes, or next year at $5 per square mile due to the development of bad-stuff-eating nanotech, and (d) whether it's worth cleaning up at all - is it worth burning 1000 gallons of diesel fuel by running backhoes near your favorite lake/river to reduce $CONTAMINANT from 10 ppm to 9 ppm? Depends on the $CONTAMINANT - but do we really know the risks associated with each specific level of each specific contaminant? (e) And I'm still only talking money - if you wanna add in the "environmental cost" of 10000 gallons of diesel fuel, all those nebulosities I objected to with regards to remediating the chip fab have to be re"calculated" for the backhoe operators and Caterpillar, Inc's equipment. Recurse ad-infinitum. We don't know the "environmental cost" of burning 10000 gallons of diesel fuel (to dig up the old fab grounds when building the new fab) vs. making a million new chips (that used new chemicals but consume less power) vs. reusing 16-million old chips (that use more power and work slower)... There are too many variables, and I'd argue that there are so many variables that we simply can't know.)
Fourth - even if you use "only the computing power needed" for a task, you can still produce a lot more '486 chips for the same amount of chemicals if you build them with an 0.13u process and 12" wafers, than if you tried to keep the original fabs running for all eternity. Something's gotta give, it's gotta give at a certain price point, and (back to reason #1/#3) - the market's the most efficient and effective way of determining that price point. Because the alternatives have too many variables to even approach consideration.
Re:All those fossil fuels! (Score:2)
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.
Re:All those fossil fuels! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:All those fossil fuels! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
No fossil fuel (Score:2)
Re:No fossil fuel (Score:2)
It's not the fact that this sort of thing is just in chips, but it's in almost every part of society.
Re:All those fossil fuels! (Score:2)
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.
Re:All those fossil fuels! (Score:3, Insightful)
There are other reasons too, but let's not forget that Bush comes from big oil. We are now looking for Oil in africa [gortbusters.org], despite the poor governments that exist there.
This summarizes the oil situation. [gortbusters.org]
all products (Score:5, Interesting)
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..
Re:all products (Score:2)
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.
Re:all products (Score:2)
Ha! Canadians! (Score:2)
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)
Re:all products (Score:2)
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)
Re:During the making of this software... (Score:3, Funny)
Would you really? (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
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).
We should all read The Ecology of Commerce (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Environmentally Abusive? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Environmentally Abusive? (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Get Ralph Nader on the Case! (Score:2)
32kg of water PER CHIP? (Score:2)
sPh
Re:32kg of water PER CHIP? (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:32kg of water PER CHIP? (Score:3, Funny)
Used - please define better (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmmm, when you think about the next sentance (Score:2, Interesting)
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)
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 the Pizza (Score:2, Funny)
Clean Machines (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.
Re:Organic produce (Score:2)
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.
Re:Organic produce (Score:2)
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)
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...)
So, what does he suggest we do? (Score:2)
Hey you! Stop breathing. You are producing greenhouse gasses.
old hardware (Score:2)
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)
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.
They keep making comparisons with cars... (Score:2)
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.
Re:They keep making comparisons with cars... (Score:2)
yeah sure it could be some non fossil-fuel generated
the heat is just a plus in countries where heating is necessity anyways most of the year..
Terrorists. (Score:3, Funny)
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)
Who buys 32 Meg DRAM chips anymore? (Score:2)
Suddenly, I feel guilty for maxing out the ram on my Mac LC III.
Re:Who buys 32 Meg DRAM chips anymore? (Score:2)
Kg = liter (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a little weird that they use kg to measure water rather than liter. Does it seem more that way?
Re:Kg = liter (Score:2)
Consumption rates for /. Posts (Score:2)
5g Pizza
1pt Alcohol (beer form)
5L oxygen
Consider this next time you post...
From the abstract (Score:5, Insightful)
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/
How bad is it really? (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
I worked at Samsung - Believe the numbers (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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.
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.
Heard similar story about solar panels.... (Score:2)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Make beer, not DRAM.
where is the beef? (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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)
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)
SUVs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lethal 'arsine' gas? (Score:2)
Re:1).. 2) ??? 3) PROFIT!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well-known flaw of the (unadorned) capitalist system. The manufacturing cost of a product does not include the costs incurred by its manufacture which are borne collectively. Example: if there was no fuel tax (and there is no significant fuel tax in the US), the cost of petrol and cars would not include the environmental cost of pollution, because it wouldn't be paid for by oil companies and car makers, but by everyone.
It's not a case of "brushing it under the carpet", more a case that the system isn't in place to make manufacturers accountable for the collective costs caused by their products. Such a system would be an extra tax on polluting products or tax incentives for less polluting ones. This is all old hat but governments tend to be too scared of being accused of being "anti-business" (or "anti-american" ;-) ) to actually implement such measures.
Re:1).. 2) ??? 3) PROFIT!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, IMHO, governments are too scared of being accused of non-impartiality in these matters.
So, lets see, you tax environmental pollution because people don't like it. How about noise pollution? I know people who had to live next to a factory after the city re-zoned the land. How about smell pollution? Again, I know people who had to live next to a pig farm after the farmer's request to turn his dead hay farm (or whatever it was) into a pig farm.
And what about class pollution? There are some who aren't interested in living near kids (think retirement communities). Should we tax the young whenever they work in a high-tech business near a retirement home?
Heck, what about luddite pollution? There are those who find luddites despiseable, and would never want to live in a luddite community. Yet, especially in California, they keep sprouting up. Should these luddites not be forced to pay a tax as well?
On a more serious note, do we force truckers to pay a tax for the roads their trucks destroy? Do companies and cities that use salt to keep their roads from being snowed over pay a tax to support people with their rust-ridden vehicles?
There's so many taxes you need to implement to do this impartially, you may as well become socialist if that's the intent. The clear way to keep a country Environmentally friendly (or Sound, smell, whatever friendly) is to let people have the freedom to avoid spending money at companies that don't support certain basic values that the people do. That is, if you want to remain capitalist. Not that socialism is a particularly bad thing (there's much worse), it's just that I don't vote for them.
Re:1).. 2) ??? 3) PROFIT!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
1) Taxes are paid by the consumers and manufacturers in proportion to the elasticity of consumer demand, so in this case pretty much "collectively".
2) Taxes are rarely used to do what they are supposedly for: ie. cleaning up things. These taxes would undoubtedly be used for prisons, drug wars, social security, and medicaid leaving us to clean things up anyway out of remaining pocket change.
3) The reduction in demand for some consumer electronics due to price disincentives might be quite high, but there are lifetime issues that are fundamental to the technology industry. eg. A 1980's laserdisc player is just not very useful today. Scanners from 4 years ago provide far less quality than those purchased this year. etc.
4) My biggest concern is that the investment of labor, capital, and resources in electronics may have led to an economy where fundamental necessities or high priority items are relatively more expensive in terms of hours worked than in the past (such as housing, food, clothing, certain machines), but we are able to suck it up because we can get so much "more" with our marginal remaining money, which is used for entertainment and enjoyment via cheap consumer electronics.
Is the real cost of the electronics boom that we can't afford to live comfortably, work less, or commute less, because we have overinvested in electronics production and entertainment?
I certainly have a share of electronic gadgets, but I'm willing to bet that I'm below the 30th percentile for slashdot readers, and below 50th percentile for consumers in general (note I have only ever had one second hand TV shared between 4 people for example).
Can we afford to keep investing in electronics production at ever faster rates at the expense of other forms of production, or will we wake up one day with even larger debts, and even larger rent, utilities, and food bills, and wonder why it is that we can't live the quality of life that people in the 60's had? Note that this is a consequence of production meeting the market desires. It's the market desires that seem out of whack to me.
Of course lots of this have to do with population density increases, especially housing and food costs.
Parent is known troll - check history (Score:2, Insightful)
"Gi" is about the only two-letter combination that isn't an element.
And helium, eh? Were they lighter than air?
Responsibility to our environment... (Score:5, Insightful)
Guilty, no. Responsible, yes. There are a bunch of non-human, low-intelligence animals on this planet which don't have the capabilities of protecting themselves from us. Free exchange of information is nobel; being responsible caretakers and guardians of the environment is also nobel.
Do you think an environmental impact study was done before the Mona Lisa was painted?
Yep. 2000 years ago, the Romans had environmental impact studies.
Pliny reports on ecological disasters and effects of pollution from refining of metals in his Natural History (check books 8, 11, 19, & 33).
Strabo reports on the effects of clearcutting forests for fuel and on pollution from refining in his Geography. (14.6.5; 3.2.8)
Xenophon reports on pollution from refining of silver in Memorabilia. (3.6.12)
Lastly, Plato talks about the deforestation of Greece in Critias. (111b-c)