Greening Semiconductor Manufacturing: Why Should You Care?

We’ve heard the refrain for decades: the endless drive to make electronic circuits smaller, faster, and cheaper. But have you thought about making electronics cleaner and greener? If not, it’s time to reconsider.

Here are three reasons why you should care about sustainability in semiconductor manufacturing:

1. The Climate is Changing

We’re seeing more severe fires, floods, and hurricanes around the world, and it’s only getting worse. And it’s clear that carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels are to blame for most, if not all, of the climate crisis. Where do these emissions come from? Transportation, electricity, and industry are the biggest contributors.

Semiconductor manufacturing is part of the 22 percent coming from industry. Your companies contribute to GHG emissions, both directly through operations at your factories and indirectly via transportation to move your products around the globe and electricity to power your facilities.

GHG emissions are divided into three segments:

·       Scope 1: emissions from company-owned factories and manufacturing processes

·       Scope 2: emissions from purchased energy (natural gas, coal, etc.)

·       Scope 3: emissions from the supply chain, both your suppliers and your customers

2. The energy cost of materials

A smartphone or laptop contains plastic, glass, and dozens of different metals, each of which costs energy to produce. Look at the energy required to make a ton of various materials and you’ll understand why aluminum is among the most commonly recycled metals and why gold is so expensive.

From Material Value: More Sustainable, Less Wasteful Manufacturing of Everything from Cell Phones to Cleaning Products by Julia L F Goldstein, PhD.

Lumber is relatively cheap. It doesn’t take a lot of energy to cut down trees. But making that wood into paper takes ten times as much energy per ton of material. (Note the logarithmic scale on the graph.)

Now consider aluminum. Producing aluminum from recycled cans or shop floor scrap is much more efficient than producing it from bauxite ore. It’s also much less toxic, which is another argument for reducing the use of mined metals.

But if virgin aluminum is energy-intensive, it’s nothing compared to gold, which tops the chart. The reason that it takes 53,000 gigajoules of energy to produce a single ton of gold is because of the vast quantity of gold ore needed. Gold is present in such small amounts that it takes between 2 and 90 tons of gold ore to extract an ounce of pure gold. Efficient e-waste recycling can recover an ounce of gold from fewer than 1000 smartphones.

Second place on the graph goes to silicon, the heart of the microprocessor. Silicon is one of the most abundant elements on earth, but it is present in the form of silica in sand. Processing the silica and turning it into silicon wafers takes lots of energy.

3. The business case for sustainability is clear

More and more companies are embracing the triple bottom line: people, planet, profit. All three aspects are interrelated and need to be in balance. Prioritizing quarterly dividends to shareholders at the expense of responsible business practices is no longer acceptable. How you treat your employees and customers—and how you use resources to manufacture products—affects profits, your corporate reputation, and the future of your business.

You should care because your customers care.

“We weave sustainability into our day-to-day operations, not only because it is good for business but also because it is the right thing to do.”—Flex website

“Our customers show increasing concern about the environmental impacts of materials” – JSR Micro 2018 CSR Report

Large OEMs like Microsoft, Intel, Cisco Systems, and HP are leading the charge to make environmental sustainability a priority. If you want to supply components or materials to those leaders, it’s time to get on board now or be left behind.

Note: This blog post is based on the first part of a talk I gave at the MEPTEC Speaker Series luncheon on October 16, 2019. It was intended for an audience of semiconductor packaging executives and engineers.