I´ve been reading a lot about the planet, and among all problems, pollution is one of great impact.
The truth is that this makes me feel sad. Why we human beings, are responsible for destroying our loved home the Earth? Why don´t we use our wisdom to avoid collapsing our planet? Who said that high technologies are synonymous of pollution?
If we look to the human evolution history a little bit, focused on the industry manufacturing processes, we will be able to understand the environment carelessness in the past.
At the beginning, people were nomads, they lived based in the nature because they didn´t know how to produce what they need to survive.
Over the years, the Men started producing the goods they needed to survive. At this point, they used some tools to help them in this task, but most of the production steps were manual.
As centuries passed by, their production processes evolved because of the new equipment’s developed to support it. They were able to increase in a faster and easier way the production.
My point of view here is to show that to do the same tasks, humans developed new processes, new tools, created new technologies, but as far as I know, the main objective was economical, and the environmental awareness was born when the impacts of the activity started to be felt.
The factories followed the same curve, at the begging there wasn´t any concerns about the environment, that was something that arrived later on. Now, we need to think about it and again create new technologies and new processes.
The semiconductor´s industry is a particular industry and considered as polluting one, but why?
To a semiconductor manufacturer it´s necessary a lot of high purity water, gases, and energy. But that demand for materials for a semiconductor´s fab don´t stop here, they demand a lot of different industries to support them, such as, chemical´s industry, solder´s industry, pack´s industry, machining industry … and this is an extensive list.
The fact is that for semiconductor industry we can think about the generated pollution direct and indirectly. So, what we should do about it?
We know the semiconductor industry for the modern days is vital…. almost like air and water for us … no it´s not absurd at all! It´s used in almost everything … if we think in all the different types of semiconductor, such as analogic or digital, for example, we will see applications everywhere in our everyday life…
The semiconductor is a growing technology which is still developing itself… new characteristics for semiconductors are still being studied and developed, news applications are still being discovered …
We can conclude that it is not an option not to use semiconductor anymore … but as right now we already have this environment conscience … we can make the semiconductor environment friendly. And here I can say, YES it´s possible to produce semiconductor cheaper with the same quality or even higher quality than right now, and at the same time environment friendly.
What we need to do is develop new manufacturing processes to replace the most pollutants ones and think more about the wastes … not only inside the semiconductor fab, but also what we can offer to really reduce the waste outside the semiconductor fabs.
We already can recycle gold, silver, metals (steal, copper, aluminum, and others), water, silicon scrap, poison gases neutralized. I would like to mention, as an example, that long time ago we made a water treatment station, which not only helped the environment but also cut off the consumption cost by 50%.
We can optimize our production processes reducing the raw material consumption or even changing it by another one. In both cases this will lead us to improve our processes.
We can optimize our devices projects and processes to reduce the energy consumption during their applications because they will have better characteristics. By doing this we will be able to offer devices that will help reduce the energy loss for the semiconductor user.
We can develop new applications for the semiconductor devices to replace old equipment, not fully electronic by a solid-state equipment. This will again reduce the energy losses. A good example is the solid-state circuit breaker for MV and HV we developed to replace the electromechanical circuit breakers used in the distribution energy sector.
There is so much we can do to be real environment friendly and at the same time reduce our costs. I think we should do all the efforts to be the example to be followed and to become truly green high-tech.
Finally, haven´t we learned with all this pandemic COVID situation that it is better to face it and solve the problem than try to live with it?
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