Intel chips away at carbon footprint but skims over thirst for water, chemicals Intel has published proposals to tackle its environmental impact, largely focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and moving to renewable energy, but gave less attention to water usage and the harsh chemicals involved in chipmaking. The Santa Clara giant's Climate Transition Action Plan outlines a roadmap for how the …
A typical techno-behemoth greenwash. Collecting rainwater merely tags as 'yours' for the PR value water that would return to the aquifers naturally anyway. Very reminiscent of suppliers of "green electricity", which amounts to no more than entering into contracts with a proportion (often quite small) of their generation sources. I investigated this a while back and asked whether they had a member of staff sitting there painting the electrons green as they passed. They didn't see the joke.
Seems likely to me that if you added up the claims for renewable power sold, "enough to power up to XXXX homes", and "equivalent to taking ZZZZ cars off the road", we'd have more renewable energy sold than has ever been generated, a housing stock that had to leave the windows open and the lights on to use it, and a negative number of cars on the road.
Renewable energy appears to be like Manuka honey in many respects.
Almost all of it could be treated and re-used, so if there were requirements in place greatly limiting their water use so long as it allowed a large initial draw to fill their storage they could keep recycling the same water through and their daily usage would be a tiny fraction of what it is today.
Alternatively they could use lightly treated (just make sure there are no hazardous chemicals) water for irrigation of crops or golf courses in the area, and other than in Arizona most of the time water will be so plentiful at their fab sites that it doesn't make sense to do anything beyond what they're doing now.
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