Intel's green dream is chips without any dips in Mother Nature's health Intel is seeking alternatives to harmful chemicals that the electronics industry has used for decades, amid growing concerns about the potentially negative impacts on the environment and human health. The chipmaking biz is again pushing the environmental bandwagon, committing to become the "industry's most sustainable foundry …
The concerns revolve around specific compounds that are employed in ways that risk entering the environment. I expect the PFAs are used to handle the horrendous fluorine etchants but, even if these are eliminated, you still need a chemical that can dissolve/etch silicon so the best you can probably hope for is something merely aggressively toxic, rather than something toxic and capable of igniting asbestos (chlorine trifluoride).
Even if you manage all that, you now have to safely handle a deep UV that will shred your DNA like confetti and achieve a level of cleanliness that makes an operating theatre seem like a clogged sewer.
There's no way an energy and resource intense process left no mark on environment. The process can be less dirty but even "green energy" use means that another business processes (or just common people) have to resort to not so clean energy. Not to mention that building energy capacity is not green, no matter the final energy source. Even something as mundane as transmission lines result in huge swaths of deforestated areas with power companies giving zero f...s for the impact and esthetics of "trimming" greenery along lines (them EVs get even greener as result of this).
The whole talk of net zero while aiming for economic growth is just BS. Sad but true.
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