LibreSilicon: Decentralizing semiconductor manufacturing [video]
media.ccc.de
media.ccc.de
I was very sceptical at first when I met David a year ago. Given that he is much more cleanly shaved now, I assume things finally turned for the better for them.
HF is a very simple compound that anyone who knows what they're doing could produce on their own. Restricting access to such things is inherently worse than providing it, because anyone who doesn't know what they're doing could attempt to produce it themselves.
Then in the best case they end up with the acid regardless and in the worst case they get the concentration wrong or produce who knows what other compound by mistake that may or may not eat through the container they're holding it it, fill the room with poison gas or cause a large fire or explosion.
I don't know if modern fabs have mostly switched to less environmentally persistent solvents or if they're just a lot more careful about not discharging solvents to the environment.
A stupidly obvious example is farming. Small scale manure production is a net benefit to the local soil. Factory farming destroys rivers, lakes and small seas.
Small scale farming is literally destroying the Chesapeake Bay--manure is the single biggest source of pollution.
The advantage of large-scale production is that you can apply centralized remediation efforts. It's easy to make a sewage treatment plant that handles 100 million gallons of water a day clean up all of its toxicity before dumping the water out. It's hard to tell 10 million people to stop dumping so much manure on their farms, especially when they're all going to say "eh, what is adding 50 extra pounds of manure going to do?" What may be safe on the scale of an individual use may not be so safe when it is repeated for millions of individual uses.