What is the environmental footprint of a typical fab? From what I understand, modern chips are free of conflict materials, but are there toxic byproducts which would cause trouble with the EPA?
[Chlorine trifluoride] is apparently about the most vigorous fluorinating agent known, and is much more difficult to handle than fluorine gas. That’s one of those statements you don’t get to hear very often, and it should be enough to make any sensible chemist turn around smartly and head down the hall in the other direction.
The compound also a stronger oxidizing agent than oxygen itself, which also puts it into rare territory. That means that it can potentially go on to “burn” things that you would normally consider already burnt to hell and gone, and a practical consequence of that is that it’ll start roaring reactions with things like bricks and asbestos tile. It’s been used in the semiconductor industry to clean oxides off of surfaces, at which activity it no doubt excels.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sa...
Read on to find out what happened when somebody accidentally spilled 1 ton of the stuff!
... https://blogs.intel.com/csr/files/2019/11/Circularity-at-Int...