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Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

Manufacturing is generally pretty messy. But green tech has come a long way in identifying effective alternatives to toxic chemicals, as well as effective management and disposal techniques for what is toxic.

Odds are good that re-shored manufacturing will be cleaner than older plants built in regions with lower environmental regulation.

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From my understanding the chemicals haven't changed, and can't really be changed. As far as i understand we will always need these crazy bad chemicals to make chips.

What has, hopefully, changed is we aren't allowing companies to store it in leaking underground tanks, etc. All these superfund sites aren't a result if business as usual, in each case there is some major, systemic, intentional oversight and frankly corruption.

Source - I've worked some in that industry designing automation for asml, applied, etc.

Not in the semiconductor industry but a good example of the kind of thing that results in a super fund site is Rocky Flats in Colorado. There is a now famous news broadcast where the representative from the department of energy is saying "there is no fire" and a big fire can be clearly seen behind them.

They were machining plutonium and uranium nuclear bomb triggers on lathes in special glove boxes with particle capture and ventilation systems that were supposed to scrub the air before venting it to atmosphere. These systems weren't properly maintained and they got clogged up with radioactive dust and caught fire. It was later found that they were dumping radioactive dust into the air, and had hundreds of barrels of radioactive waste in steel barrels that were rusted through leaking into the ground for decades. It's the only time one federal agency (the FBI) raided a facility of another federal agency (DOE).

There have been a huge number of changes to the chemicals used in photolithography over time, specifically the photoresists.

Yeah but lots of the super terrible stuff is in the surface prep and etching chemicals. All those crazy acids and bases that eat through everything, are highly toxic, and deadly in tiny quantities.

https://www.prevor.com/en/chemical-risks-in-semiconductors-i...

My understanding is that photoresists are actually some of the most toxic chemicals in the process, and their heating/irradiation makes them especially dangerous.

https://en.hesperian.org/hhg/Workers%27_Guide_to_Health_and_...

The context of my comment was in response to the parent saying they've phased out/changed many of the worst stuff in the photo resist side and so I said there is still pretty bad stuff on the etch side and then you commented that there are worse chemicals on the photo resist side. We're in a weird circular argument.

Point is - there are lots of bad chemicals used in semiconductor manufacturing, even today.

This is exactly why the cost basis for fabs in the US got less and less competitive over time compared to countries with laxer regulation.

Same thing for mining

> crazy bad chemicals

Exhibit A: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-yo...

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is about to gut the EPA's authority. Hope you're able to afford to move far away from plants that spew toxic chemicals!

https://www.npr.org/2022/02/28/1082934438/supreme-court-to-h...

Eh, I’m relatively in favor of limiting government agencies effectively making law up all by themselves. That is not the correct fix for a dysfunctional legislature.

If you think Congress is dysfunctional now, wait until you require congress to individually specify safety limits for each compound, etc. You'll have congresspeople grandstanding about how restricting X chemical is killing hardworking small businesses in their state, etc.

Which the court knows damn well will be the outcome - that's the goal. Keep anything from being done.

That kind of thinking leads to “the only way we’ll get anything done is with a dictator” and it’s not like that is an unprecedented outcome for a country. Fix what’s broken, don’t use authoritarianism as a patch for dysfunction.

I don't understand why it's "authoritarianism" for elected representatives to say "we want to protect X, within the following parameters, and we delegate the job of making specific rules to this agency". You can vote out the legislator if you disagree with the parameters they agreed upon, and you can vote out the executive branch that appointed the leaders of the agency.

We already complain all the time that legislators don't understand the stuff they pass laws about. Delegation is not authoritarianism. You haven't actually said how you'd "fix what's broken". Do you have any specific ideas?

It's authoritarian because it allows the legislature to offload its job to the executive branch and the directions given to these agencies isn't specific at all, and this is what it seems the court is deciding: if vague instructions to the various agencies matches the constitutional intent of the duties of legislative and executive branches.

We don't want to have one set of regulations for each party which change with the president, (we also don't want to delude ourselves into thinking our preferred party will keep winning).

You're assuming that there are "parameters" given to agencies to create regulation with the force of law and the case seems to be about the circumstances where these are not nearly direct enough.

I don't want the president to be able to run the country with executive actions, this has very much gotten out of hand.

Specific ideas involve people not watching news paid for with advertisements, changes to election funding which should be obvious (removing the idea that unlimited political contributions are "free speech"), killing the filibuster, fixing gerrymandered districts, alternatives to first-past-the-post voting, someone going out and trying to inform the electorate in a way that encourages independent thought and not just cheer-leading for ones own side, re-enforced and expanded limits on corporate media/news ownership.

Ultimately though, the electorate just has to demand it instead of letting itself get whipped up into an emotional frenzy with the ever-present latest manufactured crisis.

I was with you until the manufactured crisis part, I think you just want the electorate to care about a different set of issues and so you downplay them as not important in general when really they’re just not important to you. The most recent media spirals are another school shooting refueling the gun control fight, overturning Roe, and the Don’t Say Gay bill all of which have real life impact on people’s lives.

Like what do you think the “demanding” is going to look like if not an emotional frenzy and protests?

The reason Roe v Wade is being pushed is that a small number of people in power see who don't care about it one way or the other push/pushed opposition to it because getting that base emotionally charged gets people more engaged with the party. It is entirely opportunistically taking advantage of an issue to drive the conversation away from other issues. It's not that abortion is unimportant, it's that without certain politics motivations, it would just be solved and generally allowed and not particularly large on anybody's mind.

You find this all over and have to question about each issue that is emotionally charged... how does fanning the flames help certain parties and politicians? Likewise for news sources.

There's an incentive partially intentional by those pulling the strings and partially emergent (or a stand-alone complex for Ghost in the Shell fans) phenomenon where by in a intentional/emergent collusion between parties, politicians, media, and individuals... the most emotionally charged issues dominate the political landscape these days because from somebody seeking out the emotional rush of a like to a politician winning elections to corporate news advertisement sales there are benefits everywhere to make people frenzy about something, and whatever is most apt for it gets it, regardless if rationally it's a solved issue that only a few hangers on really want to fight about any more.

>Like what do you think the “demanding” is going to look like if not an emotional frenzy and protests?

There's a real core of the problem, inability to imagine what meaningful political discourse would look like without an emotional frenzy.

I feel like this is a really cynical take for “the issues that dominate the news cycle are ones where there is roughly even political power backing a given position and so small perturbations in territory result in large policy swings.” It became a wedge issue and you’re right politicians are absolutely taking advantage but people do genuinely seem to care a whole heck of a lot about the outcome. I don’t think people are as disinterested as you think. Like literally every woman I know, myself included, is at most 1 Bacon distance from someone who had an abortion.

> it would just be solved

You can’t say “god why are we still taking about this, can’t we just do the_thing_i_want and call it a day?” Because obviously there would be a lot less political strife if we all just agreed or put up with outcomes we don’t like.

Because it breaks separation of powers, and this distinction was actually made in the opinions we’ve seen — Congress can’t delegate “uniquely legislative powers.” Like if the EPA can effectively write laws and is run by the executive branch then the executive branch can write laws. That seems bad if you believe that the whole point of the branches of government is to prevent exactly this situation.

That is in fact the default practice for anything remotely technically complex. see SEC, FAA, FCC, etc…

  > Fix what’s broken

whats the solution?

>> green tech has come a long way in identifying effective alternatives to toxic chemicals

Enlighten us, how manufacturing 'silicone' has become less chemical intensive.

FTFY: Silicon

between spelling nazis and reflexive downvoters .. who are entitled their respective actions.. what I am looking for is, how is the whole Quartz to Wafers process has become green and what kind of reduction and/or elimination of toxic materials has been achieved.

A good proper justification of the claim from the claimant or supporters of that argument is useful.

I don’t have exact details but I did work in an civil/environment consulting companies (we worked remediating the GE silicone waste site in Upstate NY .. ) which might be why people are senesitive to the spelling.[1]

But generally those chemical engineers are pretty good at cleaning up the processes (it cheaper, also cheaper to ship manufacturing overseas…)

The Resource Conservation and Recovery act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Conservation_and_Re...

And toxic substance control acts seemed to rules of note.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_Substances_Control_Act...

GE silicones [1]https://www.epa.gov/hwcorrectiveactionsites/hazardous-waste-...

In this case the spelling nazis had rightfully pointed to the correct spelling, because the wrong spelling is not a problem of style or preferences, but it causes a confusion between two different chemical substances, with very different properties and applications.

"silicon" is the chemical element number 14, and this name, which is used in the English-speaking countries, was coined by someone who believed that it is a good idea for it to rhyme with "carbon" (actually a bad idea in my opinion)

"silicone" is the generic name for a class of plastics, i.e. the polymers with a poly-siloxane structure. This name was coined by someone who believed that it is a good idea for it to rhyme with "acetone", because he erroneously believed that these polymers have a structure similar to ketones.

Thank you. Not trying to be a spelling nazi, just that those two tend to get mixed up quite a bit and can cause people confusion.

It's not less chemical intensive at all. Some aqueous processes have replaced more toxic ones. But dissolved copper and solvent waste makes up the majority of ever fabs waste stream. TSMC/Intel etc have made pretty big strides in zero landfill hazardous waste. It just gets recycled and used in other processes internally or by other companies.

I don't know what the Chinese fabs do, so I have no idea if pump their waste out into the environment.

> dissolved copper

You would think that dissolved copper would have some recovery value, given the price of copper.

I am reminded of the waste from silver halide photographic processing, which at one point was just dumped into rivers (an unfortunate amount went into the Great Lakes); when the price of silver increased, suddenly it became worthwhile to recover the silver rather than let it go down the literal drain.

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