Opportunities and costs present themselves as industries assimilate environmental concerns.
Growing while green—that challenge faces all industries, but relatively few have the opportunity shared by semiconductor, electronic components and IT companies to help other industries, and the public in general, reduce emissions of pollutants and conserve energy.
At each stage of the process by which raw materials become electronic devices, manufacturers have a particular set of environmental problems to deal with. But the continuum of industries has huge opportunities to help the rest of society.
One example: By developing flat-panel television and monitor screens, the electronics industry has been able to eliminate the need for lead in CRT glass as a protective filter from x-rays.
Another: Semiconductor chips in cars maximize the efficiency with which their engines burn fuel and ensure emissions control devices are work properly.
Semiconductors and Circuit Boards
The industry starts with semiconductor manufacturers, whose biggest challenge is not managing individual pollutants but knowing what regulations are coming so as to be ready when they render a processing chemical unavailable, says Chuck Fraust, director of environment, safety and health at the Semiconductor Industry Association in San Jose, Calif.
"We've moved from wet etching to dry etching over the past decades, eliminating some unpleasant chemicals," he says. "Then when the ozone layer came to be of concern, we switched from ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons to perfluorinated compounds. Now these are considered greenhouse gasses, so the industry is working with the EPA to reduce its emissions of them to 10 percent below 1995 levels by 2010."
Opportunities for the industry abound, created in part by the pressure to reduce energy use and emissions, and in part by consumer desires for smaller, more powerful devices.
The SIA notes ways in which chip technology is helping to make equipment perform better, from the role they play in hybrid cars to the energy they save in LCD screens. Chips make computers smaller, so they consume less materials and energy. In general, modern economies use chips to decrease the energy impact of other devices.
Also using materials considered pollutants, the circuit board industry is subject to similar regulation. It's under pressure to reduce the use of heavy metals such as lead as well as brominated fire retardants among other organics compounds, to reduce the amount of water it uses and to clean up what it does discharge.
It, too, must keep up with legislation and regulation that will affect its manufacturing processes and emissions from an environmental standpoint, says Krista Botsford, president and founder of Botsford EcoTech Partners, based in Nashua, N.H.
However, the industry has the same opportunities: profiting from the push to get more mileage from the mega- or microwatt. As Botsford explains, "Programs like 'Energy Star' take advantage of efficiencies made possible by the PCB industry, and consumers are looking for products that use less energy to pack more punch."
She cites the cell phone battery as a basic example. "People want what a lot of power can provide, such as Internet usage and video, but they want low-power usage and longer battery life," she says. "There's an opportunity."
Electronic Systems
The electronics industry, too, faces constraints on its use of heavy metals such as mercury and lead, even though there may be "good and valid reasons for including them in a product," says Parker Brugge, vice president of environmental affairs and corporate sustainability at the Consumer Electronics Association in Arlington, Va. An industry focus on eco-design has minimized the use of such materials or found substitutes, he adds.
Some manufacturers are working to cut the amount of energy their products use, as well as that used in making them. Dell, for example, has announced an initiative to cut the energy draw of its personal computers 25 percent by 2010. Among its techniques will be better power management, fans and more efficient power supplies and fans.
The electronics industry also sees its products as solutions, Brugge says. "Consumer products typically account for a small percent of the energy used in a home, but they enable people to save energy—sometimes quite a lot of it. For example, they make it possible for people to telecommute, engage in telecommerce and enjoy entertainment at home rather than drive to a movie theater."
TelePresence meeting solutions that give meeting attendees a strong sense of reality have proven they can cut large amounts of travel and save concomitant amounts of energy. These virtual solutions, offered by several vendors, feature large displays, some of which show people in conference rooms even thousands of miles away as life-size. They can create a strong sense of intimacy much like a face-to-face meeting.
A Major End User—the Data Center
Electronic products that end up in data centers can show dramatic benefits. At San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Systems Inc., "blade servers [modular chassis that can accommodate single or multifunctional components] perform the work previously done by a full-size server, but they're much smaller so the processing power of a rack increases many-fold," says Rob Aldrich data center solutions manager. The energy consumed per rack increases only by a factor of three.
But if you put a lot of processing power, however efficient, in one place, you use a lot of electricity. Aldrich cites a report the EPA made to Congress in August 2007, stating that 1.5 percent of all power generated in the United States goes to data centers. "This is not surprising," he says, "when you consider that a typical large enterprise data center can consume 5 Mw of electricity." One solution is virtualization, he says, "probably the best thing one can do today to improve the operating efficiency of an IT operation." Virtualization eliminates the barriers of having IT infrastructure tied to applications," thus allowing you to parcel out application workload from homogenous groups. It promotes an increased IT asset utilization, which has a direct correlation to electrical efficiency. The savings in both capital investment and energy is an opportunity.
Another critical step before adopting any solution being billed as "green", Aldrich says, is to audit energy usage across the data center and make it more efficient where possible. This can mean adopting quarterly utilization audits for data center assets, and both IT and facilities provide a baseline metric to work towards improving operative efficiency. He also recommends specifying energy-efficient products when buying for the data center.
