THE clean, gleaming image of the modern computer belies its true environmental cost. The microchips inside computers may be tiny, but their impact on the environment is huge. Simply making a basic memory chip and running it for the typical lifespan of a computer eats up 800 times the chip’s own weight in fossil fuel.
Energy analysts in Japan, France and Virginia have worked out the hidden costs of the silicon age by tracing the life of a chip through every stage of production, from raw materials to final product. While a single 32-megabyte memory chip weighs 2 grams, the…
