When we use less energy and water to operate our manufacturing facilities, it’s not just our company that benefits. Our customers, communities and the environment do too.
To guide us in our efforts, Micron set goals in 2017 to increase our water and waste recycling and decrease energy use and associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
To understand the environmental impact of our operations, it is helpful to understand our manufacturing processes. We manufacture memory chips (or die) at our front-end facilities (fabs) in Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and the United States. Using state-of-the-art processes, we add and subtract specialized materials to silicon wafers to create our memory and storage solutions.
Micron’s manufacturing takes place at the nanoscale in a cleanroom environment. Each wafer goes through numerous manufacturing steps, where chemicals and materials are precisely applied to develop the functionality of each chip. Airborne particles, temperature and humidity are tightly controlled to ensure quality as the wafer passes hundreds of times through up to 10 process areas, each with a unique set of tools. From the moment a new wafer enters the fab until all steps are finished, this process can take more than a month. Once complete, a wafer is divided into its constituent die, which are then assembled into numerous customized formats, designed to enable myriad technologies. This back-end operation takes place at our facilities in Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia and China.
These processes require energy to run the specialized equipment in the fab and maintain the cleanroom environment, use water to ensure the cleanliness and quality of the wafer, and involve potentially hazardous chemicals. We strive to minimize the impact of these operations by improving energy efficiency, recycling and reusing water, reducing reliance on local groundwater supplies, properly and safely managing chemicals used in the manufacturing process, and reviewing all materials we bring into our manufacturing environment to identify potential risks.
To guide us in our efforts, Micron set goals in 2017 to increase our water and waste recycling and decrease energy use and associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We continue to make progress toward these goals, including implementing energy savings projects to achieve a 10% savings by 2022, using 2016 as our baseline year. We are conducting a review of these goals in 2019 and expect to provide updates in our 2020 reporting. Our performance is highlighted in the section below.