"Current costs to remove perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs), a subclass of PFAS, from the environment at the same rate they are being added were estimated here at 20 to 7000 trillion USD per year."
--Ling, A.L. 2024. “Estimated Scale of Costs to Remove PFAS from the Environment at Current Emission Rates.” Science of the Total Environment 918. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.170647.
Carbon Fixation
It is common practice for companies in the electronics sector to publish annual environmental reports. These reports can be very enlightening. After all, they represent a story about a given company in a situation in […]
Rebound Bites Google
Google’s new environmental report for 2024 is out and it makes some remarkable disclosures. Both The Register (Mann 2024) and The Guardian (Milmo 2024) have reported on the 48 percent rise in Google’s carbon output […]
Right to Repair on CBC’s ‘The Signal’
CBC’s ‘The Signal’ hosted an hour long discussion of right to repair. I got to share the mic with Audrey Parnell who is a board member of the St. John’s Tool Library and doing a […]
Interview on CBC’s ‘On the Go’
A short interview about semiconductor manufacturing and the climate emergency. The audio is here: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-47-on-the-go/clip/16064904-semiconductors-climate-change The[…]
"The electronics sector is so symbolic of what’s going on in the world. It’s a very narrow aperture that allows you to see a very broad field of problems." See Tech's Toll.
$6.6 billion in public money for tsmc: what about the water?
Fortune picks up the story on the CHIPS Act, semiconductor manufacturing, water stress, and the climate emergency: “But in Phoenix, where the factories are going to be built, TSMC faces a lingering question: Where’s the […]
Climate change puts global semiconductor manufacturing at risk.
Can the industry cope? Josh Lepawsky, Memorial University of Newfoundland Semiconductors are the basic building blocks of microchips. These technological marvels are in everything from lightbulbs and toothbrushes to cars, trains and planes, not to mention […]
New Data set Available: Global semiconductor manufacturing locations
The data set provides unique latitude and longitude coordinates for 1,393 semiconductor manufacturing facilities. For full details, see: Lepawsky, Josh. 2024. ‘Climate Change Induced Water Stress and Future Semiconductor Supply Chain Risk’. iScience, January, 108791. […]
Software Centricity
Discard studies offers an important concept for tech criticism: defamiliarization. The concept comes from the worlds of art and theatre and basically refers to some sort of device that helps make the familiar or taken […]
Electronic Planet Research Lab 
You must be logged in to post a comment.