Saving the earth with green chips

Saving the
earth with
green chips

Charging your battery less often contributes to lower carbon emission levels and that’s why Samsung’s low-carbon semiconductors are made to provide longer battery life. They’re also designed to be energy-efficient since they’re used in applications that can generate quite a lot of heat by processing huge amounts of data such as in AI, big data and autonomous driving. Our green efforts are also applied to the entire manufacturing process by minimizing the environmental impact of each stage.

Even as we speak, an incredible amount of heat is being generated from online activities like searching, streaming and gaming, and from the data centers where the data is being stored. This is where our chips come in. If all data center memory was replaced with Samsung SSDs, we could save 7 terawatt hours (TWh) a year – that’s enough energy to power all households in New York City for four months straight.

Four DRAM solutions, three SSDs and two e-storage devices have earned Carbon Footprint certifications from the U.K.-based The Carbon Trust. Of these, our Portable SSD T7 Touch was also awarded the Low Carbon Product certification from the Korean Ministry of Environment.

In June 2018, we announced plans to use 100% renewable energy at all our sites in the U.S. and China by 2020. We reached our goal a year early in 2019, and have replaced all fossil fuel usage with renewable energy.

Every Samsung Semiconductor site has a renewable energy facility. In 2019, we built a 1.5-megawatt (MW) solar power plant in Giheung and the following year, a 0.4MW solar power plant in Pyeongtaek. And since then, the two sites have been running on renewable energy.

5.68 million tons. That’s the amount of greenhouse gases we reduced during 2020 which is a further 16% reduction from greenhouse gases emitted in 2019. This is thanks to our continued efforts toward sustainability including the large-scale solar power plants we built on our Giheung and Pyeongtaek sites.

All Samsung Semiconductor manufacturing sites have received Zero Waste to Landfill validation of Gold level and above by third-party industry testing and certification organization, UL. The validation is a key indicator in evaluating a company’s efforts toward a circular economy with higher awards given to higher percentage of waste used as resources. DSR Tower at our Hwaseong site acquired Platinum level, the highest recognition, and all other sites were awarded Gold.

Since the late 90s, we have been making the transition to a circular economy. One approach was to take the huge amounts of sludge generated from the manufacturing process and reuse it as raw material for cement. In 2018, we set our zero waste emissions goal and invested in research facilities to study how we can recycle the different kinds of waste. We also provided financial support to our partners to build facilities and carried out research to improve the efficiency of dehydration pumps and filters.

To raise awareness of the importance of recycling, we started an internal “Empty, clean and separate” campaign and began by changing the types and locations of the on-site recycling bins. We also increased the types of recyclables from six to 10. Since the campaign started we have seen a huge decrease in the amount of trash thrown out daily by an average of 1.2 tons and an average 7.2-ton increase in monthly recycling. Today 57,000 of our employees in Korea continue to empty, clean and separate.

At Samsung Semiconductor, we take water management seriously because water is an important part of our manufacturing process and how we use it effects the environment. Working with environmental groups, we purified Osan Stream that carries water discharged by our Giheung Plant and saw the return of otters typically known to survive only in clean water. We are also the first in the industry to be awarded the Water Footprint certification from the U.K.-based The Carbon Trust.

Our semiconductor sites continue to improve manufacturing processes and research alternative chemicals to replace hazardous chemical substances. In particular, we are developing non-hazardous treatments to use in wastewater treatment. As a result, we’ve seen reductions in the usage of hazardous chemicals by approximately 18% from 2018 to 2020.

In 2020, we surpassed our goal of reducing the amount of water we use by 2% and saw a reduction of 3,844 million tons in water used. This was possible thanks to our team of water experts. And that’s why we operate over 30 technical training programs for our employees as part of our efforts to manage water in a sustainable way.