Not every climate-change mitigation strategy is appropriate for TI, and we must weigh each greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction decision by balancing sustainability progress against practical cost considerations. That’s why we currently focus our efforts on reducing emissions from two primary areas – perfluorocarbons (PFCs) and energy use – which make up the majority of our emissions..
PFC emissions
PFCs are a group of chemicals vital to semiconductor manufacturing; unfortunately, they may also contribute to global warming. Our industry recognizes that although the volume of such chemicals used may be small, we are still challenged to find technically and economically feasible alternatives that further reduce PFC emissions while preserving product quality.
As part of a 10-year, industrywide voluntary memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), TI reported PFC emissions to the agency, supporting a 10 percent reduction of emissions from a 1995 baseline through 2010. The industry successfully achieved and far surpassed that goal and will establish a new goal in 2011.
We also report PFC and other GHG emissions to the World Semiconductor Council as part of the U.S. industry report and Carbon Disclosure Project, a group of institutional investors that encourage private- and public-sector organizations to measure, manage and reduce emissions and climate-change impacts.
Energy
The production of energy generates carbon dioxide (CO2), a GHG emission. Because TI’s manufacturing equipment consumes the most energy in our operations, we amended our equipment purchase and usage protocols to promote efficiency and reduce energy use where feasible.
In recent years, chiller optimization has saved thousands of megawatt-hours of energy, and the recovery of heat from water-cooling loops to heat building air has conserved a significant quantity of energy as well. We have a strategy for and a variety of other measures to reduce energy use in all aspects of operations worldwide.
