(641f) Sustainability Study on Point of Use Scrubber Canister Used in Semiconductor Industry

In general, sustainability is about balancing economic, environmental and social factors. Sustainable development is about maintaining current grow without scarifying resources for future generations. Making sustainable improvement is about making decisions in improving the sustainability level of an entity. If this entity is a product, the life of this product is considered from the raw materials making this product to until this product becomes wastes and being disposed. Common practice is about making sustainability measurements on the lifetime of a product from its raw materials stage to until it is waste itself. This type of studies requires great resources and long time.

In this paper sustainability measurement tool is used but not to measure the static sustainability level of a product and the measurement target is not the whole life span of a product but only its wastes. The sustainability measurement tool is used as guidelines with alternations to compare the wastes management methods of a product. By targeting the wastes and comparing their waste management options, it is believed the resources and time required can be reduced significantly. The target of this paper is the point of use dry scrubber canister which are used to abate the exhaust gases from semiconductor reactors. The results presents in this paper are based on specifically stated assumptions and conditions. The main goal of this paper is not the results but to show the alternative use of sustainability metrics such as to facilitate the process to make sustainable improvement decisions in a semiconductor wastes.

There are two reasons semiconductor industry wastes is chosen as target in this paper: (1) semiconductor industry is a major contributor of toxic wastes, and (2) there are no known sustainability study has been done on the point of use dry scrubber canister as wastes themselves.

There are 2 topics which are seldom mentioned in research papers are attended in this paper:

• sustainable measurements are used as selection tools instead of measurement tool only
• apply sustainable study on semiconductor wastes