The way things stand, most of our gadgets have toxic compounds, and manufacturing them includes the use of more toxic compounds. Many companies have made conscious attempts to eliminate these toxins but there has been little success. And that is exactly why IBM deserves kudos for eliminating the use of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) compounds from the company’s chip manufacturing business.

IBM is the first company to phase out these toxins from all known uses of these compounds, making e-waste a tad less toxic. These compounds were used for imprinting designs and for embedding patterns for silicon chips. It took IBM a number of years to phase out their use, mainly because they had to look for an alternate compound that would do a job as good as these toxic ones, without putting the chips through any fall in quality.

IBM is making this technology available to other companies as well, and they say that many have already received the solution “through their technology development alliances with IBM.”

Source: TreeHugger

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