Addressing Sustainability Across Manufacturing and Distribution Sectors in 2025

The primary goal of integrating environmental sustainability in electronic equipment and product manufacturing is to minimize waste and greenhouse gases across the end-to-end electronics supply chain. 

Specific areas include extracting raw materials for manufacturing, using products and equipment, recycling, disposing of, and end-of-life of finished products and manufacturing. 

Sustainability in the Semiconductor and Distribution Sectors

Environmental sustainability is a big deal in all corners of the high-tech industry. Reducing industrialization’s environmental impact is a globally accepted imperative within the sector. Efforts have accelerated in recent years across the industry, and more studies warn of what lies ahead if action is not forthcoming.

Many companies in the industry are engaged, from component and parts manufacturers to distributors. As a leading distributor of electronic components, Avnet takes its environmental responsibilities seriously. 

The company is an active member of the Electronic Components Industry Association (ECIA) and the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). With these and other organizations, Avnet is one example of how distributors are helping to address the global electronics industry’s environmental impact. 

Improving Environmental Credentials 

The chip industry recognizes that semiconductor manufacturing consumes resources and produces significant greenhouse gasses (GHGs). A large semiconductor fab can use the same amount of power as 50,000 homes and as much as 9 million gallons of water per day. 

Chip companies know they produce significant amounts of greenhouse gasses (GHGs). For example, one semiconductor fab can use as much power as 50,000 homes and 9 million gallons of water daily. 

In November 2022, SEMI launched the Semi Climate Consortium to address the sustainability challenges. The consortium includes 60 founding members from across the semiconductor value chain. 

Its focus is to reduce GHG emissions, establish decarbonization targets to reach net zero by 2050, and report its progress toward reducing Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. Scope 1 is direct emissions the company owns or controls. Scope 2 and 3 are indirect emissions produced by third parties. They are not made, owned, or controlled by the company but are included in its total GHG. 

Consumer Goods: Apple’s Commitment to Sustainability

Companies that sell directly to the consumer are perhaps the most conscious about having the most at stake when evoking the image of being environmentally sensitive. Apple is one company that stands out when it comes to being environmentally responsible, as it allocates considerable time and energy to promoting its environmental efforts. 

Toward this goal, Apple claims that 22% of the materials shipped in its 2023 products came from recycled and renewable sources. For example, Apple’s enclosures for the Macintosh are made from 100% recycled aluminum. Also, the company claims that 12.8 million devices and accessories went to new owners for reuse in 2023. 

In September 2023, Apple announced its newest Apple Watch products would be carbon neutral. That means they are produced using 100% clean electricity for manufacturing and product use, 30% recycled or renewable material by weight, and 50% shipping without air transportation.

Apple aims to reduce its carbon emissions to zero by 2030 by recycling and using renewable materials, clean electricity, and low-carbon shipping. 

Small Changes Make an Impact

Making the semiconductor sector more sustainable could be seen as many small wins that add to big strides. Making a chip that consumes less energy adds up when considering how many populated servers are in a data center. Sustainability is further compounded by using “cleaner materials.” 

Chipmaking requires many materials, including silicon wafers, gas, chemicals, and water. Implementing circular economy principles through process optimization and waste reduction lowers the environmental footprint involved in chipmaking, as does recycling the end products when they reach the end of their life.

The challenge is to balance the trade-offs of using cleaner materials while still getting the desired characteristics and a technology that can scale. Atomera is applying its MST to planar memory and other planar devices at advanced nodes where there’s an opportunity to address standby power, including sensors. “We believe you could save more than 50% of the standby power,” Mears said. 

Mears at Atomera sees the company’s Mears Silicon Technology (MST) as inherently green. It consists of layers of a non-semiconductor, such as oxygen, inserted into a semiconductor material, such as silicon, to preserve epitaxial growth. Over the longer term, it breaks down into sand, he said. 

Even a 10% reduction in power consumption in any semiconductor adds to considerable savings, especially considering how much electricity is consumed by global data centers and computers. This technology has a vast amount of potential energy savings. 

Nvidia’s head of data center product marketing, Dion Harris, said the overall goal of getting better performance from generation to generation aims to improve performance within the same power envelope, if not lower. 

The company’s accelerated computing approach has shifted the per-watt dynamic in the data center. “We pioneered this whole approach around using GPUs not just to speed up the application but to give you more performance per watt.” 

On the materials front, the semiconductor industry has room for improvement. For instance, it is not a significant contributor to the circular economy as just over 9% of materials extracted from nature are recirculated back, and that figure is dropping. “There’s a large opportunity there to improve our circularity index and emissions, ” Harris says.

Momentum is building among integrated circuit vendors to change the chip industry. Global efforts are underway to make the semiconductor supply chain more sustainable, and leading manufacturers are openly committing to carbon neutrality deadlines.

Enabling Sustainability Leaders

Supplyframe recently launched a new feature within our solutions called Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) that is designed to help sustainability leaders take control of scope 3 smissions in their supply chains.

This new capability allows for real-time CO2 emissions information on over 300 million electronic parts. With 40% of a total product’s environmental impact coming from scope 3 emissions like these, this data can help designers and engineers make a measurable impact from the earliest days of a product’s lifecycle.

Learn more about how Supplyframe is helping manufacturers and distributors with Intelligence for What’s Next at Supplyframe.com.