The appliance of paper science

摘要

The price of electronics has been dropping steadily for decades. What were once luxury, high-tech articles are now commonplace, and microprocessors are being incorporated into ever-more numerous appliances and devices as the prefix 'smart' becomes almost oxymoronic for both consumer devices and, increasingly, industrial machinery and tools. But there is still a choke-point because the price of making electronics cannot go below a certain level. The silicon and germanium-based materials of which transistors and their derivative products, microchips, are made have an associated cost, both in financial and environmental terms. No matter what economies of scale are employed by their manufacturers, they still require high-temperature processing and the use of chemicals that must be removed from factory waste or otherwise treated to render them harmless before discharge from the factory.