In chip making they remove all the impurities making it PURE h20, which is in fact too pure to be just dumped back in the ground, needs to be re-mineralized before it can be dumped.

If that's all that it needs, why would they not recycle it back into the water supply?

From the same verge article:

> Last year, the company pledged that by 2030 it will restore and return more freshwater than it uses. It’s nearing that benchmark in Arizona, where Intel says it cleaned up and returned 95 percent of the freshwater it used in 2020

Yeah.

It's unfortunate that alongside this incredibly important detail the article carries a bunch of highly judgemental wording that encourages people to incorrectly interpret "use" not as "cycle through" but as "remove from water supply and banish to a superfund site."

The rest of the comment section is guilty of this too.

I fully appreciate the need for independent verification, but assuming the worst is not that, and it actually leads to bad incentives in the same way as assuming the best (or refusing to think about it at all) leads to bad incentives.

yeah. If there is something I’m missing, hopefully someone can point out what it is, because I don’t really understand why this matters.

Historically, companies have shown that they will do the worst imaginable.

The bar needs to be set high on holding them too account, or else the shareholders will get their way and Arizona will gets new superfund site. Being charitable will be abused by companies

Probably better to just re-filter it back to pure H2O and reuse on site.

Clean, pure, delicious semiconductor wastewater.

You do understand that literal sewage is treated and returned to the water supply just fine

"It's got what plants crave"

"It's got electrolytes!"

> which is in fact too pure to be just dumped back in the ground, needs to be re-mineralized before it can be dumped

how so? isn't rainwater also "pure H2O"?

Good question. I assume rainwater picks up minerals naturally as it filters through dirt and whatnot, but then why couldn't that be the case for fab wastewater? It also makes me think about the sheer amount of polluted filth that must wash out of a city after it gets rained on.

No, rainwater has dissolved air and dust in it.

Sounds like an excellent candidate for re-use.