Establishing Wastewater Process Goals in an Ever-changing Environment

Cooper, Tom
(Intel, Santra Clara, CA)

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“So, what is your wastewater discharge permit limit for constuent ‘X'” is a common question posed to the environmental professional responsible for a site’s POTW-issued permit compliance program. In today’s world of semiconductor manufacturing, where everything seems to change so rapidly, this is really only a very small part of the “real” question. Instead, the question should be “does your company have an adminsitrative process in place to ensure that your company will not violate the 3 key tenets of US/Int’l law governing wastewater discharges to POTWs?” Those three tenets are 1) don’t cause pass-through, 2) don’t cause interference, and 3) don’t impact the POTW’s abilty to manage their sludge and reuse their wastewater. In many cases, and specifically in regards to future planned discharges, the permit limit may not be strict enough. The purpose of this paper is to delineate a “process” used by Intel Corporation for developing future wastewater goals. This administrative process helps us predict Fab effluent (as well as site-specific POTW influent/effluent) quality and quantity in the future in order to determine what if any internal or external infrastructure changes are needed “today” to allow continued growth “tomorrow” without impacting the POTW or, more importantly, the environment

Back to SESHA 26th Annual Symposium (2004)