This is terrible. All the more because the chips are incredibly important, both for the manufacturers and us consumers.
Same goes with Solar panels. An acquaintance with chemical engineering degree worked in the industry and he said it's so ironic that the ingredients for manufacturing solar panels are so incredibly toxic when the goal of having solar panels is to reduce pollution caused by fossil burning power plants.
That's not exactly irony. Almost every product has dangerous phases of production. Home exercise equipment started its manufactured life as molten steel. Baby aspirin starts its manufactured life as a bunch of acutely toxic and corrosive chemicals. You wouldn't want either of those hazards in your home, but it's not dangerous to use the final products. It's the same way with solar panels: if the manufacturer takes care, the final product has a low environmental impact.
By way of contrast there is no way to use internal-combustion power without emitting a lot of CO2, even if the oil driller, refiner, and fuel retailer all devote extraordinary care to environmental and safety issues before the fuel reaches a car's gas tank.
On that last: if your fuel isn't fossil-based, then yes, your internal (or external) combustion engine is in fact carbon-neutral.
Coal surpassed wood as a fuel in the US only in the 1880s. Options for replacing current fossil-fuel use, even within only limited transport applications (sea and air travel) at present rates of use would be extraordinarily difficult, though within the realms of possibility. Seawater-based Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis being among the more interesting possibilities.
Same goes with Solar panels. An acquaintance with chemical engineering degree worked in the industry and he said it's so ironic that the ingredients for manufacturing solar panels are so incredibly toxic when the goal of having solar panels is to reduce pollution caused by fossil burning power plants.