IBM estimates 250,000 silicon wafers are produced every day throughout the world to make semiconductor chips for computers, mobile phones, video games and other consumer electronics. About 3.3% of these wafers are scrapped because they need to be near perfect to be used in electronic products.

The wafers contain intellectual property and cannot be sent to outside vendors to be reclaimed, so they are crushed and sent to landfills or melted down and resold.

Through its reclamation process, IBM is able to remove the intellectual property from the wafer surface. This makes them available either for reuse in internal manufacturing operations or for sale to the solar cell industry, to meet a growing demand for the same silicon material to produce photovoltaic cells for solar panels.

“One of the challenges facing the solar industry is a severe shortage of silicon, which threatens to stall its rapid growth,” said Charles Bai, CFO of Chinese solar energy company ReneSola.

“This is why we have turned to reclaimed silicon materials sourced primarily from the semiconductor industry to supply the raw material our company needs to manufacture solar panels.”

The reclamation process is currently being used in IBM’s northern US manufacturing facility in Vermont, with plans to introduce the technology to its plant in New York.

For the Vermont site, the annual savings in 2006 were more than US$500,000 ($540,000). The projected ongoing annual savings for 2007 is about US$1.5 million ($1.6 million).

IBM has also engaged Neuwing Energy Ventures, a verifier of energy efficiency projects, to document and verify the energy savings US clients achieve through implementing energy efficiency projects.

Data centres can consume as much as 15 times more energy per square metre than a typical office building and in some cases can be 100 times more energy intensive.

Clients will be provided with recommendations to reduce power consumption, such as upgrading equipment and fixing data centre design flaws.

This will earn them certificates that can then be traded for cash on the growing energy efficiency certificate market. Certificates can also be used to demonstrate the company’s commitment to reducing greenhouse emissions.

Energy efficiency certificates will be available first in the US but IBM hopes to extend the scheme to Europe in 2008.