Intel has recently announced that their newest chips (and all future chips) are going to be lead-free. And this is not 99.99% (like we see for batteries and some other applications for various materials) but 100% lead free. 

Intel on Tuesday said its future microprocessors will be lead free, a move that coincides with the tech industry trend toward more environmentally friendly products. The chipmaker said its "green" processors would start with its next generation Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, and Xeon products. Production of the 45-nanometer processors is set to begin the second half of this year.

There are a number of unpleasant chemicals inside the case of the average PC. But things are starting to get better. European RoHS standards (which we've mentioned before) require reductions or elimination of many of these chemicals. 

Unforunately, lead is not the most egregious of these chemicals, and the CPU chip is not the greatest source of contamination inside a PC case. Brominated fire retardants among other chemicals inside the case are more worrying to us than lead is. We're generally more excited about announcements of new processors with lower energy demands, because those have a bigger impact than the relatively tiny amount of some elements in the chips. But it's good to see manufacturers continuing with these incremental steps, as well as the bigger ones.

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