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Silicon Hell 158

Posted by michael from the how-capitalism-protects-the-environment dept.
ferlatte writes: "There's a great piece on the effects of the tech industry in Silicon Valley on the environment and their workers. Pretty scary stuff, and sort of unsettling to think about how many toxic substances went into that shiny new laptop. The story is available at http://www.sfbg.com/News/34/30/siliconhell.html." Maybe the industry needs to set up "PolluteE", a "watchdog" agency to make sure companies post their pollution policies prominently on their Web sites...Update: 05/04 11:08 by michael : A good link from the comments: the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.
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Silicon Hell More

Silicon Hell

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  • Evironmental storys are always "scary stuff," they write it that way. And most of the time, its nothing but hyperbolie
  • I wonder if in 20 or so years we'll start to see medical problems arise from exposure to computer related substances? By that I mean something similar to the asbestosis suffered by people who worked with asbestos back before they realised it could seriously damage your lungs. (Or back before they decided to tell anyone.)

    Be a tragedy of monumental proportions to see the industry that has pushed forward the boundaries of technology so far wind up costing people their lives.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • post their pollution policies prominently on their websites
    How about at the bottom of any advertising, like cigarettes?

    More seriously, any company with a good (anti)polution policy - including biproducts of the manufacturing process itself - typically shouts it from the rooftops. The trick is to get consumers to consider it in a purchase.

  • Toxic Waste Map of Silicon Valley (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @04:11PM (#1093601)
    Check out http://www.svtc.org/ [svtc.org] for detailed maps of all the toxic sites in Silicon Valley. Very scary.

  • huh? (Score:1)

    by delmoi ( 26744 )
    what the hell are you talking about?

    People have already been exposed to computers for over twenty years, and while there is some (mostly baseless) concerns about the genetic effects of plastics, there isn't much more plastic in computers then anything else. Its not like people are going inside there cases an licking there motherboards, and unlike asbestos, the stuff in computers doesn't become particles in the air.


  • "Sterile suits?" (Score:3)

    by Booker ( 6173 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @04:14PM (#1093603) Homepage
    I had a bit of a hard time with the article since it started right off saying that cleanroom workers wear "sterile suits." Of course they're not sterile... they're clean. Keeps dander and the like off of your shiny new Athlon.

    There are some pretty scary chemicals used in the semiconductor manufacturing process, though. Take HF, for instance - it'll leach the calcium out of your bones. Through your skin. (This same substance is used in alloy wheel cleaner...). Some of the gases that go into the mix are morbidly called "two-step" gases - one whiff, take two steps, and you're dead.

    Of course this is all taken pretty seriously. Worker safety is extremely important - organizations like Semi have very strict requirements on safety interlocks for the processing equipment, for example.

    As far as environmental impact goes, I think it's becoming important as well. Applied Materials, the largest manufacturer of semiconductor processing equipment, has a "Green Initiative" which seeks to minimize environmental damage in the manufacturing process. Take for example this press release [appliedmaterials.com]:

    SANTA CLARA, Calif., October 7, 1997 -- Applied Materials, Inc., the leading supplier of CVD (chemical vapor deposition) systems to the worldwide semiconductor industry, has introduced a key technology innovation for its dielectric CVD products that provides the industry's first zero-consumables chamber cleaning process and virtually eliminates PFC (perfluorocompound) emissions.

    "Applied Materials is very concerned about global warming gases used in the semiconductor industry and is voluntarily leading an effort, in cooperation with its customers, to find ways to eliminate their emission. Our Remote Plasma Clean technology not only provides a breakthrough in environmental safety by virtually eliminating global warming emissions from dielectric CVD systems...

    So yeah, there's a lot of scary stuff, but I think the industry does make a real effort to keep it under control. The article was a bit shocking, though... I hadn't heard those stories...

    ---
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • ...especially with the short life span, but Wired [wired.com] ran a great story (available 2000.05.16) in the last issue about using Flywheels [activepower.com] instead of lead-acid batteries. When can I get a Flywheel UPS?
  • This may or may not be relevant, but scorecard.org [scorecard.org] has info on who makes what pollution where. Additionally, it has contacts so you can email or send a fax to companies that are polluting your area. Check it out!
  • Many of the horror stories presented were easily preventable. For example, the lead item about the exploding barrel of nitric acid made me wonder. Why hadn't they neutralized the acid with a base? That would have made storage for disposal much safer.

    Some of the accidents were probably caused by tired people, like the worker who accidently mixed alcohol, nitric acid, and hydrofluoric acid. He survived the fireball, but died soon later. Many of the IC fabs require employees to work 12 hour shifts to reduce particulate introduction into the clean rooms. Near the end of a shift people are so tired that they aren't thinking straight. My brother worked in a fab for a few years, but quit. The money just wasn't worth the strain on his system.
    --

  • Working around harsh chemicals may give you cancer? Who'd a thunk it?
  • Part of the problem with flywheels is that if they come apart, they kill people... there's a sh*tload of energy stored up, and it's moving really really fast... one cool solution I've heard is to make it out of a tightly wound kevlar cord - then if it fails, it just turns into a ball of spaghetti instead of flying shrapnel in the mall parking lot. :-)

    ---

  • Hmm... (Score:4)

    by Shoeboy ( 16224 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @04:20PM (#1093610) Homepage
    From the article:
    The company's legally required material-safety data sheets warned of possible nausea and dizziness from the chemical-filled tubs over which he worked, Loanzan said, "but they didn't say anything about tumors. They never talked about the place being dangerous."
    Correct me if I'm wrong here, but don't the material-safety data sheets HAVE to state it if the chemical is a known carcinogen? And seriously, is acetone all that carcinogenic? I used to wear nail polish, and I hate to think of how many tumors I caused myself while removing that stuff.
    Here's another one:
    One of the main ingredients in the cutting fluid, according to Hawes, has been linked in studies to brain cancer.
    Hmm, what's this mystery ingredient? Anyone know? Who did the studies? Why is a lawyer being quoted on the subject of whether or not something causes cancer?
    Now the concerns raised in the article may be quite valid, but the fearmongering crap makes it almost impossible to take seriously.
    --Shoeboy
    (former microserf)
  • From the way the /. post was worded, it almost sounds like NAS (Nerve Attenuation Syndrom, I think it was) from the movie Johnny Mnemonic. :P
  • It's not surprising that stories like this spring up every so often. The majority of complicated manufacturing processes produce a lot of toxic waste, but readers don't like being told their, say, car is bad for the world because they like it. Take a product that's despised or misunderstood, like computers, and indicate that it might be bad for you and the story is eaten up.

    Next week, how tax can kill your unborn child.

  • The article mentions OSHA inspections, but apparently they couldn't levy very much in the way of fines because they had no conclusive scientific evidence that the chemicals they found are linked to various workplace health hazards.

  • This is an excellent story (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is the first story of its type, and I give full credit to the author for being an excellent, first-rate muckraker!
  • I once did a brief contract at Lam Research, and I had to go through a hazardous materials briefing, althought the most deangerous chemical in the systems room was the first system. The briefing scared the pants off of me. It was basically "Here's how all the various chemicals can kill you." Flourine sucks the calcium from your bones and heart. Various acids will eat you alive. Those of you who think the bunny suits are cute, remember - they are not just for decorations. :-)
  • Scary scary stuff. Anytime you start playing with the environment things get spooky.

    I can't remember where I saw it, but up here in Michigan (DetroitMetro) there are something like 20 locations that are considered hazardous. There is a website out there that lists the address/location and why it's been catagorized as such.

    Anyway, around here there's an empty parking lot directly across from an old Burrough's (calculator) factory. It's now Unisys. But, for some odd reason the parking lot was never used and was chained off after Burrough's went under, and then a mysterious small fenced-off building was built on the lot.

    As I was looking on the site, I saw that this location was considered "very hazardous", and was in "cleanup" currently. When we were kids we played in that lot!!! Scary!!!!!!!!!!!

  • They will only very slowly make their way into the market. There was a company trying to make an electric car that used flywheels for storage, instead of dry cells. I don't think anything ever came of it.

    Right now, there are companies working on using flywheels as UPS's, but only for very large-scale installations. For instance, currently telco central offices have massive racks of batteries as backup. These exist purely to power the telephone switches for the 30+ seconds that it takes to fire up the diesel generator in the case of a power outage.

    When you are talking about replacing *rooms* of batteries with one, big flywheel, then it is economical -- and certainly more environmentally friendly. The economics of PC UPS's aren't there yet. These things may eventually wind up in being used in such small-scale systems, but I can't see it happening for a long time.

    flywheels *are* kind of neat, though...
    --Lenny
  • Yee..

    scary stuff, especially the "Tumors big as grapefruits" thing.. I know they use some pretty vicious chemicals to make all these neat things for me, but what about the side effects of using them? Off-gassing, EMF, Etc. etc..

    Any funding availiable for a study on the AC's that sit 18 hours a day in a 5 foot cubical filled with blinking lights, Electrical outlets all around them, habitually reloading slashdot to get the "first post!"??
    -
  • The article addresses this. Apparently they developed a material that would simply fracture a little, then the system would shut down. The only way they could get a dramatic catastrophic failure (with shrapnel an all) was to actually shoot the damn thing.
  • Bah, like our "privacy policies" now? "This Website Does Not Collect Your Private Information (but the IMG tag connected to doubleclick.net does!)."

    What's to prevent a tech firm from just outsourcing it's production to a country/state/area that doesn't require that law?

  • they had no conclusive scientific evidence that the chemicals they found are linked to various workplace health hazards.

    Yes, the best time to ban things is when you have no evidence that something is bad. THIS STUFF SMELLS FUNY, BAN IT!
  • Its a potential problem, but none of the flywheels produced by these companys (mentioned in the wired artical) have ever shown any signs of fatige other then a few small layers cracking (but not comming off) and that was when it was spinning way over spec. Battires are much more likely to blow up.
  • This "article" is published by the SFBG, aka The San Francisco Bay Guardian [sfbg.com]. This highly reputable and serious news organization's headline for today is:

    "Cross-Dress For Less! Charles Anders hits Union Square in search of the perfect tranny wardrobe"

    Thanks, but no thanks. Transvestites, and bullshit hippie news articles are both things I try to avoid. I'll stick to ZDNet. I just hope that some earthquake or bizzare boating accident kills off these new bozo Timothy/Mikey-likes-it Slashdot authors so we can get back to the Slashdot we all remember.


    Bowie J. Poag

  • Please be advised (Score:3)

    by jailbrekr2 ( 139577 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @04:35PM (#1093624) Homepage
    After studying the deaths of 15,000 slashdot readers between 1998 and 1999, they found that 1500 of them died from brain cancer, due to the radiation of the monitors they were sitting in front of. To this date, Slashdot has yet to submit their toxic output to the EPA.
  • Actually the stuff in computers it probably as dangerous as abestos, if not worst. For one, how much Abestos dust gets kicked up from ceiling tiles and flooring materials. Very little, unless you are breaking them up. PC's have fans that are always running, cirtulating air in and out of the case.

    Abestos is a wonderful material (seriously). It's relatively light material, it can be made into several subtances, its very much fireproof, and is usually sturdy. For all pratical purposes, the danger of Abestos is mostly in Abestos plants themselves, were poorly vented Abestos manifacturing can lead "Joe" worker to inhale large amounts on a daily bases. (This probably is also the case with computer manifacturing).
  • This is a gold rush, and just as in the gold rush, we're abusing the environment, and the population of women is far outstripped by the population of men.

    You may have noticed that there are a lot of immigrant men working in the Valley. You may have noticed that a lot of them are on H-1B visas. You may have noticed that a lot of them have wives also from their home countries, often India. Well, in many of those cases, since the woman is in the US as part and parcel of her husband's visa, if she leaves him, she has no legal ability to work or stay in the US by herself. So, if her husband beats her, she has almost nowhere to turn.

    Domestic violence for anyone in the US is horrible and difficult to escape. But at least for citizens, there's a chance to stay in the same country as your children, support yourself, and live as a single woman, even a single mother. These women don't have that choice. To be a divorcee in India is unusual and socially not-very-acceptable in a lot of places, and a single mother is almost unthinkable in many places.

    SF Weekly is running an article [sfweekly.com] on this problem. It's not hardware-related, but it may make you think about the costs of our current system.

  • After Skimming the Article... (Score:5)

    by susano_otter ( 123650 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @04:38PM (#1093627) Homepage

    I get the feeling this is more likely yellow journalism than a thoughtful analysis of the pros and cons...

    My impression is that this article could be reduced to:
    "An industrial accident at FooCorp. injured x workers and exposed many more to hazardous materials. Does this remind us of the old 'ends vs. means' question and the dangers of exploiting advanced technology? Yes. Do I, as yet another journalist re-hashing this question have an answer? No."

    What frustrates me is that stories like this run not to raise awareness so much as to sell copy. It's FUD, pure and simple.

    I guess the only difference here is that the "computer industry" allegedly claims to be "cleaner" and "safer" than other industries.

    Sure, I guess. I mean, I've never really heard any of those claims, while I am aware of the hazmats and pollution attendant on high-tech manufacturing. So I'm unaware of any hypocrisy here--this feels more like FUD to me.

    Every industry has demonstrated clear hazards to life and limb for those involved in it, and while people have often questioned the "goodness" of those industries, it's interesting to note that we continued to [mine coal|manufacture plastics|hunt whales|&c.] until the economic factors dictated otherwise--safety, both personal and environmental, has always been a secondary consideration.

    This threat from the "computer is either a) a non-issue, relatively speaking, or b) suitable for serious discussion outside of random slow-news-day pseudo-editorials.

    But then, I'm a cynical bastard with little or no moral conscience, so what do I know?

  • B-i-i-i-i-g surprise - industrial pollution. in order to produce things faster/cheaper, little notice is taken concerning what damage might be done to the workers or to the environment.

    Will we ever learn? Same old story. Short memory, short memory.

  • Actually the most toxic substance in Silicon Valley is all the caffienated beverages! Ahhhh, time for my caffiene injection ...

  • Oh Puh-leeze (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sorry, dude, but the mortality rate is 100%, everybody dies from something eventually. Yeah, it takes nasty stuff to make computers, so do you want your computer or a pristine environment? You CANNOT have both. Do you want to freeze in the dark with clean air or do you want to stay warm and see your computer screen in a polluted atmosphere? You gotta choose. Sorry, but everything you do "pollutes" the earth, either actively (if you ever took a shit, you've polluted the environment) or passively (every time you turn on a light you create demand for evil electric generation). Ride a bike instead of driving a car? Like the metal frame didn't come from a mine somewhere, and the synthetic rubber tires sure came from some bad chemicals. Get over it, get on with your life. Earth First! - we'll strip-mine the other planets later...
  • HAHAHA! ROTFL! Finally a good crabby post! It's nice to see somebody has balls enough to complain under their own well-known user name. Down with Slashdot orthodoxy!!

    "When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood."

  • Those of you who think the bunny suits are cute, remember - they are not just for decorations. :-)

    No there not, they provent dust and skin from your body from contaminating the CPUs.

    I doubt those suits could protect you from anything...
  • Its not like people are going inside there cases an licking there motherboards

    You never know what people will do to overclock their cpu that 1 extra mhz...
  • There are some pretty scary chemicals used in the semiconductor manufacturing process, though. Take HF, for instance - it'll leach the calcium out of your bones. Through your skin. (This same substance is used in alloy wheel cleaner...). Some of the gases that go into the mix are morbidly called "two-step" gases - one whiff, take two steps, and you're dead

    ACtually, HF is a lot worse than that. HF exposure causes nasty burns that can't really be treated. Plus high exposures to HF will leach calcium from your cardiac muscles leading to cardiac failure. There really isn't any treatment for this so you'll die in a few hours after the exposure.

  • Oh, that makes sense... not believe it because you disagree with the lifestyles of other people. What, are you bi(homo?)phobic? If Shift, Mother Jones or whatever else wrote something you'll just think it's fake, right away? Get with it - the left (us 'hippies') can write news too. This article (did you even read it?) should scare you, no matter what...
  • >Clean rooms are "cleaner than hospital rooms," Oswalt said. "I'd rather live there than be on the street."

    What the hell kind of meaningless statement is that? Even for a corporate spokesthingy this is idiotic. Not that I wouldn't like to see it happen; kind of like the Chinese officials responsible for airline Y2K readiness (the sky is falling, indeed). Too bad that really was a chicken little story, but this isn't.

    The whole consumer electronics industry (including and especially computers) has always rested on inexpensively poisoning people too poor to have a choice in the matter. It's amusing to watch the /. posters' denial of that idea; tough to reconcile while you use your $1500 computer to read the article, isn't it? Did you really think $1500 could buy any sort of environmental control and worker protection? Somebody had to pay for that stuff you're using, and it sure wasn't you.

  • I love the smell of free radicals in the morning... it smells like computing power!

  • Re:Hmm... (Score:3)

    by gus2000 ( 177737 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @04:50PM (#1093638)

    Correct me if I'm wrong here, but don't the material-safety data sheets HAVE to state it if the chemical is a known carcinogen? And seriously, is acetone all that carcinogenic? I used to wear nail polish, and I hate to think of how many tumors I caused myself while removing that stuff.

    The answer is yes and no. Acetone alone is not particularily dangerous. Where things start to get dangerous is when you mix acetone with something else to make a very volatile cocktail. The example that first comes to mind is photoresist. Every photoresist out there today is very bad, all carcinogenic and some even nastier. If you use acetone to strip acetone or just clean an area of photoresist the fumes that you generate are very dangerous and require significant ventilation. MSDS mention the toxicity of photoresist but people often do not think about how things behave when mixed together...

    Hmm, what's this mystery ingredient? Anyone know? Who did the studies? Why is a lawyer being quoted on the subject of whether or not something causes cancer?

    I have seen cutting fluids containing trichloroethane. This is very nasty and carcinogenic stuff and should not be taken lightly. The bottle that I looked at did mention that it must be used in a well ventilated area. I assume that it can be sold without restriction as long as the percent composition of the offending substance is below some threshold. I personally never open a bottle of this particular chemical unless under a fumehood wearing proper solvent gloves.

  • Provide Links to good articles please (Score:3)

    by yuriwho ( 103805 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @04:51PM (#1093639)
    This article is nothing but innunendo with no substance written by someone who has a strong (and quite possibly correct) prebias. There are no data and some of the examples are laughable. Articles like this are good at spooking the public but are useless for information content. Their lead piece about nitric acid is a great example. Sure nitric acid is a hazardous chemical and if you mix it (carefully) with another hazardous chemical ammonia (one of those "two step gasses") what you get?

    Ammonium Nitrate AKA fertilizer woooooo nasty!!!

    I would have been interested in an article that focussed on halogenated hydrocarbons but anecdotal tumor stories are pathetic. Had they listed the percentage of tumor patients in IBM employees vs the general populace that might be useful.

    If you haven't read this article I'd suggest you skip it.

  • For example, the lead item about the exploding barrel of nitric acid made me wonder. Why hadn't they neutralized the acid with a base?

    I'm not a chemist, but this doesn't necessearily sound like a good idea. If you want a violent reaction, mixing an acid and a base is probably a good bet, and that's exactly what occured.

    From the article: The April 16 explosion likely occurred because the acid was mixed with an incompatible chemical, according to the fire department, which is still investigating.

    So, was it you that caused that explosion?

  • From the Article:
    But after two operations to remove malignant tissue the size of a grapefruit, the tumors grew back, leaving him numb and barely mobile.

    The size of a grapefruit?! Why do I think it was the surgery which left him immobile? Or did he just have a really big head?

    --Jeff

  • What's to prevent a tech firm from just outsourcing it's production to a country/state/area that doesn't require that law?

    Inconvenience mainly. It can be a bit expensive to try to maintain quality control with a non-local company. Of course for evil multinationals, it isn't such a problem.

    But if anyone thinks these chemical stories are scary, take a look at the mining industry. They use all sorts of nasty chemicals out in the open where anyone can be exposed to them. Cleaning these messes up is the price we pay for living in a high tech society

  • Re:"Sterile suits?" (Score:3)

    by technos ( 73414 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @04:58PM (#1093643) Homepage Journal
    Leching the calcium out of your bones is right! But it's not through the skin, per se. HF just doesn't do much damage to the outmost layer, aside from a wee bit of swelling. No immediate pain either.. Dipping your finger in a 5% solution is enough to lead to loss of most of your hand or death.(HF is damn toxic. Flourosis and all)

    Got a single drop of HF etching solution on my arm once. It itched for the first two hours, got red and was starting to swell by the end of the third, and by hour four I was on oxygen watching someone pump my arm full of calcium gluconate solution.

    What in blue blazes are they using hydroflouric acid for?!?!
  • Wanted for the murder of John. E. Overclocker...

    Earlier today a Pentium Celeron 300a overclocked to 550MHz was resposible for killing a computer user by the name of John E. Overclocker. Witnesses to the murder gave a description of the assailant to be a small silicon wafer, charred beyond recognition muttering the phrase "Who's the bitch now?" fallowed by large outbursts of "Muwhahahahahhahahaha". No autopsy has been performed yet, but the authorities suspect the murder weapon was actually a large quantity of toxic gases. "And I thought Microsoft was evil..." says one local user of the Linux operating system.
    The CEO of Intel, I.P. Freely qouted in his press confrence today that "Phase 1 of Project Annihilation is complete!!! Engage the Death Ray(TM)". Intel's CEO, after the press confrence, was reportedly caught by the Australian Internet Police weilding a large, death ray like, metallic device. The Australians said to have caught him zapping their army of cyborg Koalas.

    -Insane ramblings by Kwikymart
    (dont mind my spelling)
  • There is a huge difference between 'No conclusive scientific evidence' and 'no evidence'. I personally believe in erring on the side of caution. Call me a hippy if you want, but if it's going to injure people and the environment, I don't care how fast it goes. I'd rather have a 16Mhz computer with no blood on it than a 16 GHz responsable for the rape of the planet and the death of innocents. Personally, I think anyone who disagrees should have the pleasure of living behind the IBM plant for a while.

    Just my inflammatory opinion,
    Dusty Hodges
  • More from the article:
    After logging 30 years in a dried-fruit cannery, Alicia, now 69, started washing hard-drive disks for IBM in 1977.

    Sadly, this shows horrible research on both parts: the article and the woman. If you read any respectable health journals, you will see something they warn you about: dried fruits. The chemicals which end up in the fruit are known carcinogens, especially the nitrates. Gary Null and Dr Weil tell readers to stay away at all costs, because the levels consumers are exposed to are dangerous. How about the workers?

    --Jeff

  • If only smell were all it took!! I have known quite a few programmers on the Shower-In-A-Can regimen.. You could smell them five cubes away even through the Rite-Guard...
  • I had no idea... So now what? I don't like car pollution, so I walk, I take a bus, I carpool if I have to (I pay for the gas since I can't return the favor). But how am I supposed to go around finding out who was environmentally safe and who didn't abuse their employees when I'm shopping for computer equipment? Frustrating...
    --
    Peace,
    Lord Omlette
    AOL IM: jeanlucpikachu
  • well, we wouldn't want there deaths to be in vain, now would we?

  • A man got killed and the fine was $1000, because "it was mostly his own fault". That's one massive chronic failing in many things in our society. Regulations without *ANY* teeth, effective 'control' by the groups who have a vested interest in the status quo, and an utterly idiotic amount of outrageous incidents and tragedies before anything is done.

    The term 'tombstone technology' applies to nearly everything mankind does.

    Doing a MSc in Physics (opto-electronics), I got fully indoctrinated into my University's safety system and regulations (which were impressive, strict, enforced, and followed), so I know a bit about what they are talking about. WRT the above incident, our regs were basically "yes you are responsible for your own safety, but so is your manager/supervisor, and so is your supervisor's supervisor, etc etc". Responsibility doesn't just 'stop' with one or two people.

    In my and my co-orker's work, we dealt with comparatively small amounts of these chemicals, and yet we were highly protected. Tri-choroethylene, HF, and the other things mentioned frequently in that article, were not handled unless you were fully suited ( heavy rubber smock, heavy rubber gloves, full face mask, etc ), and were never used outside of a fume cabinet with the partition lowered as far as possible. Haz mat chemical lockers were *everywhere*, and 1 gallon bottles and even squirt bottles were NEVER left out unless actually in use. You only kept out the minimum quantities for what you were doing, no pouring a few ml from the gallon jugs. NOTHING was unlabled. No one got to work in a given lab until they had spent a serious amount of time (a couple days for 10 pages for me for 4 labs) writing up a major paper (on their own) describing in detail all of the hazards in the lab, what the procedures to reduce the hazards were, what the responses to incidents with each specific hazard was, etc etc.

    Now the kicker. Remember our friend Tri-cloroethylene? The one I didn't handle even in small quantities unless fully suited and with a fume cabinet? The one suspected of being a cancer causing agent, that is highly flamable, that blew up on the guy in the story above (who was mixing 'vats' of it with no personal protection or fume hood?)

    It's used as the 'carrying agent' in 10% of lawn herbicides. That's right. They spray a 90% solution of it on YOUR lawn, or one of your neighbours lawns.

    You should have seen the look on my face as I sat on my couch watching the investigative news report about this back in 1996, knowing what I know about how we in a University semiconductor lab dealt with this compound.

  • Well, what exactly would be breathing in from your computer? the stuff just dosn't turn into dust. I mean, yeh it probably wouldn't be a good idea to eat a motherboard, but who would do that?

  • A serious problem (Score:4)

    by eliduc ( 122239 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @05:17PM (#1093652)
    I think that regardless of your opinion of the quality of this particular piece of journalism, you have to acknowledge that this is a serious problem and people need to be thinking about it. Who cares about statistics? Lying with statistics is easy. Consider the following points:

    1) The manufacture of electronic components does certainly involve the use of large amounts of various solvents. Many of them are particularly nasty, (I've worked with toluene and methyl ethyl ketone, for instance, and they're no joke), and it is to be noted that chemists use fume hoods and gloves even when working with acetone. Of course, it's also worth noting that chemists have pretty bad work-related fatality and illness statistics. Anyway, the point is that the high-tech industry certainly uses large amounts of toxic chemicals, that much you can't really argue with.

    2) It will inevitably be cheaper and quicker, at least in the short term, to deal with these chemicals in an irresponsible manner than it would be to deal with them responsably. Protective equipment is expensive.

    From there you can do the math for yourself. I don't see how the conclusions in this article are unbelievable or even surprising. One would expect the electronics industry to have these kinds of problems, regardless of whether the specific claims of the article are true or backed up by statistics. What's really scary is that this will almost certainly get worse as the industry moves more and more into the third world.

    I think this is an issue of which people in the tech industry need to be much more aware. Consumer awareness could put pressure on manufacturers to be more clean. At the very least, it's something to think about as we sit down in front of our computers.

  • for those of you who didn't notice, this article is only one in a series of four articles about toxics in the computer industry in this issue of the Guardian.

    the other three are:

    IMO, the "Garbage In" article is a bit more informative and less tear-jerky than the one linked in the main story.

  • I have several ppl that I know that work in the environmental hazard assessment field. Some have told me that the job opportunities in the Silicon Valley area are increasing. You can draw whatever conclusion you want from this. Here's a thought. In the DC area where I live, there are usually only one or two (sometimes, none) of these types of jobs advertised in the Sunday Washington Post employment section. I wonder how many jobs openings are posted in the local San Francisco papers? Note that is a relatively small field so there won't be hundred of job posted.

    BTW, I used to live up in Rhode Island where they used to have a sizeable jewelry industry. This also involved the use of some nasty solvents and heavy metals. Needless to say, RI has/had a serious problem with ground contamination. I had friends that would put on the old environmental bunny suit and then walk into technicolor sludge in order to take samples for testing. Hopefully, this will not be the future of Silicon Valley.

    Finally, one consideration is ground water contamination in a particular area. The contaminants slowly migrate away from their dump site. The affect of this slow diffusion may take many years to become noticeable or a threat, but the process is difficult to reverse. IOW, this can represent a slowly ticking time-bomb.

  • When I was working at "a major semi-conductor mfg in Dallas", there was a story about how the company had purchased the manufacturing process for arseen gas. Arseen gas is deadly in just a few ppm, and is used in sc mfg (I don't know how prevalent). The old process was complex and expensive, but the new one was easy and cheap. So much so that the inventor of the process used it to kill insects in his fruit orchard by mixing this up in a 55 gallon barrel that was positioned upwind from the orchard. But he didn't get rich by selling the process. It was actually the heirs to his estate that sold the process. The enormous value of the process was not discovered until the inventor was killed when the wind shifted just after mixing up a batch!
  • This article does raise a few important questions, and makes you wonder about how the computer industry affects the enviroment. In an industry where the entire productlines change every year or so, how do you measure the enviromental impact these companies are having if the constantly upgrade their manufacturing equipment? How many of them fall in and out of EPA guidlines from one product cycle to another? And how do prove what chemicals gave someone cancer when they have worked there for 20 years and have been exposed to many different chemical mixes used only for a few years each?
  • Take for example this press release: ...

    ... but I think the industry does make a real effort to keep it under control.

    Not to pick on you, but... Press releases are carefully-crafted documents to show a company in the most positive light possible. Do not ever, ever take them as fact, without doing other research. Press releases are essentially advertising.

    Maybe Applied Materials is doing something good, maybe not. A press release alone can't tell you.

    Does everyone here know what "greenwashing" is? It's the PR practice of trying to make a company look pro-environment, and there's a LOT of money being spent on it. Greenwashing became widespread in the 90's, with the increase of public awareness of environmental issues. Many millions of dollars are spent each year on advertising that fosters pro-environmental images of companies, more money than is actually spent on pro-environmental activities by those same companies. Advertising conferences conduct sessions on greenwashing, and hire speakers who are experts at it. Corporations hire professional greenwashing consultants.

    Be aware that greenwashing is all around you, and avoid being fooled by it. Watch for it yourself, the next time you see one of those disgusting "People Do" commercials for Chevron, which is one of the single most environmentally destructive corporations on the planet.

    Some companies are pro-environment, some aren't. As with everything else, decide which is which only with care and research. Be leery of information that comes (even indirectly) from the company or person you're investigating.

  • Why not post them at boot time? ;)

    Best regards,

    SEAL
  • 'Nuff said. Typical journalistic FUD.
  • ... they had no conclusive scientific evidence that the chemicals they found are linked to various workplace health hazards.
    The companies using these chemicals need to do some studies about the toxicity of these chemicals. Ignorance is no excuse for harming your workers.

    --

  • no truth in spin (Score:3)

    by toh ( 64283 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @05:32PM (#1093661)
    Uh, this reads like spin control from a company that finds itself in dire need of some. Skip ahead in the article to the part starting with
    Applied Materials - the world's largest manufacturer of semiconductor-making equipment - may rank number one in the valley for fire and safety code violations.
  • ...that a lot of people posting replies to this article seem to have the attitude "Companies have been polluting the environment forever, this is just more sensational journalism." That may be true, but if this sort of thing is not reported then it will not be addressed. Sure, the EPA may try to track down polluters, but how many of us have faith in a government beauracracy to take care of us? Journalists looking for stories may find something the EPA has overlooked, or highlight something they haven't. The resulting public outcry will (hopefully) *encourage* the polluter to clean up their act. I personally would rather have too many of these scare stories than too few.

  • I personally never open a bottle of this particular chemical unless under a fumehood wearing proper solvent gloves.

    Smart man! While working at a hardware store in high school, we had a truck driver drop a case of the stuff and split a pint can. (It's sold commercially in the States as a grease solvent and is the principle agent used in dry-cleaning)

    Both cashiers were puking uncontrolably just from a whiff of the stuff. In lieu of the Hazmat team, we closed the store for a couple of hours for a trip to Joes Army Navy Surplus for a couple of Soviet made gas masks to clean the mess up.

    On a lighter note, try putting a few drops of it in a full, hot Styrofoam cup of coffee. The cup turns to jelly without serious deformation. Watch as your coworkers pick up the cup that dematerializes in their hand!!
  • Nina Paley [ninapaley.com] (a should be much-better-known-cartoonist) did a strip on almost this concept. Check out:

    Nina's Adventures - "Ecollusion" [ninapaley.com]

  • oh man... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I can see it now:

    A crazed coworker can't take the stress anymore. He whips out his revolver and shouts...

    "Nobody move or the UPS gets it!"

    Heh.
  • Yes, ignore information you don't like. That'll make it go away.

    --
  • There is a huge difference between 'No conclusive scientific evidence' and 'no evidence'.

    Only in connotation, really. If I have no evidence whatsoever, I can say that I have No conclusive scientific evidence and be just as right. Of course, if I do that, people will still belive what I have to say....
  • The average rate of cancer in males is 44.66% [cancer.org] (I'm assuming that, at least historically, a significant majority of the workers were male). This would be about 12,000 of the 25,000 worker deaths IBM has on file. Compare this with the actual rate of cancer deaths (The file now shows that 8,000 of the 25,000 deaths were due to some form of cancer, Hawes said.) and it appears that working at IBM reduces the risk of cancer by 33%.
  • >Their lead piece about nitric acid is a great example. Sure nitric
    >acid is a hazardous chemical and if you mix it (carefully) with
    >another hazardous chemical ammonia
    >(one of those "two step gasses") what you get?
    >
    >Ammonium Nitrate AKA fertilizer woooooo nasty!!!

    heh heh - then just add a little diesel, throw it all in the back of your SUV, and park it outside your local FBI office...

    just 'cause it has common uses, doesn't mean its _not_ nasty...

    big
  • Yes, I shout at the TV when those ads are on. :-)

    But you shouldn't be too cynical, either. Some companies really do make an effort. A bunch of semi companies here in Austin have signed up for "Green Choice" power from the electric co - paying about 4% extra which will buy power from wind farms, etc.

    And although that press release from Applied Materials did look a bit cheesy, this one [appliedmaterials.com] (yeah, another release... the EPA has a corroborating story here [epa.gov]) points out that they got a Climate Protection Award from the EPA in 1999.... "This year's award recognizes only ten individuals and organizations worldwide that have made exemplary efforts and achievements to protect the global climate."

    So yeah, be wary, but applaud those who ARE doing good things...

    ---

  • Re:After Skimming the Article... (Score:3)

    by schussat ( 33312 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @05:52PM (#1093671) Journal
    I don't really think this has a "slow-news-day-pseudo-editorial" feel to it. The author(s) went to the trouble to track down the numbers on the inspection records and talk to lots of folks on both sides of the issue. I get the feeling that the article has been in the works for quite some time.

    Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt? Well, it sure as hell is scary that some of the area's tech plants have failed nearly half of their inspections! Those of us who are outside of the Bay Area can dismiss this issue as never really affecting us, but the astounding tech production boom is an issue of immediate relevance to the people who do live there--even those not involved with the industry (there are plenty of them still there, last I heard). They all have to drink the water and breathe the air, making this an issue far beyond the scope of simply OSHA.

    If the same tech workers were handling any of those chemicals in other settings--university research, for instance--they'd have extensive training and rigorous safety precautions, the violation of which would result in immediate suspension of the entire facility's permits to use such materials.

    It's intriguing that some people here on Slashdot say this issue is irrelevant, or muckraking, or "not news for nerds." We use the results of industrial production every single day of our lives, and the more we are immersed in a high-tech world the more we should be aware of the externalized costs of our technological lifestyles. It's absolutely no different from being concerned about the source of the water you drink or the pesticides in your food -- except that this industry exists precisely because of all of us who live and work with computer technology. Frankly I think it's irresponsible not to see the relevance of stories like this.

    -schussat

  • ...one time. Really hard to learn anything in that course, since the stuff changes so fast. It was cool though, since we got to work with some graphical process simulation software.

    The other thing I came away with from that course is that yes, there are a *lot* of toxic chemicals involved in chip making. Arsenic and Diborane leap to mind. One guy I knew worked in a lab where there was a "solid arsenic source". I used to kid him about having arsenic on a stick. Every day, I used to walk by a tank full of liquid nitrogen the size of a large van. Ah... the prank potential that went unrealized with that liquid nitrogen.

  • Huh? A code violation is a code violation - being big doesn't give you an excuse to make more of them. Rather, it makes you more responsible to avoid making them, because the effect is magnified when you do.

    If it were "accidents" or even "fires" I'd agree with you, but that's not what we're talking about here. Violating some code occurs because the company chose to do things that way. It's not a question of scale, but of policy.
  • Do you think that steak you ate last night was really safe just because some government agency said it was? Inspectors can be paid off, and many people know ahead of time when an inspection is scheduled so they clean up for the inspection.
  • People didn't die to make my computer. If people died making computers, we would of noticed sooner. I live in Silicon Valley and I have not died. This is what you call Shock Reporting.
  • HaHa how true that is. Not only is caffine more addictive than a controled substance like marajana, it hurts your body more. But oh man !! Caffine is one great thing to be addicted to !!
  • Ever see an invoiced purchase order with four paragraphs (1/2 page) of 'you must guarantee your product doesnt have lead, CFCs, asbestos, etc' on the back of it? Well, that's what one from Applied is like. I had an AMD lease buy-back cross my desk last week with Applied semi equipment on it, and I just had a peek at the database for another look. If the internal 'thou shalt not's are anything like what they feed their vendors, I'm not worried..
  • Uh, a fire code violation can be as simple as using an exstention cord. In fact, thats one of the things that was mentioned in the artical.

    The more people you have, the more mistakes are going to be made. This particular company had only about 150 violatoins out of tens of thousands of employees.
  • Part of the problem with flywheels is that if they come apart, they kill people... there's a sh*tload of energy stored up, and it's moving really really fast... one cool solution I've heard is to make it out of a tightly wound kevlar cord - then if it fails, it just turns into a ball of spaghetti instead of flying shrapnel in the mall parking lot. :-)

    I read the article too The flywheels are made of wound carbon fiber so they won't just fly apart. They monitor for defects and have plenty of warning when defects begin to show up. Even in the case of a total failure they are confident of safety.

    I don't know much about it other than what I read in the Wired article, but they certainly make it sound like a promising technology and quite safe.

    numb

  • Sounds accurate to me (Score:4)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @06:18PM (#1093685) Homepage Journal
    I spent 10 years cleaning wafers, creating devices, and creating blanks. The article matches my experience. A wafer fab is just a glorified machine shop. We often use the vilest chemicals: intelligent people are suitable terrified. We all know people who got their finger cut off. We also know people who had to go to the hospital to get get calcium shots so the hydrofluoric acid would not destroy their bones. Horseplay leads to a friend falling into a vat of solution and turning blue for a week.

    A problem with chemical safety is we only recently understood the risks. It was not so long ago that toulene and xylene were used as freely as rubbing alcohol. We now know better. One of my memories is the day that I finally convinced the people at a fab that acetone was actually dangerous. I spent a year trying to convince everyone that we needed fume hoods and carriers. When everyone had finally read and understood the MSDS, there was a push to get rid of all the acetone. This, of course, was an overreaction. I worked out some numbers to show which cases were safe and which weren't. The key was for everyone to understand how to safely use the chemical, and try to use it in an inherently safe way. We must remember that the accident in Japan was caused by worker confusion, supervisor pressure, and deprivation of needed resources.

    My main desire is that companies take an extremely objective look at the safety issues, the alternatives, and not put business expediency above the objective conclusions.

    BTW, a good book that talks about, among other things, the difficulty of matching medical cause and effect is A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper.

  • Well you needn't feel too good about semiconductor manufacturers in Austin using wind power. The single Alcoa smelter in Rockdale will burn enough ultra-low-grade lignite to smog up the state. Look, I even have a link [txpeer.org].

    I'm not saying that the semiconductors aren't doing the right thing, but each region has its big bad polluters. Here in the SF Bay Area (where I live now), it is the semiconductor industry, but in Texas (where I am from) there are bigger fish to fry.

  • I wonder about where you live; if you lived in the Bay Area and ever read the Guardian, you would know that it is a genuinely investigative paper, filling in a gap that the tweedledee-and-tweedledum Chronicle and Examiner leave in their bland mainstreamness. The Guardian is progressive, unabashedly leftist, and yes, often covers news and features of interest to the non-heterosexual community. But is it really fair to say, "I won't believe the New York Times because they have some puff piece about the Oscars on their front page"? Because if you're going to be annoyed by this cover, be annoyed because it's not news, not because it targets people with a different lifestyle than your own.

    Why do you read Slashdot if you only want to be exposed to your own point of view?

  • Sloppy journalism (Score:5)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2000 @06:48PM (#1093703) Homepage
    There are some real Silicon Valley toxics problems, but this journalist isn't that good with his facts.
    • The HP toxic site isn't at Page Mill and El Camino, it's at Oregon Expressway and Park, about two blocks away. HP tore down their old building, and is building a new one on most of the lot. There's a small cinder-block building on Park containing groundwater cleanup equipment. Plants and grass grow nearby.
    • "Freon-laden groundwater"? Freon is basically inert. The Freons (there's a whole family of Freons, DuPont's trademark for CFCs) that are gaseous under ordinary temperature and pressure are a problem only because they rise to the top of the atmosphere, spread out, break up under the strong UV, and combine with ozone, damaging the ozone layer. Freons were used as propellants in spray cans for decades, including for food products, without health problems.
    • Corrosives like nitric acid or oxydizers like sodium hydroxide are dangerous, but only in high concentrations. And they don't cause cancer or cumulative damage.
    • Material Safety Data Sheets are conservative; if they don't mention cancer, it probably doesn't cause cancer. The test for carcinogens is very conservative, due to the Delaney Amendment; if it causes cancer at any concentration, no matter how low, it's considered a carcinogen.
  • if you lived in the Bay Area and ever read the Guardian, you would know that it is a genuinely investigative paper.... The Guardian is progressive, unabashedly leftist, and yes, often covers news and features of interest to the non-heterosexual community.

    I've lived in SF and read the Guardian every week when I lived there. As an activist, I have personally been written about sympathetically in the Guardian several times.

    The Guardian is sensationalist. It's purpose is to sell gullible readers to advertizers and it follows a strict formula to that end. It is a member of the AAN, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. Compare it to the other papers in the AAN and grok the formula: run "investigative" stories about favorite local "bad guy" industry(ies) featuring lots of quotes from plaintiff attorneys, testimony by allegedly injured parties, selective presentation of facts and a strong human interest slant; if "alternative lifestyles" are popular in the area, act as a cheerleader for them/imply that evil traditionalists are out to suppress same; run sympathetic stories about local activists; etc.

    It's a good cop/bad cop game with maximum profits at the core. Feel repressed by the "conservative" and cold, unfeeling dailies. Come on over to the "leftist" alternative newsweeklies. The Chronicle and Examiner could be said to be Tweedledee-and-Tweedledum, but its just as truthful to say the ChronEx is Tweedledee and the SFWeekly/Guardian is Tweedledum.
  • beacuse your an idiot and you didn't made the link realitive.

    Should read:

    Because you're an idiot and you didn't made the link absolute.
  • Another side of the halogenated hydrocarbon environmental problem lies in the chlorinated hydrocarbons. Substances like methylene chloride (CH2CL2) and tetrachloroethylene (TCE, C2H2Cl4) are liquids that are immiscible with water yet are heavier than water. What happens when you use these to clean computer parts and happen to spill a few gallons down the drain? They sink into the water table and find nooks and crannies to hide in, continually leaching into the ground water for years to come and you can't easily clean them up since you cant find where they are hiding. If you could find where they are what would you do? Dig the ground up and suction them out..they can be stitting in pools a thousand feet deep.

    A very tough problem and one of the major groundwater issues today.
  • You are correct that there isn't much evidence available but the article, on several occasions, misses perfect opportunities to provide this info and fails.

    Yet scientific studies and a potentially path-breaking lawsuit filed against IBM and its many chemical suppliers suggest that Loanzan's fatal disease may have been caused by his work. "His exposures led to the illness that caused his death," argues San Jose-based attorney Amanda Hawes, who is representing Loanzan's family and 10 other semiconductor workers in the lawsuit. According to the February 1998 suit filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court, IBM maintained an internal "corporate mortality file," a database detailing the deaths of more than 25,000 IBM workers nationwide. Of 10,331 employees who died between 1975 and 1989, 149 died of primary brain cancer, the lawsuit states, citing a 1995 study sponsored in part by the company. That's 10 brain cancer deaths a year at IBM, a startlingly high number for such a rare disease. The file now shows that 8,000 of the 25,000 deaths were due to some form of cancer, Hawes said.

    What scientific studies? and what were the conclusions?

    And relative to the incidence of cancer (and brain cancer) in the general public is the number IBM cancers abnormal after factoring out lifestyle influences?

    This journalist sets the question up, provides some number and doesn't put it into context. These sort of details would make the difference between believeablility and crap journalism.

    Back when DOW was under attack for breast implant lawsuits, I was asked to review some evidence submitted by some joker scientist using an antibody test to measure the immune response of patients to silicone. The ELISA test this company was offering had no scientific basis yet lawyers were trumpeting the results as proof of silicone induced immune problems. As you may know DOW-Corning lost and was bancrupted only to later have multiple meta-statistical analyses show no statistical correlation between the silicone implants and immune problems relative to immune problems in the general public. But it dosen't matter because nonscientific juries are swayed by the personal anecdotal evidence.

    This is the reason why I ask for better information. If the data show a statistically significant problem them we have reasonable evidence to pin the tail on the donkey. Without it, we have a witch hunt.

  • In all honesty, I'm not surprised by this report. Here's [ethicalconsumer.org] another one for you, which goes into a little bit more detail about the ethics and practices of computer manufacturers (or lack thereof).

    I seem to remember a previous thread on a similar subject on /. a few months ago. It's getting a bit like usenet these days... the same threads/subjects popping up.

    Getting back on topic, I think it does go to show that no matter how much you research the products you buy, whether that's a pair of trainers or a computer, you can never be entirely sure that the company concerned doesn't have any skeletons in it's cupboard. Although that said, this particular article is a little bit patchy in places.

    M.

  • No joking matter.

    My brother worked for a gas company that made the dopants and etchers used in silicon wafers. This included incredibly lethal gases, like HCl and arsenic. He has a dual chemistry/geology degree from a respectable university, but he too was subject to deplorable conditions.

    I started out by jokingly refering to his job as "taste-testing dopants", but it became deadly serious after he described a cannister of HCl gas hat ruptured in the warehouse. It instantly became a gruesome data visualization tool. You could actually see the strength of the air flow through PC's running in the warehouse at the time by inspecting their melted internals just before the fans went out.

    It was an awful company here in the valley, and it serves a lot of the industry's gas needs. This is definitely an infrastructure disease. I've seen a lot of crappy journalism, and this article certainly qualified by not explaining the other side, but I assure you, the other side isn't that moving.

    Perhaps ironically, an EE Times article I read not too long ago described a study which showed that air pollution in the valley was increasing everyone's rate of cancer. So the well-paid engineers in their cublicles (like me) are paying a poetic price.

    =-ddt->

  • Dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO) is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there.
    Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.

    Dihydrogen monoxide:

    * is also known as hydroxyl acid, and is the major component of acid rain.
    * contributes to the greenhouse effect.
    * may cause severe burns.
    * contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
    * accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.
    * may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.
    * has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.

    Contamination Is Reaching Epidemic Proportions!

    Quantities of dihydrogen monoxide have been found in almost every stream, lake, and reservoir in America today. But the pollution is global, and the contaminant has even been found in Antarctic ice. DHMO has caused millions of dollars of property damage in the Midwest, and recently California. Despite the danger, dihydrogen monoxide is often used:

    * as an industrial solvent and coolant.
    * in nuclear power plants.
    * in the production of Styrofoam.
    * as a fire retardant.
    * in many forms of cruel animal research.
    * in the distribution of pesticides. Even after washing, produce remains contaminated by this chemical.
    * as an additive in certain junk-foods and other food products.

    Companies dump waste DHMO into rivers and the ocean, and nothing can be done to stop them because this practice is still legal.
    The impact on wildlife is extreme, and we cannot afford to ignore it any longer!

    The Horror Must Be Stopped!

    The American government has refused to ban the production, distribution, or use of this damaging chemical due to its importance to the economic health of this nation. In fact, the navy and other military organizations are conducting experiments with DHMO, and designing multi-billion dollar devices to control and utilize it during warfare situations. Hundreds of military research facilities receive tons of it through a highly sophisticated underground distribution network. Many store large quantities for later use.

    It's Not Too Late!

    Act *now* to prevent further contamination. Find out more about this dangerous chemical. What you don't know can hurt you and others throughout the world. Send e-mail to no_dhmo@circus.com or a SASE to:

    Coalition to Ban DHMO
    211 Pearl St.
    Santa Cruz CA 95060
  • Reading this reporter's article is not the least bit surprising. Reports of secret company physicals, assurances that the chemicals aren't dangerous - this has been done over and over again in US history.

    A report that shows infant mortality dropping by half in the vicinity of nuclear reactors after their shutdown has just been released. See the story here [apc.org]. Again, in light of the historical activities of corporations when it comes to safety & profits, this is not surprising.

    Basically, companies in a capitalist system will always place profit ahead of worker's health. Go read your history books. The only way to prevent this and insure worker safety involves two things: goverment regulation and oversight, and worker organization. Coal mining, making steel, railroads, have all been through this before. Go look up the mortality rates for railroad workers in the early 1900's before they started striking en masse for reform.

    Reform for worker's health will only come at the initiative of organized workers. Capitalism just plain doesn't give a shit because the capital-owning class doesn't put their bodies at risk. If you want a starting place for the history of this sort of thing, try Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States [amazon.com].

  • HF is also used to keep ultrapure water sterile and free of bacteria. Ultrapure water is really, really pure water (double distilled and filtered). It has an resistance of 19 megaohms per cm and is used to wash board/components. Unfortunately bacteria grow like crazy in it so companies use a weak HF solution in the water to keep it sterile.

  • The "bunny suits" really are just to protect the electronics from the workers, not the other way around. They are typically made of very light material, like Tyveck, a cheap platicised paper product, or a bi-layer plastic film. Tri-cloroethylene, acetone, HF, HNO3 will all go through most of these materials in less than a second. Cloth suits offer no protection at all. A full facemask filter, a "gasmask", only offers a 50 to 100 times safety margin (if it fits and the person knows how to use it). For chemical exposure, that's nothing. A facemask might allow you a couple of minutes of exposure, rather than a second or two. Gasmasks are for escape, not for long-term use.

    Level A spill response for a fab, the first-in people, calls for a full-body, sealed butyl-rubber suit (~1/4" thick) with a self-contained, overpressure air supply. The full suits with air give you a couple of hours in most environments. If there's radionuclear sources present, as there are in some fabs, all bets are off. In that case, you send in a robot. Alternatively, you cover the place with concrete and cross you fingers....

    Workers generally vastly over-rate their protective equipment. Most employers provide the bare minimums (or less) and then these are usually only to be used for escape during an emergency, not (usually) for chronic exposure. Anybody in an environment that hasn't been trained and isn't properly paranoid about the chemicals they are using is a nutbar. Avoid them if you can. On the bright side, you usually don't have to plan retirement parties for these people either.

    Some reference sites:
    The US Govt. Hazmat site [dot.gov]
    and what should be every spill responder's bible:
    The NIOSH Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards [cdc.gov]

    Kind Regards,

  • The points made about mixtures are real concerns, however. At least the silicon industry doesn't use DMSO as a solvent. Solvents often aren't a huge worry by themselves, but what they carry can be quite dangerous. Also, the synergistic effects of many of these mixtures are unknown.

    However, the article does have one great failing; it misses the recent industry moves towards closed-system loops. Solvent re-use greatly reduces costs to both the company and the environment. Unhappily, such success stories don't often make the news.

    Finally, sorry, but I can't let this go by. Nitric acid is both a strong acid and an oxidizing agent (and thus can, potentially, be carcinogenic). Sodium hydroxide is a base, a corrosive, but has no redox action. There are few chronic health effects for a single NaOH exposure.

    Kind Regards,
  • Sure, companies are supposed to keep bulk chemicals in contolled-access inventories, and the good ones even do. The more usual case, however, is that there's always the back corner or that space under the stairs that nobody knows precicely who is responsible for and it's full of mysterious black barrels....

    With regards to the acid accident, it sounds to me like the person poured water into a drum of anhydrous or conc. nitric. That will cause quite a nice explosion of hot acid, quite sufficient to injure someone. Water + acid is usually highly exothermic.

    Nitric acid, in small doses, turn skin a sepia brown colour and makes it crinkly, like rough paper. In large volumes, it will indeed cause the blackening effect described in the article. When you were young, you were lucky enough to be playing with a fairly dilute mixture. Anything else and you would have hurt yourself. Concentrated oxidizing acids, sulphuric and nitric to name two common ones, really sting on exposed flesh.

    Kind Regards,
  • I read this article in dead tree form a few days ago after arriving in San Francisco for my new job.

    I find myself wondering how much of this article is based on objective fact, and how much is based on biased editorialism and sloppy research.

    In just a week of reading the local papers, I've noticed, in the editorial sections at least, a good deal of outright hostility towards computer geeks in general. But just by virtue of moveing here, I've , according to the Guardian, gone from being a slacker-punk-computer-geek to being a predatory yuppie scum.

    Why, I don't know. I can only guess that the editors, and some of the writers/letters to the ed readers/writers have never matured past their assinine little high school we-hate-the-computer-nerds cliques. Either that, or they just have such a liberal bias (SF *IS* known as a VERY liberal area after all) that they hate anyone who might ever become sucessful in life... and let's face it, out profession is potentially very profitable. Oh well. At least most of the PEOPLE I've met so far (as opposed to journalists) haven't shown themselves to hate computer geeks.

    I've gotten a little off-topic here, but I think it *IS* very important to remember the anti-geek bias in the Guardian when you're reading about them trashing geeks and the computer industry.

    If you haven't had HASMAT training, you'd be quite suprised at how many substances, common in everyday life, are considered hazardous/toxoc/carginogenic/etc if used in the workplace.

    *The bleach you use in your toilet or to clean your whites...
    *The gasoline you use to fuel your car...
    *The windex you clean your glass with...

    Each and every one of these is considered a hazardous/toxic material by OSHA. And each one requires a MSDS to be on hand if used in the workplace.

    And MSDS's are VERY conservative. If there's the slightest chance of an adverse effect at ANY concentration, you are warned about it. Chlorine, for instance, has a good half page or so dealing with it's irritant/toxic qualities at concentrations you'd find in a swimming pool!

    I find it quite hard to beleive that tech workers were cast into toxic conditions completely ignorant of the risks and unable to take any precautions.

    john

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