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Earth Intel Businesses

Chipmakers Fight Spread of US Crackdowns on 'Forever Chemicals' 37

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Intel and other semiconductor companies have joined together with industrial materials businesses to fight US clampdowns on "forever chemicals," substances used in myriad products that are slow to break down in the environment. From a report: The lobbying push from chipmakers broadens the opposition to new rules and bans for the chemicals known as PFAS. The substances have been found in the blood of 97 per cent of Americans, according to the US government. More than 30 US states this year are considering legislation to address PFAS, according to Safer States, an environmental advocacy group. Bills in California and Maine passed in 2022 and 2021, respectively.

"I think clean drinking water and for farmers to be able to irrigate their fields is far more important than a microchip," said Stacy Brenner, a Maine state senator who backed the state's bipartisan legislation. In Minnesota, bills would ban by 2025 certain products that contain added PFAS -- which is short for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances -- in legislation considered to be some of the toughest in the country. The Semiconductor Industry Association -- whose members include Intel, IBM and Nvidia -- has cosigned letters opposing the Minnesota legislation, arguing its measures are overly broad and could prohibit thousands of products, including electronics. Chipmakers also opposed the California and Maine laws.
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Chipmakers Fight Spread of US Crackdowns on 'Forever Chemicals' More

Chipmakers Fight Spread of US Crackdowns on 'Forever Chemicals'

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  • Good and Bad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Inglix the Mad ( 576601 ) on Thursday March 23, 2023 @04:45PM (#63394239)
    Long term probably a good idea, but short term it could cause some headaches.

    Then again companies rarely do anything useful for society or the environment unless there's an abject profit motive directing them toward that goal. All anyone has to do is look at how many times the Cuyahoga river caught on fire to realize how little corporations care about the environment... and the fires recorded were the large fires...

    • Does not make sense for shareholders or execs to fight this cos eventually it will effect them and their families eventually. Same for climate change.

      No matter how rich / wealthy / powerful you are, you can't escape certain things, unless you plan to stay in a bunker for the rest of your life. Even they will probably go crazy staying in that for long.

      • Or, you're a 65-year-old asshole who could give a fuck about his kids and isn't going to see any of the long-term effects of all of this. It turns out that an awful lot of the world's capital is controlled by this sort of person.
      • Insert meme: are-you-like-a-crazy-person.gif

        Do you have experience with rich people? They can afford to move and/or buy stuff. The Cuyahoga river was so polluted it was undrinkable and started on fire many times. The Upper Midwest paper towns had poison in their rivers high enough people didn't eat the fish OR go swimming in large portions. You don't want to know about meat packing plants. How about coal burning power plant hassles? Turns out that Exxon Mobil pulled a page from the tobacco company playbo

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday March 23, 2023 @04:45PM (#63394241)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • It gets worse (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Thursday March 23, 2023 @04:46PM (#63394249) Homepage Journal
    Chipmakers moved to central Texas because they could bribe elected officials and dump what they want

    Now Musk is going to add an unknown mix of poisons dumped into the river from his boring company

    We d need to get a handle on this. I am not sure how. I suppose we donâ(TM)t want to kill the US chip industry.

    • Re:It gets worse (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Inglix the Mad ( 576601 ) on Thursday March 23, 2023 @04:58PM (#63394295)
      Sadly the quickest way to do this would be to let the states wallow without federal help.

      Similar to looking at Texas, Florida, Montana, Idaho, Iowa, and so on, for cuts. They claim hate evil federal big government, so let's help them by removing it from their states! Pull the military bases in Texas and move them back to California. Pull the IRS office and Johnson Space Center as well. Pull NASA out of Florida as well, and I'm betting Puerto Rico would love that investment. The goal being to get all those evil big government things out of those freedom loving states.

      Using that as a model, if some companies pollutes like crazy... well that's the state's problem. Why should Minnesota pay for Texas being lackadaisical regarding oversight?

      • You're ignoring that states are made up of multiple groups, and in the states which encourage this stuff there's generally a social structure where people who are already better off benefit from it while people who are poor are forced to live with the consequences.

        You see a similar dynamic going on with the states which turn down various sorts of federal funding for healthcare. Well-off people are okay anyway; a few well-connected people are making lots of money off the situation; poor people suffer. An

        • I'm not ignoring anything, just counting on them to continue being hellholes of graft and special interest politics. People want to keep voting for those politicians? Well that's their problem not mine. I'm not backing those politicians, nor can I vote in those elections. The people who disagree are welcome to move to other states. Heck that would be a double-whammy... people moving after pulling out all that evil big government would severely shrink the population of those states, reducing their power in t

      • California is the entity who wanted the evil military bases gone in the first place. The land needed to be sold to virtuous real estate developers.

        Letting the states run their own internal affairs was rather the point of kicking King George out in the first place.

    • Sam Houston is reported to say that if he had the choice of living in Texas or hell, he would pick hell.

      • Sam Houston is reported to say that if he had the choice of living in Texas or hell, he would pick hell.

        I believe that quote is actually attributed to General of the Army Philip Henry Sheridan aka "Fightin' Phil." He was born in Albany, New York and fought for the Union in the Civil War.

  • Is there a viable containment strategy? Do alternate chemicals exist in a diverse and competitive supply chain?

    • Have you no faith in innovation? (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Can a capitalistic economy and an entire innovation industry not come up with a better, more benign alternative?

      The only reason we have HCFCs is because CFCs were banned. The only reason we have low GWP refrigerants is because HCFCs were banned. Money at each step. That's business. Might as well ban PFAS yesterday so that the cycle can get started anew.

      • Only if there's a profit motive to come up with a better solution. We need to tax the hell out of these externalities rather than banning things. Sure, use all the PFAS you want, but the environmental/health cost isn't going to be borne by everyone, it's going to be borne by you specifically. I'm always surprised when conservatives are against carbon taxes or the like. It's the best free-market oriented approach to getting real solutions.

  • Onshore ongunk (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Thursday March 23, 2023 @05:29PM (#63394363) Journal

    There's a reason a lot of this manufacturing had before gone to 3rd world countries and dictatorships: the consequences of polluting are ignored there. Dictators don't care if a few percent of babies have 3 eyes or no arms.

  • There's rarely a *good* reason for a blanket ban on an inanimate object. Lawmakers do these because they're easier than well-thought-out smart legislation which might require its authors to actually learn a bit about the subject at hand and then weigh costs and benefits and write reasonable legislation. Most legislators are lawyers, not engineers or scientists, and they mostly listen to energized core supporters and to lobbyists and campaign funders rather than people with good ideas.

    It's not like the only

    • It's not like the only options here are: [a] PFAS everywhere and anywhere, including in our food and water, or [b] no PFAS anywhere for any reason.

      What you're seeing are the effects of lobbying. The industries consider having to carefully manage PFAS chemicals to be unnecessarily burdensome, so they prefer no regulations. The enviro-nazis want everything banned because they believe the industries can't be trusted.

      The politicians themselves don't understand the issue well enough to come up with a reasonable compromise.

    • It's not like the only options here are: [a] PFAS everywhere and anywhere, including in our food and water, or [b] no PFAS anywhere for any reason.

      How about something like: "PFAS is fine in industrial facilities where it must be used with proper containment, re-used, recycled, etc and any waste must be transported to a processing facility for safe disposal."

      Do you know what PFA's are primarily used for? If not, have a look at this: https://www.canada.ca/en/healt... [canada.ca]

      Here's a TL;DR version quoted from the link:
      "Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group of over 4,700 human-made substances that are used as surfactants, lubricants, repellents (for dirt, water, and grease). They can be found in certain firefighting foams, textiles (including carpets, furniture, and clothing), cosmetics, and in food packaging materials.

      And then there's this from Wikipedi

      • Forgot to add that FPASs still end up in finished semiconductor products. And that if they're used in factories, they WILL get out. The ban is necessary, and viable substitutes will be found, just as they were for CFC's and HCFC's.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          Forgot to add that FPASs still end up in finished semiconductor products. And that if they're used in factories, they WILL get out.

          In quantities large enough to matter?

          The ban is necessary, and viable substitutes will be found, just as they were for CFC's and HCFC's.

          Maybe. But finding alternative non-stick coatings for use in industrial environments may not be as easy as finding alternatives for CFCs (which could literally be replaced by any gas for use as a refrigerant or propellant, with varying degrees of efficiency).

  • Whatâ(TM)s the use of PFAS in the chip making process?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Beyond_GoodandEvil ( 769135 )
      Due to the definition of PFAS being so broad as to include anything with a CF2 group in the middle or a CF3 group at the end, there's a lot of 2 and 3 carbon materials used in etch plasmas that would never wind up in drinking water or food supplies(unlike the original PFAs, c8-c10 molecules that are very persistent). This is merely the latest in a long line of examples showing that good governance is hard and requires some level of knowledge about a subject that our politicians unfortunately lack, so we get

  • Actual capitalists are in favor of pricing in the full costs.

    Which goes to show how bad Americans are at capitalism.

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