Poison
Valley
Part 2
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/07/31/almaden2/index.html
Salon.com
Poison Valley (Part
2)
What new cocktails of toxic chemicals are
brewing in the high-tech industry's "clean rooms" -- and will
we ever know what harm they're causing?
Editor's note: Read Part
1.
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By Jim Fisher
July 31, 2001 |
In the middle of the 19th century, the baleful effects of
mercury poisoning were hard to escape for anyone familiar with
California's quicksilver mines and refineries. As Gray Brechin writes in
"Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin," "a
visitor to New Almaden [Mine] in 1857 noted that the smoke from the
refinery killed trees and cattle and that, despite short shifts, men
exposed to the fumes had 'pale, cadaverous faces,' that 'leaden eyes'
are the consequence of even these short spells, and any length of time
continued at this labor effectively shortens life."
One of Brechin's recurring themes is that
metropolises are sustained by the continuous pursuit of metals, and the
energy necessary to produce more of the same. Quicksilver, or mercury,
was essential for the reduction of gold ore. For centuries, the chemical
phenomenon known as mercury amalgamation was the only financially viable
method for extracting gold from stamped quartz or alluvial slurry. The
early alchemists, it turns out, were not entirely mistaken in believing
mercury a core element in the philosopher's stone, capable of changing
waste materials into gold.
A century and a half later, aspiring
cities are founded on the reduction of a new precious metal -- the
computer chip -- which in the end is just a metalized piece of sand, or
silicon.
If there is a philosopher's stone of the
computer industry, it is the "photoresist," a mixture of
organic solvents and photoactive compounds whose properties are altered
upon exposure to light. Essential to the process of optical lithography
-- the means by which chip makers "print" ever smaller circuit
patterns on silicon wafers -- the photoresist is the chemical
underpinning of Moore's Law, which famously predicted that the number of
transistors that can be built on a piece of silicon will double every 18
months. It is, in many ways, the representative chemical formulation of
the industry.
The photoresist is also, like mercury, potentially quite deadly. In the
chip-making process, the photoresist is a solvent typically applied by
dropping a small amount in the center of a spinning wafer, spreading a
uniform coating across the substrate. According to former IBM physician
Dr. Myron Harrison, there is an unusually high potential for worker
exposure to photoresists through both inhalation and skin absorption.
As early as 1983, according to Harrison, lab
tests had determined that a compound sometimes found in photoresist
solvents called trihydroxybenzophenone was genotoxic. Along with the
rest of the photoresist ingredients -- xylene and DQ sulfonic acid
esters, the former a known neurotoxin, the latter genotoxic and
mutagenic; n-butyl acetate, a suspected neurotoxicant and respiratory
toxicant; and glycol ethers or EGE, the substances at the center of the
industry studies discussed above that are known to cause extensive
reproductive and developmental disorders -- the photoresist is one nasty
concoction.
But it is only one of many nasty
concoctions necessary for keeping the modern-day furnaces of Silicon
Valley humming. And it is only through the unflagging efforts of
activists, health experts like Joe LaDou and, not least, the pressure
brought to bear by lawsuits such as the various complaints levied
against IBM that public awareness of the dangers of semiconductor
manufacturing -- or the assembly of other high-tech devices, such as the
hard drives coated by IBM's Alida Hernandez -- is finally beginning to
approach the level of what has long since been known about 19th century
industrial processes.
But do we know whether the situation is
getting better or worse? The effects of mercury poisoning were fairly
easy to spot. The effects of exposure to photoresist ingredients may
take many years to manifest. Even more troubling, by the time health
experts and corporate executives have caught up to what may have been
happening 20 years ago, the pace of technological advancement will no
doubt have launched a whole new parade of threats.
LaDou has been publishing technical articles
on the hazards of the semiconductor industry for nearly 20 years, having
observed the industry firsthand in the early 1970s while practicing as
an occupational physician in Sunnyvale, Calif.
"In the early days, it was not
unusual to see people in first-stage anesthesia -- fairly drunk,
staggering -- from solvent exposure," says LaDou, sitting in the
sunroom of his Woodside home, a cylindrical structure built from the
recycled redwood of an old water tower. "We treated literally
dozens of hydrofluoric acid burns every day. The safety and health
provisions in these companies were primitive at best."
While such provisions improved in the
subsequent decades -- first with precautions like gloves, splash guards,
face shields and safety glasses, followed by automatic loading
techniques and more sophisticated air-monitoring systems -- risks of
workplace exposure by inhalation or skin absorption have by no means
been eradicated, says LaDou.
Recall that the percentage of work-loss
injuries and illnesses involving "exposures to caustic, noxious and
allergenic substances" is three to four times higher in the
semiconductor industry than in manufacturing industries as a whole. Even
so, LaDou feels that the safety statistics are fundamentally flawed, and
reflect a far lower rate of illness than is actually taking place.
The reporting system for workers'
compensation, he points out, dates back to a time when no occupational
illnesses, not even lead poisoning, were recognized. It is thus geared
toward tracking injured workers rather than sick workers. Because no one
is losing fingers making integrated circuits, at first glance the
industry can seem relatively safe. Employees who are fighting
"psycho-organic" symptoms like headaches and nausea or who are
losing weight because of solvent fumes are more likely to end up in the
records of a personal physician than in filings with the Department of
Labor.
Even when illnesses are properly reported, the industrial codes for
workers' compensation offer no way to distinguish between semiconductor
employees who actually work in the "clean rooms" -- who
constitute approximately 25 percent of the workforce in a typical
chip-making company -- and the remaining 75 percent who've never donned
a bunny suit in their career. Compare this with the automobile industry,
where approximately 90 percent of workers coded as automobile
manufacturers are actually working on the auto production line.
"It makes epidemiologic research
impossible, unless the company will tell you the magic information on
who works where," LaDou says. "Otherwise you're studying
people who work in the canteen, or work in offices, or sell product out
of their cars." One can understand why LaDou turns ashen with
frustration when discussing workers' compensation data. "They're
such gross understatements of what's actually taking place," he
insists. "We've wanted to look at the industrial hygiene data from
inside the fabrication plants, and it's never been published, and it's
never been made available to any experts."
Exasperated with the absence of reliable
data, in 1998 LaDou and members of a working group developed a
preliminary study plan with the Environmental Protection Agency's Common
Sense Initiative to measure cancer and birth defects among California
semiconductor workers by cross-linking the state's cancer and birth
defect registries with an industry-provided database of semiconductor
employees, broken down as to which employees held which job and in what
occupational setting. With a few additions -- like tracking birth
defects and collecting detailed job descriptions -- it was the same idea
as a 1983 Swedish study that found an elevated risk of cancer among
electronics workers as a whole, and that concluded with a call for
further study "focusing on particular features of the work
environment."
The EPA put forward $100,000, and
California's Department of Health Services, which had been chosen to
conduct the study, promised "an umbrella of confidentiality"
to protect the privacy of both workers and specific companies.
At the last minute, the semiconductor
industry pulled out, led by representatives from IBM and Intel. In a
widely reported statement -- leaked to the press in violation of
confidentiality rules -- Intel spokesman Tim Mohin declared: "To
participate in a project like this would be like giving [legal]
discovery to plaintiffs. I might as well take a gun and shoot
myself."
Molly Maar, spokeswoman for the
Semiconductor Industry Association, says that the SIA "allocates
approximately 15 percent of its annual budget to environmental, health
and safety issues," although she declined to state what the SIA's
annual budget is. Asked for examples of proactive measures taken by the
industry to safeguard worker health, she cites the Occupational Health
System, an "ongoing, management-sponsored approach to performing
work injury and illness surveillance" operated by industry
consultant Don Lassiter.
When pressed for specific examples of how
this data has been used to improve worker health and safety, Maar says
that the industry is "constantly sharing practices" and
"making sure that everyone is up to speed on chemical
alternatives" and that "every generation [of new equipment and
practices] as we go into the future is going to be safer and safer.
That's just the way the industry is going to be. Those things, as time
goes on, are just going to be better and better."
A search through SIA press releases turns
up an announcement from March 2001 that the association was doubling the
size of its Focus Center Research Program, funneling half a billion
dollars over a 10-year period to leading research universities "to
ensure continued advancements in microelectronics technology." The
industry provides 50 percent of the funding of this program, divided
into four efforts with the following goals: materials to extend the life
of planar-bulk CMOS silicon, circuit analysis and synthesis, application
methodologies for future computing devices and interconnects between a
microchip and the total system.
That's $250 million in industry funds
funneled into targeted research and development. Maar says that the
research into future chip materials takes "environment, health and
safety concerns into significant consideration," but is unable to
say how much money, if any, such consideration costs.
For more details on proactive health measures taken by the industry in
the past two decades, Maar referred me to Lassiter.
Lassiter, a professor of public health at
the University of Oklahoma, was hired by the SIA in 1982 to develop and
administer an internal health and safety reporting system -- which,
curiously, comes up with a consistently lower rate of occupational
illness in the industry than indicated by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics. A former health official at both the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration and the National Institute for Occupational Safety
and Health, Lassiter makes "no pretense that this [system], in any
way, identifies chronic conditions ... It's not designed to do that. If
those conditions exist -- there's no evidence they do -- but if they
exist, then the system is certainly not capable of capturing
those."
Lassiter is also unable to provide much
in the way of specifics on the topic of workplace improvements. He cites
general trends over the past two decades toward equipment automation and
protective devices, resulting in "less potential for contact with
chemicals," but with regard to the issue of worker safety he says,
"I have less an opinion on stuff than I am just managing a
database."
What about possible health hazards for
clean-room workers as a result of contaminants in recirculated air?
"I'm not sure what people are
talking about with recirculated air," he answers. "What you'd
have to find out is how much the air really is recirculated, and if it
is recirculated, what does that mean when you take air measurements? ...
Even if you recirculate the air, I guess what they're saying is that the
concentration of the chemicals increases."
Lassiter's critics disagree with his
suggestion that their main problem with recirculated air is that it
might increase the amount of chemicals ingested. What they're saying,
and have been saying for 20 years, is that the air filters do not change
the chemical makeup of vapors -- such as those escaping from the spilled
disk coating Alida Hernandez describes -- and that these chemicals
constitute low-level, long-term exposures that may accumulate in fatty
tissue and have adverse chronic effects on worker health such as cancer.
What they're also saying is that these chemicals, once metabolized by a
worker, may react with other contaminants, creating new and untrackable
pharmacological hazards.
Dr. Bruce Fowler, director of toxicology
at the University of Maryland at College Park, explains it this way:
"Most commonly, what you see when
you start mixing chemicals together is additivity -- it's like stacking
blocks. But for some chemicals, you actually get a bigger bang than you
would have expected when mixing two or more compounds. The literature of
toxicology is replete with stories of potentiation [i.e, "bigger
bangs"]. Sometimes you can have one chemical jack up the
metabolizing system so that the toxification of the second chemical will
actually be increased -- it's a very chemical-specific phenomenon. Who
knows what would happen if you had five or six chemicals absorbed at the
same time?"
"All of us vary in our
susceptibility to chemicals," adds Fowler. "Some people say
that [bigger bangs] are uncommon at low-level exposures, but then the
question is, What's a low-level exposure? Low-level to whom? Is it a
35-year-old male? Is it a pregnant woman? Is it somebody who goes home
every night and has a few drinks?"
If Don Lassiter is the unworried voice of
the semiconductor industry, Mandy Hawes is the same industry's
unassuming scourge. With a thin, pointed nose and straight brown hair
cropped above the ears, Hawes is a long-distance runner who is also a
careful speaker, with the litigant's habit of answering questions with
citations and disclosing no more than is asked. Clients adore her and
corporations loathe her. She is the eye of the storm against IBM.
"If the [local exhaust ventilation]
doesn't capture the organic contaminants, where do they think they're
going to go?" asks Hawes, founder of the Santa Clara Center for
Occupational Safety and Health and one of the most tireless activists on
behalf of worker safety and health in the country. Last month, Hawes
received an award from the Women's Foundation for her lifetime
commitment to raising the issue of environmental causes of breast
cancer. "People shouldn't even be in that sort of environment,
breathing recirculated fumes, but they have been. What were the
companies thinking?"
Hawes began her career providing legal
services to Bay Area cannery workers. Beginning in the mid-1970s,
however, she noticed more and more of her clients -- most of whom were
newly arrived immigrants -- taking jobs in electronics assembly. With a
few colleagues, Hawes started the Electronics Committee for Occupational
Safety and Health, whose first major effort was the Campaign to Ban TCE
-- a recognized carcinogen often referred to as "trike" and
better known, these days, as the solvent suspected of causing the
clusters of leukemia in "A
Civil Action."
Today, Hawes is lead attorney for the
plaintiffs in the lawsuits against IBM and its chemical suppliers. The
conference room at Alexander, Hawes and Audet overlooks St. James Park
in downtown San Jose, where in the early 1930s the Agricultural Workers
Industrial League organized massive labor rallies on behalf of striking
workers from the Santa Clara canneries.
"There's so many ways in which the
existing set of regulations [controlling workplace exposures to
chemicals] doesn't begin to get the job done," Hawes says.
"Testing is at a minimum for [chemical] mixtures, even though the
reality for all workers is that they're working in a mixed-chemical
environment, both because the individual products are mixtures and
because they're using several chemical products at once. Our whole means
of trying to regulate the [workplace] environment is so far behind that
fact."
While Hawes concedes that the equipment
used to detect airborne organic contaminants in fabrication areas has
greatly improved over the years, she points out that such systems
function primarily as protection against acute hazards, such as gas
leaks. They are not intended to monitor the workplace environment for
low-level chemical exposures under OSHA's permissible exposure levels.
As documented in Bill Moyers' investigation
of the chemical industry, and summarized by environmental advocacy group
Coming Clean, of the
2,800 chemicals produced in volumes of 1 million pounds per year or
more, 43 percent lack basic toxicity testing, including tests for
carcinogenicity, reproductive toxicity, neurotoxicity and immune system
toxicity. Only 7 percent of these so-called high-production volume
chemicals have a complete set of preliminary toxicity evaluations, or
"screening level data." Even if these tests indicate a
problem, this is not enough to ban occupational use of the compound,
often at exposure levels far greater than those considered hazardous
when found in the natural environment.
"There are powerful historical
reasons for these disparities," says Sandra Steingraber, author of
"Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the
Environment." "First of all, I think there's a misconception
in the minds of a lot of folks that the so-called permissible exposure
levels [for synthetic chemicals] are completely science-driven -- that
scientists go out and test these chemicals for all their possible toxic
effects, and then agree on a safe threshold level, and that threshold
level protects everyone equally under the law. That's not how our
regulatory system actually works."
She explains that different branches of
the government, such as the EPA, Food and Drug Administration and OSHA,
are responsible for setting threshold limits in different sectors of
society. Workplace exposures are governed by OSHA, and ambient -- or
background -- contamination levels that we might all be exposed to fall
under the jurisdiction of the EPA. It turns out that OSHA, as a rule,
regulates much more loosely than the EPA does.
Steingraber credits the stronger unions
of the first half of the 20th century with pushing through safer
exposure levels and monitoring equipment for the first wave of
industrial chemicals, most of which got their start in the 19th century.
"Unfortunately, what's happened in
the last half-century is that you saw this explosion of synthetic
chemicals right after World War II, when the chlorinated solvents really
came in big time. At the same time, you had this waning of union power,
and so workers lost a lot of ground" in protecting themselves
against workplace exposures.
That sentiment is shared by Hawes, who
suggests posting warnings in places of employment that would not only
notify employees if they were being exposed to concentrations of
hazardous chemicals but would state that it is legal to expose the
worker to concentrations many, many times greater than what the state of
California has determined to cause one excess cancer per 100,000 people.
"That may make a difference, and make people begin to grasp the
total double standard between what happens in the workplace and what
happens outside."
Will warning labels be enough? Or is it
time for corporations to start factoring in the potential dangers of
working at the cutting edge into employee compensation? Since employers
simply cannot say, with certainty, that working with constantly changing
combinations of complex organic compounds is safe, shouldn't they be
telling that to workers and start offering them hazard pay?
But even if activists are successful in
requiring that businesses come clean with their workers, how can chip
making, and the computer economy generally, realistically be expected to
continue without necessarily putting workers at risk? We cannot expect
to discover, in one fell swoop, an entire chemistry set of nontoxic
alternatives for the toxic metals, solvents, resins, gases, plasmas and
acids still required to make computer chips. And yet, the world economy
is increasingly dependent on those chips.
Steingraber is optimistic, looking back
at the example of the pesticide DDT for encouragement. "Whole books
were authored on how if we banned DDT, agriculture would wither on the
vine, and yet we've figured out better, safer ways to do things. I think
when workers stand up and say, 'Enough already, we're not going to make
computers possible on the backs of our health, and die -- we need to
find a better way of doing this,' human ingenuity and innovation will
come through, and suddenly we'll find better ways."
There are researchers making
genuine progress on low-impact ways to manufacture chips. One of the
more prominent is Fahrang Shadman, director of the Engineering Research
Center for Environmentally Benign Semiconductor Manufacturing at the
University of Arizona in Tucson.
Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Semiconductor Research
Council, Shadman and his team of over 100 Ph.D.s and graduate students
and approximately 30 faculty members from a dozen academic disciplines
have done some amazing work in just half a decade. They have replaced
the spin coating process -- in which organic solvents are often used to
deposit thin films on the wafer surface -- with a totally
"dry" process that deposits these films "without any
solvents whatsoever."
Already, they have substantially reduced
the need for photoresist -- possibly the most critical and toxic
formulation in chip making -- by developing chemistries in which certain
films are directly imprinted on a chip. They've created radical new ways
of reusing and reducing the need for water, traditionally one of the
largest resource drains of fabrication plants -- and a reason for the
semiconductor industry's tense relations with the water-poor regions of
the Southwest, whose aquifers it has not only poisoned but consumed.
"We are not sitting here trying to
figure out how to meet the regulations," Shadman says. "We are
trying to revolutionize certain aspects of semiconductor manufacturing.
Environmental issues, after all, are international, and the
semiconductor industry is an international industry. It is truly global.
And yet there is no [research center] anywhere in the world with this
kind of vision."
That vision is devoted to the research
and transfer of radically new chip-making technologies, developed
according to a project philosophy called "Design for
Environment." "What this means is that we're looking at the
environment in the same way we would at other manufacturing factors,
like cost. Why is it that we have to lower cost? Because cost is a
factor. Why is it that we have to improve performance? Because
performance is a factor. So we put environmental impact exactly in the
same category, and the environmental motivation becomes a driver for new
technology."
Environmental motivation of a different
kind is being shown by the semiconductor industry with respect to the
cancer question. In November 1999, as the number of plaintiffs was
beginning to multiply in various lawsuits, the SIA announced the
formation of a Science Advisory Committee "to review existing data
on potential cancer health risks, if any, within the U.S. semiconductor
manufacturing industry." SIA president George Scalise prefaced the
announcement with a carefully worded disclaimer: "While we do not
believe there is credible evidence of increased risk of cancer
associated with working in the semiconductor industry, we believe it
will be useful to assess the existing data to determine whether more
extensive evaluation is warranted."
The recommendation of the Science
Advisory Committee is due early next year. According to Dr. Mark Cullen,
professor of medicine and public health at Yale University School of
Medicine and one of the six expert scientists picked for the current
panel, "This represents what I would consider to be, as a
professional in the field, a very positive evolution in the industry
over the decade-plus that I've been involved. I take at face value their
serious interest in wanting to know where they are and what they need to
do in order to do the right thing."
Even if the semiconductor industry and other
high-tech giants that manufacture devices in clean rooms are finally
taking the problem seriously, a hard look at Silicon Valley today, with
its mercury-infested streams, poisoned aquifers and rising rates of
breast cancer, still doesn't encourage hope for the future. What new
brew is bubbling up at the valley's biotech start-ups? What new untested
mix of chemicals is set to spill on a clean-room worker's arms and legs?
Silicon Valley is full of oft-repeated
myths that are proud testaments to the region's technological prowess
and entrepreneurial spirit. The garage in which Hewlett and Packard
founded one of the most successful high-tech companies of the 20th
century, the Homebrew Computing Club's prowess in bringing personal
computers to the people, the Apples and Suns and Netscapes and Yahoos --
they're all examples of the new economy, of the wondrous computer
revolution. But rarely do the mythmakers take a close look at the costs
of such progress. Rarely do they contemplate the vicious cycle at work:
The faster the technological advancement, the harder it is for public
health experts to keep up with the potential new health hazards posed by
those innovative new processes.
Driving through Silicon Valley today,
with its nondescript office flats and cookie-cutter suburbs, it's easy
to focus only on the genuinely impressive feats of its engineers and
entrepreneurs, and easy to miss the more subterranean changes wrought by
those achievements.
But if you step out of the clean room at
IBM'S Cottle Road disk drive manufacturing plant and into the lunchtime
sunlight, returning to Blossom Hill Road as it crosses over Monterey
Expressway (forming the eastern border of the IBM contamination plume as
it extends three miles northwest toward Coyote Creek), you'll reach the
southern on-ramp to Highway 101. The next exit will drop you into the
neighborhood of Los Paseos, just a few blocks from the former site of a
Fairchild Semiconductor fabrication plant at the eastern base of the
Santa Teresa Hills.
That plant is where a failed gauge allowed an underground storage tank
to overflow, causing an estimated 40,000 gallons of organic solvents to
seep through the fiberglass liners and into the underlying aquifer. Less
than 2,000 feet away was Great Oaks Well No. 13, which supplied the
drinking water that may have resulted in a surge of miscarriages and
birth defects in the residents of Los Paseos.
Fairchild, of course, is the prototypical
chip maker of Silicon Valley, founded in 1957 by the so-called
traitorous eight from William Shockley's failed start-up, two of whom --
Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce -- would later found Intel, today the
largest chip maker in the world and the company tied for the most
Silicon Valley Superfund
sites to its name. According to legend, Fairchild sold its first
batch of transistors to IBM at $150 apiece. Many of Silicon Valley's
biggest stars can trace their ancestry back to Fairchild.
The site is now occupied by a Shell
filling station. If you pass the station and continue up into the Santa
Teresa Hills, you won't get far before hitting another IBM checkpoint.
It's the east entrance to the IBM Almaden Research Center, on whose
several hundred acres of orchard and live oak Big Blue's San Jose
research director is promoting something called "pervasive
computing." If you listen hard at that checkpoint, with some
imagination you will hear the far-off sound of Alamitos Creek, flowing
down on the other side of the mountain into the most
mercury-contaminated river basin in the nation.
The gold rush that launched that mercury
madness birthed modern California. The silicon boom, in turn, fuels
today's global economy. Somewhere in Sunnyvale or Mountain View there
is, perhaps, an as-yet-unknown biotech start-up ready to unleash yet
another wave of world-transforming change.
Future revolutions are inevitable. But
the lesson of the impact of the semiconductor industry on its workers is
also inescapable: Nothing comes without a price.
