Jim Fisher

Companies assume that system administrators, who seem to know everything else about computers, have information they don’t about recycling electronics. The truth is that these monitors, printers and CPUs that silently disappear after a couple of months in a storage closet rarely make it to a recycler; instead they’re sacrificed in a space crunch, hastily loaded on to a handcart and more often than not left outside the freight elevator with a stickie that says “Basura.”

I’d recently come across a statistic, however, that pointed out that monitors contain an average of 5 to 8 pounds of lead per unit, thanks to the radiation shield in the cathode ray tube (CRT). It turns out it’s worse than that: Lead constitutes approximately 25 percent of monitors by weight, and the estimate of 5 to 8 pounds per unit is based on 14- and 15-inch monitors. The standard-issue monitor today, at least for workers in the clean new economy, is 17-inch or above. In addition, lead is spackled across printed circuit boards as part of the soldering alloys that fuse electrical connections. It’s no surprise that consumer electronics constitute 40 percent of the lead found in landfills.

Some reminders about lead: If ingested, it can have toxic effects on the central and peripheral human nervous systems, and cause brain damage in children. It can seep into groundwater, poisoning plants, animals and microorganisms. More than two decades after the U.S. government banned lead from house paint, the feds estimate that 4.4 percent of children between the ages of 1 and 6 suffer from lead poisoning, typically from tainted paint flaking off old walls. In short, it’s a toxin, and doesn’t belong in the dump.

Leave an old monitor by the freight elevator, however, and that’s just where it’s going. “If you landfill a CRT, it will get crushed in the process,” says Ted Smith, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, an organization founded in 1982 in response to a rising number of birth defects and other health problems near the leaking Fairchild Semiconductor plant in San Jose. “The fine particles of glass laced with lead eventually degrade. With rainfall getting into the dump site, the water will become contaminated with lead, and that lead-filled water will leach out of the landfill and into the groundwater.” It’s a process that may take several decades, but it will happen: It’s as ineluctable as the flaking of paint.

“Lead is an element,” Smith says. “It isn’t going away. You can burn it, you can stomp on it, you can bury it; it isn’t going away. It’s going to get back into the life cycle.”

None of this is a secret to the U.S. electronics industry. Yet rather than developing consumer take-back programs for the recycling of its obsolete products, PC makers and other consumer electronics companies are lobbying to stop a European Commission proposal that would demand that they take responsibility for the hazardous materials in their wares. The European Commission’s draft directive on waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) would hold producers legally responsible for the reuse and recycling of their products, and phase out some of the worst toxic chemicals used in the manufacture of electronics.

The WEEE Directive so alarmed the U.S. computer industry — specifically the American Electronics Association, whose over 3,000 members include Microsoft, Intel, IBM and Motorola — that it prepared a legal position paper claiming the directive violates — surprise — the international trade rules of the World Trade Organization; the association managed to convince the United States Trade Representative to adopt its key positions. Targeted are the directive’s phaseouts of hazardous chemicals because, as the USTR states in its 2000 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers, “viable substitutes may not exist” — though plenty of people will tell you they do.

“The United States supports the drafts’ objectives to reduce waste and the environmental impact of discarded products,” the National Trade Estimate Report states. “The Administration has expressed concerns, however, on the adverse impact on trade from the current proposals’ ban on certain materials … and with the provisions regarding producers’ retroactive responsibility for the collection and recycling of end-of-life products.”

While it’s hard to say just how much USTR and AEA lobbying has influenced the directive, a list of revisions in the various drafts (the most recent version is the fifth) casts a recognizable shadow. The deadline for the phaseouts of hazardous chemicals has retreated from 2004 to 2008; the list of materials scheduled for phaseout has shrunk; the minimum recycling rate for cathode-ray tubes has dropped by 20 percent; provisions mandating the use of recycled plastics have vanished; and most worrisome of all, the most recent draft splits the directive into two separate legal documents: one dealing with the phaseouts of toxic materials, the other with everything else.

“I’m concerned they’re going to focus on one [document] and relegate the other to obscurity,” says Smith of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, who’s convinced the U.S. electronics industry will continue to fight, particularly against the phaseouts. “[The directive] is not just talking about producers who are home-based in Europe; it’s talking about everyone who wants to sell into the European market. Everybody wants to do that. Everybody has to do that. If this thing holds, it’s going to set the de facto global standard.”

For the time being, the de facto global standard is that the industry sells products to consumers, and consumers are responsible for their disposal. No matter that consumers have no control over — much less any idea of — what materials are used in the manufacture of electronics. I was appalled to learn the extent of the toxins in my e-junk.

Along with the lead in my cathode ray tubes and circuit boards, my U-Haul was loaded with chemicals with documented risks to public health and the environment: There was cadmium in my semiconductors, SMD chip resistors and infared detectors; there was mercury in my switches and position sensors; chromium in my steel housing; brominated flame retardants in my circuit boards and connectors; nickel, lithium, cadmium and other metals in my batteries; and in my cabling and older casings was polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a widely used plastic that during both production and incineration releases dioxins, which are among the most toxic chemicals known. All that was missing was a 55-gallon drum.

I had started my recycling mission by asking around for referrals. Few were forthcoming — not from my co-workers, not from friends in IT departments at other companies. The typical suggestion was to donate the equipment to schools or nonprofits. “But the stuff doesn’t work,” I found myself sputtering. “It’s defunct. It’s ‘end-of-life.’ What’s a school going to do with fried 486s and blown cathode-ray tubes?”

It wasn’t until I showed up in person at the Market Street offices of the Solid Waste Management Program in San Francisco, and asked with some belligerence what to do with my dead computer, that I was handed a comprehensive Commercial Re-use and Recycling Directory, listing a handful of local electronics recyclers.

In the meantime, I learned that schools and nonprofits have wised up in recent years. Many reject anything less than a Pentium 166, and refuse individual donations as a matter of policy. With the growing demand for newer and faster machines, “the nonprofits became everyone’s dumping ground,” says Dan Schimenti, purchasing manager for HMR-USA, a San Francisco recycling business that was recently awarded a $100,000 grant from the city’s Solid Waste Management Board to purchase a $350,000 monitor-crushing machine. “They don’t want 486s, they don’t want low-end Macs.”

It’s not just CPU speed that’s the problem: Few schools or nonprofits can afford the skilled help necessary to refurbish old equipment. “Most schools in California are budgeted for a single, part-time computer repair person,” says Steven Wyatt, executive director of the Computer Recycling Center. “Given what schools pay, it’s also the case that they don’t always get computer people with lots of experience and skills.”

To make things easier, the CRC makes a point of donating clusters of machines with identical components and drivers — a practice that makes it easier for schools or nonprofits to make them functional, but difficult for individual defunct computers to find useful second lives. At the Santa Clara warehouse (just a few blocks from an Intel Superfund site) pallets of shrink-wrapped CPUs and cathode-ray tubes tower nearly to the ceiling. On the warehouse floor, a group of volunteers and paid technicians test newly donated systems. Nonworking equipment, or equipment that can’t fit into clusters, is carted to the back room to be dismantled for recycling.

Recycling electronics means determining which parts can be sold intact and which must be unloaded as scrap. For example, monitor manufacturers can use intact cathode-ray tube guns, and third-party service companies — the businesses that contract with computer makers to manage their warranty programs — can use parts from old product lines. Eventually, however, one is left with electro-scrap and mixed plastics that can’t be reused.

The only buyers are specialized recyclers, such as MBA Polymers in Richmond, Calif., a business that’s developed a commercial process for recovering mixed plastics, or Micro-Metallics in San Jose, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Canadian mining giant Noranda, Inc., which operates a smelter in Quebec.

Electronics recyclers like Micro-Metallics, says Schimenti, “get thousands of tons of circuit boards” each year, which they strip of recoupable components, like microprocessors and memory chips, before shipping them off to smelters. The end product is “a metal stream … that is worth money based on the composition of the metals. It’s got a lot of lead, because of all the solder connections, and there’s also steel, aluminum and copper.” Needless to say, smelting is a dirty business, and one that’s heavily regulated in the United States and Canada. It’s no coincidence that almost no smelting is done near the population centers of the Bay Area.

While the Noranda smelter is probably the largest consumer of electro-scrap generated in North America, it is a best-case scenario. Due to regulations and pollution laws, it’s often cheaper to export the scrap to countries where such laws, if they exist at all, are more lax than those in Canada and the United States. Not surprisingly, reliable figures on the export of electro-scrap are hard to find, especially after the 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes, which the United States refused to join, began monitoring and regulating “toxic trade” of hazardous materials between developed and developing nations. Even so, an estimated 1 million of the 1.7 million monitors recycled in 1997 were shipped abroad for disassembly and processing.

“There are a lot of countries that make a huge business in the processing, recycling, smelting and disassembly of electronics, and it is done in an environmentally unfriendly manner,” Schimenti says. “Different countries have done it over the years, but when they reach a certain economic level, they stop.” The perfect example is Taiwan, which only a decade ago was desperate for raw materials like copper, silver and steel. “So what did they do? They imported it [and smelted it themselves]. That’s their source; they’re not mining the stuff.” Now that Taiwan is on its feet, it’s no longer in the market for scrap.

After a tour through the HMR facility, filled like the Computer Recycling Center with towers of palletized, shrink-wrapped computer components, Schimenti takes me out to the warehouse yard, where I hear the scream of drills and the crack of plastics before noticing four workers, bent over a workbench, dismantling monitors stacked in refrigerator-sized crates. They break the monitors into five key components: the plastic casing, the metal chassis, the yoke, the circuit board and the cathode-ray tube. The tubes, looking like giant chocolate kisses, are thrown onto a conveyor belt and carried into an environmentally sealed container to be crushed. The lead and glass are then separated with a heavy magnet and discharged for shipment as commodities.

“We deal with trailing-edge electronics,” Schimenti tells me once we’re inside. “The new Pentium 650, the new Mac G4 — that’s not us. We’re trailing-edge. We’re last year’s stuff.”

————

Despite the fact that California requires cathode-ray tubes to be handled as hazardous waste, I found no mention of consumer electronics on the Web sites of local waste management agencies, including San Francisco’s Hazardous Waste Management Program and Santa Clara County’s Hazardous Waste Recycling and Disposal Program. These programs provide detailed instructions on what to do with wastes such as aerosols, antifreeze, used tires and motor oil, but they share a glaring omission of electronics, with the exception of used batteries.

The one local program I found that did mention electronics — the city of Mountain View’s — did more to discourage computer recycling than help it along: “Electronic equipment … has too many intricate parts for recycling to be economical,” the site reads. “It is labor intensive to separate the multiple, and sometimes minuscule, material types for recycling, and markets aren’t readily available for small quantities of some of the material types. Therefore, recycling of electronic equipment is not common at this time.”

Would the folks in Mountain View, Silicon Valley’s ground zero, really rather have local companies like Netscape, Rambus, Veritas and scores of start-ups dump their old lead-filled monitors and circuit boards in the local landfill?

I have to assume not — but why do they make information on recycling e-junk so hard to obtain? Robert Haley, residential and special projects coordinator at the SF Recycling Program, says “the thing about solid waste [administrators] is that every new product that gets invented, we have to then figure out what it is and deal with it. It takes us a little while to catch up.”

“That’s why the producers have to get involved. They know what’s in there, yet a lot of times they won’t tell us because it’s proprietary,” adds Haley. A good example is the new flat-panel displays, which some organizations believe contain the kinds of gases that contribute to global climate change. No one knows for sure, however, because the industry won’t say. “Are [the manufacturers] thinking about what’s going to happen with these displays two years from now? They’re not required to, but they should be. That should be part of their job.”

Fortunately, not all domestic manufacturers shy away from the problems of producer responsibility. At Apple Computer — whose P.R. department failed to return several calls for comment — “Design for Environment” guidelines are becoming closely tied to the development cycle, with Apple Product Environmental Specifications (APES) tables measuring various product attributes with an eye to reuse and recycling options.

Similar design guidelines are in place at Hewlett-Packard, whose recycling facility in Roseville, Calif., is an encouraging example of how a large producer can responsibly dispose of its retired products and manufacturing overruns.

In the computer industry, “The cost of recycling — because there is a cost, it doesn’t happen for free and it doesn’t generate positive revenues — has never been a part of the commercial equation,” says Renee St. Denis, an environmental manager at the Roseville facility, which began as an in-house operation salvaging repair parts from old HP product lines. “To this day, the industry-wide solution to what we call ‘breakage’” — the mixed plastics, metals and glass left over after cannibalization — “is to put that stuff in a container and ship it to China.”

In fact, when St. Denis joined the group in 1994, that’s just what the Roseville plant was doing with breakage from 600,000 pounds of equipment recovered each month from its North American manufacturing plants, as well as from HP employees exchanging their own computers for newer models. “My job … was to find out for sure what was happening [with the breakage]. I found out for sure, and didn’t like it very much.”

Soon after her arrival, all shipments to China had stopped, and St. Denis was coordinating with Micro-Metallics to jointly manage a recycling facility on-site, with the breakage disassembled in Roseville and sent directly to Noranda’s smelter in Quebec. It may not be an ideal solution, but when dealing with 3.5 to 4 million pounds of recovered equipment per month — the current volume processed at Roseville — one can’t do much better than ship the scrap to one of the largest, most monitored smelters in North America.

When asked for her position on producer responsibility, however, St. Denis chooses her words carefully. “What we talk about [at HP] is the concept of shared responsibility vs. extended producer responsibility … Shared responsibility is the concept that there are several players along the value chain. Distributors get value out of our products, and even the consumer who uses the product at home or in the office gets some kind of value out of it.”

“We feel the responsibility for how you dispose of it at end-of-life needs to be shared,” she explains. “That doesn’t mean that we think we shouldn’t play a role or bear some of the cost; it just means that we shouldn’t do it all.”

Today, although Roseville gets a small but steady volume of equipment from commercial customers exchanging old equipment when purchasing new models, what goes on at places like Roseville is of little relevance to the average consumer. Individual users and small-to-medium businesses are more likely to purchase an HP product through a third-party distributor, such as a computer superstore or mail-order business, than from a sales representative who deals with large commercial customers. While an HP sales representative is prepared to take back end-of-life products as part of a purchase, try striking the same bargain with your CompUSA clerk next time you buy, say, a new Pavilion PC Minitower off the shelf. These days, more than half of all American households own a computer and one study, conducted six years ago at Tufts University, found that 75 percent of all computers ever bought in the United States are gathering dust in a closet, basement or garage. A report by the National Safety Council’s Environmental Health Center found that in 1998, only 6 percent of computers were recycled compared to the number of new computers put on the market that same year. That same report estimated that by the year 2004, there will be nearly a third of a billion obsolete computers in the United States. Today the average life span of a computer is estimated to be about two years — down from five years in 1997. We cannot just stockpile this stuff indefinitely; people need their space. Eventually the e-junk is going to get chucked.

Wyatt of the Computer Recycling Center tells me of a law firm that donated two dozen Pentium machines in May. “Their reasons for getting rid of the computers were speed, small hard drives, not enough RAM — the usual complaints,” he says. “The computers had the manufacturer stickers right on them.” The stickers told when the computers were first put into service. The dates on the stickers? May, 1999.

It’s not hard to believe. In my own company, it’s rare that I’m able to repurpose a year-old computer without a manager interceding and authorizing new equipment. And the managers have a point: used computers, like used cars, are less reliable than new models. The entropy ratio is accelerating; computers are breaking down at faster rates. The approaching rule of thumb: one computer per user per year.

Why can’t we just treat old computers like used toner cartridges, and ship them back to the manufacturer with a pre-paid return label? It’s a logistical problem, says St. Denis: “It’s easy with cartridges: the old one is exactly the same size as the new one, so it’ll fit right in the packaging … [Whereas] if you were to trade in your PC, it’s probably a different size, a different shape; even the boxes have changed.”

Meanwhile, agencies like the Solid Waste Management Program are rushing to classify and divert the increasing stream of electro-toxins from landfill. A new pilot program, begun Aug. 15 — just a few weeks after my cruise in the U-Haul — announced a free recycling service for obsolete and nonworking computers, with dropoff locations at eight San Francisco computer stores and four metal recyclers, including HMR-USA. Equipment dropped off at the stores will be picked up in bulk by the recyclers.

The program’s next goal is to arrange for the capture of electronics directly at residential public disposal areas, or “transfer sites.” For the time being, however, there’s little hope for diversion (the legal term for the reduction or elimination of targeted materials from a waste stream).

Take a load of cathode-ray tubes to your local dump, as I did that morning on my drive to Santa Clara, and you won’t find much resistance. In fact, workers at the Sanitary Fill Company at Candlestick Point, the main disposal site for San Francisco residents, gave me a blank look when I asked if they accepted old monitors. I pointed to the cathode-ray tubes in my U-Haul; they handed me a brochure with tonnage rates. To them, it was general refuse. I thanked them and got back on the freeway.

Contrast this with trying to dispose of tires, mattresses or household hazardous wastes such as paint, used oil, solvents, batteries or coolant. “Dump a mattress at the landfill, it could cost you a hundred bucks,” Schimenti says. “[The waste companies] don’t want them, and they’re going to process them in a different way.” They don’t want them because, by law, the waste is marked for diversion. With the exception of Massachusetts, which in April became the first state to ban cathode-ray tubes from landfills, no such diversion exists for computer systems, despite the hazardous materials in their components.

Had I paid the $16 listed on the brochure, my cathode-ray tubes and lead-laden computers would have become part of the municipal waste stream, loaded onto containers and hauled to Altamont Landfill in Livermore. (San Francisco, despite a per-capita waste-generation rate 1.5 times that of the national average, does not have a landfill within city limits.) This same landfill made news last year when its operating company, Waste Management Inc., inadvertently dumped 6,000 cubic yards of lead-tainted dirt, disgorged from the infield of San Francisco’s new ballpark, on the Altamont hills outside Livermore. The mistake cost taxpayers just under $1 million, the price of gathering up the spill and shipping it to a hazardous-materials dump in Kings County.

The point here is not negligence. It was actually the state and not Waste Management Inc. that was to blame in this case. The point is that lead and other toxins do not belong in Altamont or in municipal landfills anywhere. The cities know it, the states know it, the feds know it. Yet today, there’s nothing to stop electronics, with their toxic cocktail of heavy metals, from getting dumped. The only reason we know about these hazardous materials is because of nonprofit watchdogs like the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and taxpayer-funded agencies like the Solid Waste Management Board.

“We’re still learning,” Haley says. “We’re trying to get the information and build the infrastructure, but really the industry has to come to the table and try to help with this. They’re the ones making the money, they need to pay the infrastructure costs … They’re not going to do it unless someone compels them to do it, because right now they can make money without having to be responsible for it.”

Then Melissa Block mentioned that as a 1-year-old Alexander had been carried to see Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered in 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and in a head rush of gratitude I nearly laid my forehead on the horn.

Since that broadcast, I’ve been thinking about the kind of work Alexander’s been asked to compose — an “occasional poem,” meaning verse produced for a special event – and discovered an anxiety it seems other poet friends share.

As a genre, occasional poetry originated with classical Latin poets, who used it to honor leaders and commemorate ceremonies of home and state. Since then it’s become less common, though it enjoyed flashes of favor in the 17th and 18th centuries. These days, in the United States at least, poems are still commissioned for the incidental donor gala or somber anniversary, though the practice is by no means a convention.

There’s no starker demonstration of our culture’s separation of poetry and state than the fact that our nation’s poet laureate, a consultant post to the Library of Congress filled on an annual basis since 1937, is not expected to produce verse for government events. It’s easy to see why: What poet today would allow his or her voice to be yoked to the policy of a presidential administration, even one as popular as Obama’s? At what point would the poetry become propaganda?

If the post was on the hook for occasional verse, as it was in England before Wordsworth resisted in 1843, America’s current poet laureate, Californian Kay Ryan, would be writing and delivering the inaugural poem. With no disrespect to Alexander, that’s something I’d have given my book budget to see. In addition to being a fluid, lucid poet, Ryan is a lesbian, who lived with her partner of 30 years in Fairfax, Calif., until her partner died on Jan. 3, 2009. Four years ago, in February 2004, they were married in San Francisco’s City Hall. How’s that for a voice to follow the invocation of Rick Warren, the anti-gay evangelical preacher who supported California’s divisive Proposition 8 in November?

But if the poet laureate doesn’t write poems for the state, why should other poets? That depends on the poet and the public event, and goes a long way to explaining why so many of my peers freeze up at the challenge of occasional verse. For what’s being asked of us is not necessarily a great poem (though a great poem would be a triumph), and not at all the kind of poem we’re practiced at composing.

What’s being asked is the fulfillment of a ceremonial role, something many Americans only experience in the one familiar ceremony where poems are routinely recited: the wedding. Not uncommonly, poets asked to choose a marriage poem (as most poets over 30 will tell you) give up the hunt for material both suitable and inspiring, thinking they’ll try to write the thing themselves. Next comes the panic: I have no idea how to write an occasional poem! For my own wedding, what I finally did was rework one of my existing poems; I did the same thing for the recent union of some close friends.

Did the revised poems suffer as stand-alone verse? Of course. Stanzas were tweaked to personalize the themes and ensure no lines risked being misconstrued, given the focal story of that day’s bride and groom. But whatever the poems lost in independence they gained in ritual and sentiment, and the affection of the moment still attaches to the poems for many who were there to receive them. This is probably why Goethe, an overwhelmingly social poet who was also a public official, asserted that “occasional poetry is the highest kind.”

A provocative claim, but I like my poetry on the page: solitary, unscheduled, perhaps talking to me personally but by no means shouting so all can hear.

This isn’t to say a poem can’t be written in response to a public event. On the contrary, poems often wrongly described as “occasional”  — Yeats’ “Easter, 1916″ and Auden’s “September 1, 1939″ are two prominent examples — were written after the occasion they commemorate, both of them rising above the moment to give meaning over time. Auden certainly didn’t write his poem in anticipation of the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II; the shock of the event conceived the poem, which was written in the days following the war declarations. Further, it was not only a great poem in 1939, it was a great poem in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks cast the stanzas in a new twilight, at the end of one era and the menace of the next.

An old poem was similarly reclaimed at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 by Robert Frost, the first poet in America’s history included in the ceremony. (Alexander is only the fourth.) After faltering with the beginning of a week-old original poem he had decided to write at the last minute, he finally said, “This was to be a preface to the poem I can say to you without seeing it.” On familiar ground now, his voice boomed as he recited his own 20-year-old poem beloved by JFK and first printed in “The Witness Tree” (1942). This was “The Gift Outright,” with its stunning invocation,

 To the land vaguely realizing westward,

a line reborn at that instant to signify the promise of the Kennedy presidency. Like the Americans of the poem, who hold themselves back from their country until they find “salvation in surrender” and “give [themselves] outright” to the land, Frost gave in to the greater poem, which became its own gift. The poem thus rewrote its own title and theme in ways impossible before JFK’s inauguration. In fact, Frost’s delivery was powerful enough that most Americans, reporters included, forgot the uncomfortable few minutes that preceded it. “Frost’s Poem Wins Hearts at Inaugural” read the headline in the next morning’s Washington Post.

The inaugural poets who followed, Maya Angelou (1993) and Miller Williams (1997), went forward with verse written specifically for the ceremony, and neither poem reads well when wrested from its event. Maya Angelou, despite her seemingly limitless talents and remarkable life story, delivered to my ears a real groaner, “On the Pulse of Morning.”

As for Miller Williams, it wasn’t until I became a fan of his daughter, musician and songwriter Lucinda Williams, that I took a closer look at his work. Not surprisingly, he’s a much stronger poet than “Of History and Hope,” the sensible, solemn, ultimately forgettable poem he delivered at Bill Clinton’s second inauguration in 1997, gives him credit for.

Why is poetry so different from other disciplines? Music and the plastic arts (painting, sculpture, architecture) are demonstrably receptive to commissions, with great works created on command, as it were. With sculptures and buildings, we only have to walk a few downtown blocks in most major cities to see lasting examples of both, pro and con.

The problem for poets is not the commission — Milton’s “Lycidas” and Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” are both immortal poetry commissions — but the occasion, which fixes the poem with a public event. Once the function has passed, the poem loses the immediacy of its audience, and with it the power to summon meaning and emotion over time.

So let’s dispense with this idea that poets can produce lasting poems for public events. It’s unfair to the audience, discomposes the poet, and probably confirms the low opinion of poetry some listeners already hold.

When we read poetry to ourselves, the occasion of a great poem is an internal event, organizing the perceptions and determining the material. When that occasion is a point in time and place, the work is more likely to be stuck there when published: partial, responsible, contemporary, rarely timeless.

How does this prepare us for the original verse Alexander will recite on Tuesday, Jan. 20, following Obama’s inaugural address? Based on her volumes, the most recent of which, “American Sublime,” was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, we can expect it will be generous and heterogeneous in its influences: skillful in tone, bold in emotion, deeply rhythmic in delivery. As for Alexander, she will be better prepared than Frost, more succinct than Angelou, and livelier than Williams. And it’s likely we, the audience, will be moved in ways we weren’t expecting to be moved, just as we sometimes choke up at the craziest words when sitting through the wedding of a loved one.

But if the words do not do the same thing on the page, that’s no fault of the poet. It is the occasion that speaks through her, an occasion that carries with it a shared universe of meaning, one not only privy to consumers of poetry but to Americans at large. That’s the role Alexander is poised to fulfill. Her given occasion will not only commemorate the election of the nation’s first African-American president — a friend and former colleague — but the 200th anniversary of the birth of the leader most often invoked as forerunner and mentor to the president-elect: President Lincoln.

“It is appropriate to revisit the words of President Lincoln,” explains the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (JCCIC) in its announcement of the 2009 theme, a leader “who strived to bring the nation together by appealing to ‘the better angels of our nature’. It is especially fitting to celebrate the words of Lincoln as we prepare to inaugurate the first African-American president of the United States.”

Specifically, the inaugural theme is “A New Birth of Freedom,” a phrase taken from those last, resolving lines of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:

… that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

In the emphasis of Lincoln’s dedication on the equality of all people, and the continuity between the living and the dead, we hear the substance of a poem written three years before by the American poet most associated with Lincoln and the spirit of our country: Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” that uncanny meditation on continuity and passage — present to future, individual to community, body to soul.

Chances are Alexander hears it too. In an early-’90s article for the Village Voice, she names two poets she’d take with her to the “proverbial desert island”: Gwendolyn Brooks and Walt Whitman. (Brooks is the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet from Chicago’s South Side, a former U.S. poet laureate and masterly fuser of form and African- American vernacular.) Whitman, writes Alexander, “is intoxicated with all that human life and the natural world hold.”

More recently, in a December 2008 interview with the Poetry Foundation, Alexander replied to a request for a poem reflecting “the cultural moment” by saying, “I have truly in my head been hearing lines from Walt Whitman’s ‘I Hear America Singing.’” For Alexander, what stirs Whitman’s words is how Obama’s “campaign truly belonged to an extraordinary cross-section, not only of Americans … but of people the world over.”

When Alexander steps up to the podium on Jan. 20, she’ll look out over the National Mall, where the Armory Square Hospital for soldiers stood during the Civil War. It was at this hospital that Whitman spent his discretionary time while working at a series of government posts. He talked with the sick and wounded, brought them gifts, wrote letters to their families, and sat beside them when they died.

When Alexander begins to read, I’ll hear “these honored dead” speak through her as they spoke through Lincoln, and as Whitman himself, prophet of inclusiveness and of the multitudes gathered on the mall, speaks through his great poem of crossing over, casting himself into the future on the numinous immediacy of the occasion:

It avails not, neither time or place — distance avails not;
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever
so many generations hence;
I project myself — also I return — I am with you, and
know how it is.

 

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.

The mine is also the single greatest source of mercury pollution in the San Francisco Bay Area. After the mining companies sweated the quicksilver from the rock, they dumped an estimated 800,000 cubic yards of burnt cinnabar into nearby Alamitos Creek: To this day, drops of liquid mercury and cinnabar slag are readily found in samples collected anywhere between New Almaden Mine and the city of San Jose. If you follow that creek into Silicon Valley you’ll pass signs showing a fish on a poker, and the warning:

FISH IN THESE WATERS ARE CONTAMINATED WITH DANGEROUS LEVELS OF POISONOUS MERCURY. DO NOT EAT FISH CAUGHT IN THESE WATERS.

The creek flows down through the serpentine foothills, through blue oak and California laurel, until it passes under McKean Road at the valley floor. A couple of hundred yards northeast on McKean takes you past a walnut orchard and across Calero Creek, also flowing down from the New Almaden hills and contaminated with mercury, until you hit the foot of the Santa Teresa Hills and the checkpoint for IBM’s Almaden Research Center. IBM ARC, the first computer research lab west of the Mississippi, is the birthplace of a host of technological innovations as valuable as mother lode gold, and, according to a wave of recent lawsuits, as toxic as New Almaden Mine mercury.

If you make a U-turn at the check gate to IBM ARC and follow the run of Calero Creek as it flows along Camden Avenue, the pepper trees and flowering plums thin and shift from the creek bed to the center divide. After approximately five miles you reach the stoplight at Blossom Hill Road. To your right is the parking lot for the Santa Clara Valley Water District, and behind it are the Alamitos Groundwater Recharge Ponds, where the joined creeks of the eastern New Almaden hills (Alamitos and Calero) meet the Guadalupe River, flowing in from the west side of Almaden Quicksilver County Park. The combined water is then spread across the ponds, seeping through the earth’s porous layers until it reaches underground aquifers, where it is stored until tapped by the county. Signs posted around the pools warn again of poisoned fish.

You are now officially in Silicon Valley. A few blocks ahead is the West Valley Freeway. Go east on the West Valley Freeway and after five miles you’ll have driven over one of the largest plumes of poisoned groundwater in the United States, over 3 miles long and 180 feet deep, contaminated with xylene, toluene and other volatile organic compounds, including the chlorinated solvent trichloroethane (TCA). Pump-and-treat groundwater cleanup operations continue to this day. The original source of this poison? Underground Tank Farm No. 1 of IBM’s Cottle Road Disk Drive Manufacturing Facility.

Built just three years after the disk drive was invented at IBM ARC in 1956, the Cottle Road plant was the first among dozens of manufacturing facilities — including those operated by Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Applied Materials and National Semiconductor — discovered in the early 1980s to have collectively leaked tens of thousands of gallons of organic solvents and other toxic contaminants into the groundwater of Silicon Valley. Today, the valley is home to more EPA Superfund sites (29) than any other county in the nation, with the most notorious of those sites — from a leaking tank at a Fairchild Semiconductor fabrication plant — poisoning a well that served the south San Jose neighborhood of Los Paseos. A subsequent study by the state’s Department of Health Services found 2.5 to three times the expected rate of miscarriages and birth defects among pregnant women exposed to the contaminated drinking water, leading to a lawsuit and multimillion-dollar settlement in 1986 with over 250 claimants.

The toxic details of Silicon Valley’s mercury-laden streams and contaminated aquifers are relatively well known. But another, even more troubling potential vector of deadly pollution has required more time to come to light — the “clean rooms” in which high-tech workers come into direct contact with a vast array of chemicals as they manufacture semiconductor-laden circuit boards and computer hard drives. According to a lawsuit filed in 1998 in Santa Clara County Superior Court on behalf of four cancer-stricken IBM employees and the families of five deceased workers — the number of plaintiffs has since quintupled to 45 — Big Blue and its chemical suppliers, including Union Carbide, Shell Oil and Eastman Kodak, fraudulently concealed from their employees the risks of adverse health effects, including fetal toxicity and cancer, arising from chronic, low-level exposures to chemicals used in the manufacture of disk drives and related circuitry. Solvents named in the complaint include many of the toxic compounds leaked into the groundwater two decades before.

In January, IBM and two chemical suppliers (Union Carbide and Ashland Chemical) settled a separate case in a similar wave of lawsuits involving about 200 current, former and deceased IBM employees, most of whom worked at a huge chip-making plant in East Fishkill, N.Y. But the amount of the settlement was not made public and IBM admitted no guilt.

And yet, IBM’s own corporate mortality statistics, charges the Santa Clara lawsuit, record a death rate from brain cancer among its employees about 2.5 times that of the general public. Did the chemicals involved in high-tech manufacturing cause the cancers? No one, not even experts who have long been critical of the potential safety hazards associated with clean-room workplaces, can say for certain. But numerous scientific studies have established that certain chemicals used in manufacturing semiconductors are statistically associated with increased rates of reproductive problems and various types of cancers. And the heart of the Santa Clara suit is the assertion that IBM repeatedly assured its workers that those workplaces were safe.

To the handful of experts occupied with the dismayingly difficult challenge of assessing the health threats of semiconductor manufacturing, IBM’s alleged confidence could not possibly have been merited. There simply hasn’t been enough testing and research into the health hazards posed by low-level exposure to combinations of toxic chemicals. If anything, the experience of the semiconductor industry should be sobering — the complexity of the chemical cocktails at use in modern high-tech industrial manufacturing is mind-boggling, and it is always getting more so. There is little chance, warn these experts, of ever catching up with the public health challenges inherent in new advances in technology, especially when the rate of change continues to accelerate. We may know that mercury is deadly, we’re pretty sure that drinking water contaminated with trichloroethane isn’t a good idea and we may finally be waking up to the dangers of making clean-room workers breathe the same recirculated air, laden with complex chemicals, all day long. But what do we know about the explosion of research in biotech, and microelectronic machines, or the next wave of advances in semiconductor manufacturing?

Is the price of technological advancement, and its consequent economic growth, to be paid in workers’ health? The legacy evident in Silicon Valley, since at least the 1850s, might hint at such a conclusion, although it also raises an obvious question: What alternatives do we have, if we are intent on technological progress? The lawsuits against IBM — the consummate symbol of high-tech prowess — might also give pause to the Silicon Valley’s more ardent advocates of high-tech progress. But instead of attempting to help public health officials and their own workers keep up with the challenges of accelerating technological change, for years the semiconductor industry has been more interested in investing its dollars in pretending that problems don’t exist.

Cottle Road, which today forms the western boundary of IBM’s disk drive manufacturing facility in San Jose, is named after one of the valley’s pioneer ranching families and forms part of what was once a vast Spanish land grant rancho. Orchards planted by the Cottles and dozens of other 19th century growers turned the valley into a world-famous provider of prunes and apricots, inspiring its first commercial nickname: the Valley of Heart’s Delight.

In the 1950s the prune and apricot orchards began to disappear to make space for the more than 2,500 electronics manufacturing firms that, by the early 1980s, had come to dominate the valley and would eventually lend it a new name, after the most common semiconductor substrate: silicon. The IBM campus, occupying approximately 1 square mile below Coyote Creek to the north and above the West Valley Freeway to the south, was built in 1959 on the commercial promise of the disk drive and solid-state electronics. At its peak it employed between 10,000 and 15,000 workers.

Virtually every computer currently manufactured owes something to the research carried out by IBM ARC scientists and the products then manufactured at the Cottle Road plant. ARC researchers came up with things like thin-film inductive heads, rotary actuators and sector servos — technologies found in most every modern hard drive, be it Quantum, Western Digital or any other brand owing its skeleton to IBM patents. Without a hard drive, no computer, not the IBM Thinkpad 600E on which this story is being typed, nor any of the rack of high-powered Web servers on which this story is being served, would be anything more than so much heavy metal and miscellaneous plastics.

Today, the Cottle Road plant is still the principal factory transforming the research and development of IBM ARC into salable product. This is where patented chemical formulations used in optical lithography — a process in which chip circuitry patterns are transferred onto silicon wafers — and disk-drive coating are mixed, packaged and shipped. It is where proprietary microcircuitry and subassemblies for new generations of disk drives are manufactured in the famous clean rooms — the factory floors of high-tech production whose highly protected environments require that workers take air showers before entering the “fab,” and wear head-to-toe “bunny suits” to protect the wafers from microscopic debris.

“The tiniest speck of dust on a chip could ruin thousands of transistors,” reads an exhibit at the Intel Museum in Santa Clara. Nowhere in the museum is it mentioned what health professionals and activists have attempted to point out since the late 1970s: that this “clean” environment has very little to do with safeguarding worker hygiene. The bunny suits may do an excellent job of preventing particles on employee clothes from damaging silicon wafers, but they are deplorably inadequate to protect workers against skin contact with the acids, solvents and other chemicals they use as a daily part of their job. Even worse, most clean-room ventilation systems are designed to recirculate the majority of the air used in the workplace, so as to prevent new infusions of airborne dust — in effect, workers are breathing the same chemically suffused air over and over again throughout the workday.

“Had I known that I was working with anything that could cause cancer, I would have had second thoughts about going to work there,” says Alida Hernandez, a former IBM employee and plaintiff in the Santa Clara lawsuit, who began her 14-year career at IBM washing residue from the surface of disk drives. She never knew what chemicals were in the wash, but a likely suspect is trichloroethane (TCA), a so-called safe substitute for the known carcinogen trichloroethylene (TCE), which itself was once touted as a safe substitute for the carcinogen perchloroethylene (PERC). In relatively low doses TCA can damage the liver, nervous system and circulatory system, and has been associated with brain cancer in gerbils exposed through inhalation. It is one of the contaminants in the solvent plume spreading beneath the Cottle Road plant, and shows up in Cottle Road’s Toxic Release Inventory data as late as 1991 — the year Hernandez left IBM.

Most of Hernandez’s 14-year career, however, was spent in the disk-coating operations, where she was exposed on a daily basis to another mix of solvents and resins that also included known or suspected carcinogens, in addition to liver and nervous-system toxicants. “We were given classes as to what to do in case of an explosion, what kind of a fire extinguisher to use if it was electrical or if it was chemical — those were the instructions they gave us. They didn’t say anything about the chemicals being bad for your [biological] system, or possibly cancer causing, or anything like that.”

Before starting each shift, it was Hernandez’s responsibility to inspect the back of her “operation” — as the coating workstations were called — to ensure the machine was running properly. If the mixers were running too fast, for example, air bubbles could end up in the coating formulation and ruin a batch of disk drives, not to mention an employee’s performance record. Workers were also responsible for cleaning the coating equipment with solvents several times throughout the workday.

“In coating you could only run 50 disks at a time without having to stop your operation and clean [the machine],” Hernandez says. Machines were cleaned chiefly with acetone, a moderately toxic solvent that is rapidly absorbed by the skin and is narcotic in high concentrations. Symptoms of acute exposure include convulsions, kidney and liver damage, and coma. Lower exposure symptoms include “slight intoxication, central nervous system depression, lassitude, drowsiness, loss of appetite, insomnia, somnolence, loss of strength, shallow respiration, weakness of the limbs, lightheadedness and general malaise.”

The National Toxicology Program safety data sheet on acetone recommends that workers wear “a full face chemical cartridge respirator equipped with the appropriate organic vapor cartridges” when handling this chemical. Hernandez was never provided with a respirator, or any other means of scrubbing organic contaminants from the air.

Hernandez, who was frequently in charge of running several machines at once, estimates that she passed from 350 to 375 disks through each machine per shift.

“Sometimes the [machine] lines would plug up and it was up to the operator to unplug those lines. You’d get coating all over yourself — I mean, it went right through your clothing. It went down to your skin. After you finished cleaning you just went and changed the outside smocks — the bunny suits — but your own clothing was all stained. It went right through the bunny suits.”

After the film had been applied, the disks were placed in drying machines that spewed mists filled with acetone and coating. That coating, states the complaint, contained the organic solvent xylene. An aromatic hydrocarbon — like benzene — xylene has long been implicated in toxicological literature for its adverse effects on the peripheral nervous system. Additionally, commercial formulations of xylene — at least in the early 1980s — contained concentrations of up to a few percent of its carcinogenic cousin benzene, according to a 1986 journal article, “Carcinogens and Cancer Risks in the Microelectronics Industry.” It too is one of the chemicals found in the Cottle Road groundwater plume.

Epoxy resins were another ingredient in disk coating, made from the compounds epichlorohydrin and bisphenol-A. The former chemical is mutagenic and genotoxic, and the latter is a known endocrine disruptor. Mutagenic and genotoxic “events” — in which genetic material is changed or damaged — are part of the first stage of cancer development, and may be indicative of cancer-causing chemicals. Epichlorohydrin is, in fact, a carcinogen. Endocrine disruptors are associated with reproductive and developmental harm.

Even today, clean-room workers continue to breathe recirculated air throughout their shifts. Machines are still cleaned, and metal surfaces degreased, with solvents, the most common being acetone and isopropyl alcohol, though more than a few companies — particularly the smaller, less recognizable firms — still use the carcinogen trichlorethylene or its cousin trichloroethane, according to annual Toxic Release Inventory data. To this day, the single most important chemical formulation in the manufacture of computer chips — the photoresist — is almost always a mixture of xylenes, carrier solvents, formaldehyde-based resins and genotoxic photoactive compounds. Other potential exposures in modern clean rooms include hydrofluoric acid, antimony, boron, phosphorous, gallium and arsenic.

Hernandez was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993, two years after leaving IBM. Hernandez has no family history of the disease. At the time of her departure, two of her immediate colleagues had fallen ill, says Hernandez. One female engineer was on a leave of absence as a result of breast cancer, and the employee who had trained Hernandez on disk-coating operations came down with skin cancer. Another colleague suffered a miscarriage.

Hernandez never connected the illnesses with the job until she was diagnosed with the disease herself. “It’s something you tell yourself always happens to somebody else, and never to you. When it happened to me, I started to think something was wrong.”

“My mother’s death should not have happened,” says Carmen Navarro, daughter of former IBM worker Alicia Apodaca, who rinsed and inspected silicon wafers in the clean rooms of Cottle Road from 1980 through 1989, and died of breast cancer at age 51. As with Hernandez, and the great majority of women newly diagnosed with breast cancer, there was no history of the disease in Apodaca’s family. “She was vibrant, healthy. She didn’t smoke, she didn’t drink, she took good care of her health. She was loved by her six children, and by her grandchildren, whom she adored.”

“She had friendships with fellow employees at IBM — a few of them have also passed away with cancer,” Navarro says. One acquaintance died of lung cancer, another of brain cancer, says Navarro. “And it’s continuing,” she says. In mid-April, Navarro says she learned of another IBM worker of more than 20 years who was diagnosed with breast cancer. (IBM declined to comment on Navarro’s and Hernandez’s statements, citing pending litigation.)

“I believe that [IBM] knew that the chemicals were dangerous to the employees,” says Navarro. I do believe that. This should not have happened.”

“Workers are a kind of controlled experiment,” says Dr. Sandra Steingraber, author of “Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment,” an authoritative study of the growing body of evidence linking cancer to the environment. “We know they work in certain workplaces for a certain number of hours with certain kinds of exposures. It’s considered unethical to go out and do human experiments on a group of folks who aren’t workers — but this happens de facto in a lot of workplaces. Workers are the canaries in the mines.”

In the East Fishkill lawsuit, former IBM workers Michael Ruffing and Faye Calton are the parents of Zachary Ruffing, 15, who was born blind and with facial deformities so severe he cannot breathe through his mouth or nose. They originally sued for $40 million in damages. Other Fishkill cases name cancers of the gastrointestinal and lymphatic systems; of the skin, bone and brain; and, most commonly, of the breast and testes. The cases filed by Cottle Road employees reflect a similar suite of cancers, the majority of which — like the cancers listed above — have all shown increased rates over the past 20 years and show longer-term increases that can be traced back at least 40 years, megatrends that correspond with the proliferation of synthetic chemicals following World War II.

In fact, workers’ compensation statistics show that exposure to toxic chemicals — coded as “systemic poisoning” in California — is twice as likely to be a cause of occupational illness in electronics workers as it is for workers in other manufacturing industries. National figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the percentage of work-loss injuries and illnesses involving “exposures to caustic, noxious and allergenic substances” in recent years (1992-1998) was consistently between three and four times higher for workers in the semiconductor industry than in manufacturing industries as a whole, a group that includes manufacturers of petrochemicals, paper, petroleum, coal, steel, aluminum, plastics and rubber.

The BLS statistics do much to erode the perception that the high-tech industry is somehow “cleaner” than its predecessors. But what of the companies themselves? How much did they know about what they might be subjecting their workers to, and how hard were they trying to find out?

The simple fact is that it isn’t in the high-tech industry’s interest to know too much about the long-term health consequences of exposing its workers to toxic chemicals: The more it knows, the greater its legal liability. Of the few industry-funded studies of clean-room-related worker health problems, the two most significant examined workers’ reproductive problems. One study was funded by the Semiconductor Industry Association, or SIA, the other by IBM. Both studies were conducted after activists raised concerns about the toxicity of a group of chemicals called ethylene glycol ethers, or EGE, used in photoresist.

The IBM-funded study, whose preliminary findings were released in 1992, found that pregnant employees at IBM’s Fishkill lab who were exposed to EGE were roughly 1.5 times more likely to suffer a spontaneous abortion than unexposed workers. The authors emphasized that no conclusive causative chemical could be identified, but IBM acknowledged that it could be “inferred” that the cause of the increased miscarriages was exposure to EGE. Eventually, IBM and most of the industry stopped using EGE. (The SIA study came up with the same conclusions.)

What’s noteworthy is that the gloomy results of this study didn’t lead the industry to carry out more research into the long-term health consequences of exposure to other chemicals.

See no evil is a wise corporate strategy. But the Santa Clara lawsuit declares that IBM should have known that something was very wrong in its clean rooms, based on trends visible in its Corporate Mortality File, a database with work history on over 10,000 deceased IBM employees. Public access to the mortality file is currently restricted by a gag order, but the facts cited in the Santa Clara complaint are corroborated by statistics in a 1996 article in the scientific journal Epidemiology, “Brain Tumors Among Electronics Industry Workers.” The file is a substantially complete (99 percent) database of all U.S. IBM workers of five or more years who died between 1975 and 1989; the records were constructed from death certificates obtained by IBM “for administrative purposes”; and the cause of death in 149 of the total 10,331 cases was primary brain cancer. (The article never specifically identifies the subject company, but a footnote identifies IBM as the funder of the research, and the mortality statistics are identical to those included in the complaint.)

That’s quite a lot of brain cancer, about 2.5 times that of the general population, without factoring in biases for gender and age. More significantly, what this study found was an upward slope in brain cancer deaths among male electronics workers as duration of employment lengthened.

Because of the gag order, the other charges in the complaint — that these records prove IBM knew that workers involved in manufacturing electronic devices were at a significant risk not only of brain cancer but of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, gastric cancers and leukemia — cannot be independently confirmed. (IBM will not comment on pending litigation.) But if one traces the citations in the Epidemiology article back through the scientific literature a pattern emerges that raises troubling, unanswered questions about elevated risks of cancer among workers in the manufacture and repair of electronics, and particularly among workers with long-term work histories — specifically, 10 or more years — and with probable exposure to solders and organic solvents.

In 1985, the same year the elevated brain cancer mortality rates began showing up in the scientific literature, Gary Adams, a chemist working in the material analysis department in Cottle Road’s Building 13, where IBM disk drive coatings were developed, wrote a memo to IBM corporate headquarters. The memo alerted IBM officials to a cluster of cancers in his building. Eight out of his 14 immediate colleagues had fallen ill with some form of cancer.

Brain cancer had killed Adams’ colleagues John Wong and Al Smith; lymphatic and hematopoietic cancers killed his colleagues Gordon Mol and Dwayne Johnson; and gastric cancers killed his colleagues Robert Cappell and Ken Hart, states the complaint. When Adams and another colleague, Fred Tarman, developed bone tumors, they decided it had to be more than a statistical fluke.

“All of a sudden we began to worry,” Adams told “Dateline NBC” in 1998. “And then when another one [was diagnosed] and another one, it really began to hit home.” Adams said the response of a staff doctor to his request that the company monitor its workers’ health, particularly in Building 13, was to say such a program would be a waste of time, because “workers did not get cancer from their jobs.”

The official stance of the semiconductor industry has long been similar. At the end of each year, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the results of its survey on occupational health and safety, the Semiconductor Industry Association, which calls itself “the leading voice for the semiconductor industry,” and whose member companies constitute more than 90 percent of U.S.-based semiconductor production, issues a press release announcing that the industry ranks among the safest manufacturing industries in the nation. (The current SIA chairman, incidentally, is John Kelly III, a senior vice president at IBM.)

Molly Maar, a spokeswoman for the SIA, says too little is known about the chemicals involved to point fingers at any particular industry. “What we’re finding,” she says, referring to cancer risks among clean-room workers, “is that there’s not much scientific data out there … Studies aren’t inexpensive, and when you have many companies coming together, these things don’t happen overnight.”

IBM’s short, official statement following the Fishkill settlement admits of no doubt:

“No scientific data supports the allegations of [the plaintiffs]. No evidence conclusively links the cause of [the plaintiffs' son's] birth defects to the chemicals in question or, for that matter, any specific chemical at all.”

One of the toxicological literature’s most detailed surveys of health risks in clean rooms, it turns out, was written by a former IBM industrial physician, Dr. Myron Harrison, in a 1992 article titled “Semiconductor Manufacturing Hazards.” If there is a smoking gun for IBM, showing just how much it knew or should have known about potential health risks in clean rooms during the late 1980s, it is to be found is this exhaustive analysis of the potential hazards and exposure pathways of chemicals at every stage of chip making.

“If you look at the very early studies of chemical carcinogenesis,” says Dr. Steingraber, author of “Living Downstream,” “a lot of them were done by researchers who were industrial toxicologists, who might have originally worked for an oil company or something like that. They’re right on the front lines … When they have the courage and integrity to publish their findings, that’s some of the best science that we have showing the relationship between chemical carcinogens and cancer.”

Harrison’s catalog of health risks is staggering. He lists potential exposures of workers to arsenic in the manufacture of gallium-arsenide wafers; to acid aerosols in the “wet etch” stage of chip lithography; and to toxic gases of arsine and boron in the operation of dopant implantation tools. He attests to cases of hydrofluoric acid burns during the cleaning of furnace tubes; of exposure to corrosive solvents in wet-stripping processes; and of untested photoactive compounds being sprayed by photoresist spinners. He warns of “catastrophic accidents” in the replacing of gas cylinders and the draining and refilling of wet chemical baths; of malfunctioning ventilation systems; and of widespread respiratory complaints among workers, including sinusitis, laryngitis and asthma. He documents mercury exposure from arc lamps; “relatively frequent” chemical fires at storage sinks; and solvent overflows in tool exhaust systems.

Harrison begins his article with an extensively diagrammed treatment of what remains the most worrisome — and least acknowledged — pathway of exposure in clean rooms: the vaporized mix of organic chemicals recirculated by the ventilation systems. A rule of thumb proposed by Harrison is that 90 percent of the air in a clean room is recirculated per hour, to minimize the introduction of contaminants that might degrade semiconductors or other advanced technological fabrications. He also shows how fumes can enter into circulation through “service cores,” where vapors escape during equipment maintenance and where chemical spills are most likely to occur.

On top of that, recent evidence suggests that 15 percent of new fume hoods — the local exhaust system for clean-room workstations — fail to operate properly, potentially blowing toxic vapors back at the worker and into the clean-room environment.

“The ventilation conditions in clean rooms are very turbulent, and they cause a lot of problems,” says Tom Smith of Exposure Control Technologies, a business that tests and evaluates laboratory ventilation systems. “Fume hoods [designed for the microelectronics industry], when we’ve tested them in clean rooms, generally only have a capture effectiveness about six inches above the work surface. If you get above that, or if you have a very volatile process, they just spill. And the clean-room airflow is so turbulent that it competes with these hoods, and the vapors escape from these hoods and infiltrate the return air system and are recirculated with the air handler.”

And there are, without question, plenty of chemical vapors that can escape into the air system during the manufacture of a single computer chip, beginning with the pulling of a silicon crystal to the apotheosized “metallization” of the wafer — the industry’s term of art for deposition of electrical connections of aluminum on silicon. Figures based on a speech by a Texas Instruments fellow at the International Symposium on Semiconductor Manufacturing in September 1993 estimate that Intel’s state-of-the-art chip fabrication plant in Rio Rancho, N.M., consumes, in a single year of manufacturing, 832 million cubic feet of bulk gases, 5.72 million cubic feet of hazardous gases and 5.2 million pounds of chemicals.

These figures, though prodigal, are deceptively simple, for they do not indicate the unprecedented spectrum of chemicals used in semiconductor manufacturing. In his 1992 article, Harrison prefaces a section titled “Selected Toxic Hazards” with the disclaimer: “An attempt to review the toxicology of all the thousands of chemicals in use at a typical fabrication plant is doomed to be superficial and of little value.”

And the acceleration of the use of new techniques and new chemicals in new combinations in high-tech manufacturing makes safety evaluation harder all the time. “Professionals associated with this industry,” wrote Harrison, “have invariably commented on the rapid pace of change in tools and materials, and on the fact that adequate toxicologic assessment of chemicals almost never precedes their introduction into manufacturing settings.”

Harrison’s frustration is echoed by Joseph LaDou, director of occupational and environmental health at the University of San Francisco. LaDou calls chip making “one of the most chemical-intensive industries ever conceived.”

“The air-filtering systems do not alter chemicals except to dilute and recirculate them; and smocks and head gear do not protect workers from toxic exposures,” LaDou wrote in 1984. He reiterates the point in an interview 17 years later. “Not only are you recycling the vaporized chemicals, but you’re presumably allowing them to react with one another and introducing reactants into the air and recycling those as well.”

“Most of our [health] regulations are predicated on workers being exposed to one chemical, maybe two or three — but what do you do when they’re exposed to a hundred?” LaDou asks. “What we have here is a brand-new work setting with an almost scientifically impossible question to answer — how do you determine if a recirculated mix of chemicals is safe? — and there is no magic formula.”

“The problem with the spectrum of chemicals used in semiconductor manufacturing is that it could conceivably cause any cancer anywhere in the body,” says LaDou. “When you find a cancer in a semiconductor worker, it’s almost impossible to find a smoking gun.”

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In Part 2 Tuesday: Will clean rooms turn out to be the “dark satanic mills” of the 21st century?