|
|
 Home Our WorkElectronics IndustryElectronic Manufacturing
|
ELECTRONICS MANUFACTURING
A Deadly Process Requiring Thousands of Toxic Chemicals
 |
|
Workers are soldering together component parts for use in Brand Name PCs at an electronics facility in China
|
|
In general, electronics manufacturing is a complicated assembly of hundreds of materials that require enormous amounts of natural resources to complete. Some compare the making of a single computer chip to boiling 10 gallons of water to make a cup of tea. This production has led to polluted drinking water, waste discharges that harm fish and wildlife, and high rates of miscarriages, birth defects and cancer clusters among industry workers. Electronics manufacturing is spread out between many companies around the globe, some that specialize in one or a couple of components like chips, and others that make most or all of the standard components like wiring, circuit boards and disk drives.
Annual Materials Usage of a Typical Semiconductor Facility
- 832 million cubic feet of bulk gases
- 5.72 million cubic feet of hazardous gases
- 591 million gallons of deionized water 5.2 million pounds of chemicals and
- 8.8 million kilowatt hours of electrical power
Toxic Chemicals in Computer Components Include:
- Lead and cadmium in computer circuit boards
- Lead oxide and barium in desktop monitors
- Mercury in switches and flat screen monitors and
- Brominated flame retardants on printed circuit boards, cables and plastic casing.
The Chip: Super-Powerful and Super-Toxic to Produce
Semiconductor chips are the most important part of electronic devices and require the most resources and toxic chemicals to produce.
Download a report that documented rates of cancer among semi-conductor workers at National Semiconductor's plant in Scotland. Click Here (PDF))
|
The semiconductor industry uses more than 1,000 hazardous substances including acids, solvents, caustics and gases to make chips. Some chemicals are suspected carcinogens and reproductive toxins. Others are so strong that they can cause severe burns deep beneath the skin. Arsine gas is the most toxic and attacks red blood cells.
Learn about toxics and your health.
Semiconductors factories have ‘clean’ rooms where workers must ‘clean’ the surface of the chip with toxic solvents that then become waste product that must be dealt with.
Workers and ex-workers in chip manufacturing report high rates of cancer, birth defects and miscarriages.
Chip factories in Silicon Valley have left a legacy of pollution, creating 29 Superfund sites in Santa Clara County before moving most of the manufacturing offshore to places of lower environmental and labor protections. Take a toxic tour of Silicon Valley.
Although a lot of product engineering and design still occurs in the U.S., most of the chip production has moved to countries like Costa Rica, Mexico, China, Malaysia, Singapore and Scotland. Read more in Challenging the Chip.
Standard Computer Components: Toxic Plastics
Standard components include: printed circuit boards, cables and wiring, plastic casings, disk drives, memory, and screens and monitors
These components are mostly plastics that require lots of energy as well as petroleum to make. Petroleum refineries are a major source of dioxin emissions that have been linked to adverse health effects.
There are large, multi-national electronics manufacturing service (EMS) companies that create electronics components, help to engineer new technologies and even do final assembly and logistics for some brand names.
Many of the intricate computer components must be assembled by hand, and EMS companies use low-wage and temporary workers to do the work. These workers have little or no rights because of their temporary status and often must work in sweatshop conditions.
For additional information also go to
CPA http://www.cleanproduction.org/
Lowell Center for Sustainable Production http://www.sustainableproduction.org/proj.clea.abou.shtml
|
|
| |
|
|
