Under the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, the outgoing Biden-Harris administration continues to pour billions of dollars into building science facilities. Huge new microchip planta distinctive domestic policy and ready to continue into the next one. These plants will continue to have a significant impact on the environment through their energy use, water use, and release of hazardous substances into the environment.
Those environmental impact documents were abruptly waived in early October when President Biden signed another bipartisan bill. Chip construction method under American lawmost CHIPS Act projects are exempt from mandatory environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act. The effects of these penstrokes will likely be felt in America's bloodstream for generations to come.
The semiconductor industry argues that such an environmental review could cause delays and undermine the federal government's efforts to restart chip production. Industry lobbyists have successfully reassured lawmakers that their operations pose little environmental risk. I've heard this argument many times from the semiconductor industry. And if possible, the groundwater in the area where I live as I write this would be different.
Currently, Santa Clara County, the center of Silicon Valley, has Highest concentration of federal Superfund sites — In other words, a highly toxic site — in any county in the U.S. This is an often forgotten legacy of the birth of Silicon Valley. For decades, many of the world's microchips have been manufactured here. Over time, the industry has moved chip “manufacturing plants” to other locations, but the poison remains, mostly in the form of toxic groundwater plumes.
Although today's semiconductor manufacturing is largely automated, the industry's early days were extremely labor-intensive. Workers at the Santa Clara chip manufacturing plant are primarily women of color, and due to exposure to solvents and other chemicals used in the production process, wide range of health complicationsfrom miscarriage to cancer. And workers weren't the only ones affected, as mishandling of these toxic substances caused leaks and spills that contaminated local groundwater and soil.
Back then, as now, the industry insisted it was clean and safe. And at that time, there was no need to conduct an environmental review.
Bringing semiconductor wafer manufacturing back to the United States is a good idea and deserves government support. However, government funding should only be provided on the condition that workers and host communities are not put at risk by domestic revitalization of the industry. Exempting CHIPS awardees from environmental reviews makes it easier for industry to degrade the environment and threaten public and worker safety. And in the process of building and permitting large new factories in local communities, they withhold important information from the public.
The new exemption is essentially a return to the old policy approach that polluted Santa Clara County, but the names of the pollutants have changed. This is what the semiconductor industry has become I got hooked on PFAS. — Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances — a class of highly toxic, highly persistent, and now ubiquitous compounds commonly known as “forever chemicals.”
A vast body of research has shown that PFAS Accumulated in our environment and bodyleading to a number of serious health conditions. While this research sparked a movement to remove PFAS from many products and manufacturing processes, the semiconductor industry is developing alternatives to hundreds of different PFAS chemicals used in approximately 1,000 critical applications in microchip manufacturing. It claims that there is no.
The use of PFAS by the semiconductor industry is unregulated and, in most cases, unmeasured. However, data collected by the Vermont Department of Environmental Protection Found Cornell University researchers discuss various PFAS chemicals being released into the Winooski River Found Most PFAS in chip manufacturing waste fluids have not been identified. I call them “dark PFAS.” As CHIPS Act projects operate, this wastewater, like the potent and persistent greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by factories, remains unmonitored, untested, and unregulated.
For more than 40 years, I have fought to get businesses and regulators to clean up the mess that industry has left in Santa Clara County. The work is not finished yet. And to this day, residents are still exposed to harmful solvents underground that enter their homes and workplaces as vapors, putting them at risk for health problems such as heart birth defects, Parkinson's disease, and cancer. is increasing. This is the result of industry “self-regulation.”
In the early 1980s, through organizations such as the Silicon Valley Toxic Substances Coalition, we in Santa Clara County raised awareness of the dangers the industry posed to our communities and forced the adoption of strict standards for the use and management of hazardous substances. I did. Eventually, many of these standards were widely adopted across the country and around the world.
Communities hosting new and future chip factories have the opportunity to seek protection permits under other environmental laws, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and advocate for transparency for companies and their enterprises. is still left. Government Funders. If we don't hold our governments accountable for the industries that are putting our bodies and our futures at risk, it's up to us.
Renee Siegel is executive director of the Center for Public Environmental Monitoring.
