The Underside of High Tech

The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.

—Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962

If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than with sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as God really made it, not just as it looked after we got through with it.

—President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965

A harbor seal arches her back and dives, a graceful comma of brown on the steel blue water of San Francisco Bay. A school of herring darts through the saltwater off the coast of Holland. A polar bear settles down to sleep in a den carved out of Arctic ice. A whale cruises the depths of the North Sea and a chinook salmon noses her way into the Columbia River on her way home to spawn. In the Gulf of Mexico, a bottlenose dolphin leaps above the waves. A seagoing tern lays an egg. A mother in Sweden nurses her baby, as does a mother in Oakland, California. Tissue samples taken from these animals and from these women's breasts contain synthetic chemicals used to make the plastics used in computers, televisions, cell phones, and other electronics resist fire. Americans have the highest levels of these compounds in their blood of any people yet tested, and the same chemicals have been found in food purchased in grocery stores throughout the United States.

On the shores of the Lianjiang River in southern China, a woman squats in front of an open flame. In the pan she holds over the fire is a smoky stew of plastic and metal—a melting circuit board. With unprotected hands she plucks out the microchips. Another woman wields a hammer and cracks the glass of an old computer monitor to remove the copper yoke. The lead-laden glass screen is tossed onto a riverside pile. Nearby, a man sluices a pan of acid over a pile of computer chips, releasing a puff of toxic steam. When the vapor clears a small fleck of gold will emerge. Up and down the riverbanks are enormous hillocks of plastic and metal, the discarded remains of electronic appliances—monitors, keyboards, wires, printers, cartridges, fax machines, motors, disks, and cell phones—that have all been exported here for inexpensive, labor-intensive recycling. A bare-legged child stands on one of the mounds, eating an apple. At night, thick black smoke rises from a mountain of burning wires. In the southern Chinese city of Guiyu—one of the places in Asia where this primitive recycling takes place—an estimated 80 percent of the city's 150,000 residents are engaged in processing the million or more tons of electronic waste that have been arriving there each year since the mid-1990s.

Mines that stretch for miles across the Arizona desert, that tunnel deep under the boreal forests of northern Sweden, and others on nearly every continent produce ore and metals that end up in electronic gadgets on desktops, in pockets, purses, and briefcases, and pressed close to ears all around the world. In a region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo wracked by horrific civil war, farmers have left their land to work in lucrative but dangerous, landslide-prone coltan mines. Sales of this ore, which is used in the manufacture of cell phones and other devices, have helped finance that war as well as the fighting between Uganda and Rwanda in this mineral-rich region of Africa. Although they are mostly hidden, metals make up over half the material in the world's approximately one billion computers. A typical desktop computer can contain nearly thirty pounds of metal, and metals are used in all electronics that contain semiconductors and circuit boards (which are themselves 30 to 50 percent metal)—from big plasma screen TVs to tiny cell phones. Extracted and refined at great cost, about 90 percent of the metal that goes into electronics eventually ends up in landfills, incinerators, or some other kind of dump.

Traffic on the highway that runs between San Francisco and San Jose is bumper to bumper. Haze rises from the vehicle-clogged road. Office plazas, strip malls, and housing developments stretch out against the backdrop of hills that frame the valley. Pooled beneath the communities of Santa Clara, Cupertino, and Mountain View, California—to name but a few—are thousands of gallons of poisonous volatile organic compounds left by the manufacture of semiconductors. California's Silicon Valley now has more toxic waste sites subject to cleanup requirements under the federal government's Superfund program than any other region of comparable size in the United States. In parts of Mountain View, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has found in groundwater levels of trichloroethylene (TCE)—a solvent used in semiconductor production that the EPA recognizes as a carcinogen—that may be sixty-five times more toxic than previously thought. Official estimates say it will take decades, if not a century or more, to complete the cleanup. Families in Endicott and other communities in Broome and Dutchess counties in upstate New York are grappling with the same problem, living above a groundwater plume contaminated for over twenty years with TCE and other solvents used in microchip manufacture.

In the high desert country of New Mexico, the ochre and mustard colored cliffs of the Sandia Mountains rise above the Rio Grande valley. Globe mallow and prickly pear sprout from the sandy soil. This is the third most arid state in the nation, and the past decade has been marked by drought. Yet one of the handful of semiconductor manufacturers located near Albuquerque has used about four million gallons of water a day—over thirty times the water an average American household uses annually—while sending large quantities of toxics into the local waste stream. Similar scenarios have emerged in other parts of the country where semiconductor manufacture has taken place—among them, the Texas hill country around Austin, the Boston area landscape that gave rise to the American Revolution, and the suburban sprawl that surrounds Phoenix. Residents of Endicott, New York, and Rio Rancho, New Mexico, have asked the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry (part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) to assess the health impacts of hazardous air pollutants—including trichloroethylene, methanol, ethylene chloride, and several perfluorocarbons—emitted by high-tech manufacturers located in their communities.

Semiconductors come off the assembly line in numbers that dwarf other manufactured products, but...