THE STORY OF STUFF

by Annie Leonard

  But before you write me off as a total Luddite, let me assure you I appreciate the positive contributions that electronics and computer technology make. I would be hard-pressed to manage without my cell phone today. I know electronic devices can help find lost kids and stranded hikers. In the hands of activists around the world, they document human rights abuses and disseminate alerts and warnings. Text messages and tweeting have alerted the media and support networks when people have been unjustly detained or harmed. And I would be a very unhappy camper without my computer, which helps me find and organize information, communicate with friends and colleagues, and write this book.

  Yet the story of our electronics is extremely complicated. Those Apple advertisements make their products look so clean, simple, and elegant, don’t they? High-tech development is often cast as an improvement over the belching smokestacks of old-fashioned industries, but it actually just replaces the highly visible pollution of old with a less visible version.

  The truth is, electronics production facilities are ecologically filthy, using and releasing tons of hazardous compounds that poison the workers and surrounding communities. Silicon Valley, less than fifty miles south of my home in Berkeley, has so many toxic contaminated sites linked to former high-tech development that it has among the highest concentration of Superfund sites in the country.52 (Superfund is the U.S. government’s list of sites so contaminated with toxins that they qualify for priority cleanup programs.) Much of the high-tech production has now moved out of Silicon Valley—seeking the lower wages and less stringent worker safety and environmental regulations in Asia and Latin America—but it has left behind a toxic legacy.

  The famed high-tech wonderland of Silicon Valley is also a place of social extremes, with the mansions where Internet tycoons live butting up against rundown neighborhoods inhabited by the people who actually make electronic components—or who used to before the factories moved overseas. As computer companies strive to offer lower prices to consumers while maintaining their hefty profits, they increasingly focus their cost-cutting efforts on the stops along the supply chain. Big name brand computer companies are infamous for pressuring manufacturers and suppliers to lower expenses and prices and to lengthen working hours in order to make and sell the components cheaply. Michael Dell of Dell computers once said, “Our job is to be absolutely the best in the world at driving costs down.”53

  Then there’s the back-end problem of electronic waste, or e-waste. As I’ll discuss further in the chapter on disposal, e-waste is a global nightmare, with between 5 and 7 million tons of electronics becoming obsolete each year, their trashed toxic components poisoning the land, air, water, and all of the earth’s inhabitants.54

  In trying to gather information about the specific materials that went into my computer and the processes by which it was made, I ran up against some insurmountable barriers. Ted Smith at the Electronics TakeBack Coalition shook his head when he heard that I wanted to uncover the story of my computer in the same way as I’d tracked the production of my T-shirt and this book. “A computer is more complex than those items by several orders of magnitude,” he told me, like the difference between the biological makeup of, say, an earthworm and the entire planet. Smith points out that more than two thousand materials are used in the production of a microchip, which is just a single component of my machine! And because the industry moves so fast, continuously introducing new materials and processes, regulators and heroic watchdog groups like Smith’s can’t keep up. They haven’t yet completed their analyses on the health and environmental impacts of electronics from several years ago, and a new crop of products has already been introduced.55 On top of that, what makes telling the full story truly impossible is the secrecy the industry mandates, claiming their processes and materials are proprietary. That mentality is reflected in the title of a book by former Intel CEO Andy Grove: Only the Paranoid Survive.56

  It is impossible to know the exact locations where all the components of a laptop were drilled for, mined, or made, because of the increasingly complex supply chain of the electronics industry, which the UN reports has the most globalized supply chain of all industries.57 But we do know that all the problematic mining practices described in the chapter on extraction—for gold and tantalum, as well as copper, aluminum, lead, zinc, nickel, tin, silver, iron, mercury, cobalt, arsenic, cadmium, and chromium—are involved. The brand name company—Dell, HP, IBM, Apple, etc.—may have little immediate knowledge of, or even control over, how materials are derived or components are made, because these companies outsource to hundreds of other companies all over the world that provide and assemble the pieces. But that doesn’t exonerate those big brands from their responsibility for the environmental contamination, health problems, or human rights violations that their products cause.

  There is a fair amount of information available about the manufacturing of microchips, so we can at least take a look at how these are made. Chips, being the brains of the computer, are very complex. A chip is a thin wafer, usually made from silicon, onto which they etch tiny, fussy pathways made of metal that enable an electrical current to be transmitted and transformed into digital information. One of these chips is smaller than the fingernail of your pinky, and they’re getting smaller all the time.58

  The silicon for the wafers can be derived from nearly anyplace on earth; silicon is a kind of sand, very common and not inherently toxic. Fortunately wafer production does not require large amounts of silicon, which is good because exposure to silicon in mines or factories at greater levels can lead to respiratory problems and an incurable lung disease known as silicosis. According to the World Health Organization, thousands of people die from silicosis every year.59 Later in the chip-making process, the toxic elements antimony, arsenic, boron, and phosphorus are added to make the silicon conduct electricity.60

  To create the wafer, the silicon is ground to a powder, then dissolved in a flammable, corrosive, highly toxic liquid. In energy-intensive steps (there will be more than 250 of them before the chip is finished), this liquid is heated until it evaporates, is allowed to crystallize, and is baked again to form cylinders. The cylinders are cleaned and polished in a series of acidic and caustic solutions. Finally, the wafers are sliced from these cylinders. “Imagine a seriously high-tech, ultrapure silicon crystal roll of refrigerated cookie dough,” writes Elizabeth Grossman in her comprehensive book High Tech Trash.61

  It’s onto these wafers that circuits will be etched, a process that involves another whole set of toxic metals, gases, solvents, and “etchants.” “Altogether, one individual semiconductor fabrication plant may use as many as five hundred to a thousand different chemicals,” writes Grossman, “acids, including hydrofluoric, nitric, phosphoric, and sulfuric acid, as well as ammonia, fluoride, sodium hydroxide, isopropyl alcohol, and methyl-3-methoxyproprionate, tetramethylammonium hydroxide, and hydroxyl monoethanolamine, along with acetone, chromium trioxide, methyl ethyl ketone, methyl alcohol, and xylene.”62 And that’s only a partial list.

  All of this takes place in so-called clean rooms, which use vast amounts of toxic solvents to keep microscopic particles of dust from landing on the chips. The term “clean” refers to protecting the product, not the workers. In fact, workers in clean rooms are among the most contaminated of all hightech workers. The materials to which they’re routinely exposed have been proven to cause respiratory diseases, kidney and liver damage, cancers, miscarriages, and birth defects like spina bifida, blindness, and missing or deformed limbs.63 Many of these adverse health impacts likewise affect the communities around fabrication facilities, whose groundwater, soil, and air are contaminated.

  And yes, the toxics threaten us even as we work on our computers. In 2004, two nonprofit organizations promoting safer materials in the electronics sector—Clean Production Action and the Computer TakeBack Campaign—collected dust from computers to test for the presence of toxic flame retardants. The scientists found these potent neurotoxins in every sample tes
ted.64 Flame retardants, such as PBDEs (polybrominated diphenyl ethers), are chemicals added to materials in an attempt to slow the time needed to reach ignition. But it isn’t even proven that these chemicals deter flames: so they may not even help. When electronics that are encased in plastic treated with PBDEs heat up (as happens when a computer’s been running for a few hours), the chemicals break off in the form of dust or as a gas that can leach out of the product into the environment (i.e., our desks).65 The particular form of PBDEs used in computers persists in our bodies for years. Beyond their neurotoxicity, further studies have linked them to problems with immunity and reproductive systems, as well as to cancer, which is why PDBEs have been banned in Europe, are being listed under the Stockholm POPs Convention, and why computer manufacturers everywhere have come under pressure to phase them out.66

  The public health implications of electronics production are matched by its impacts on the environment. Take the production of just one of these finished wafers, this tiny thing weighing in at about 0.16 grams.67 According to Eric Williams of United Nations University, coauthor of the book Computers and the Environment, a wafer’s production involves about 5 gallons (20 liters) of water, about 45 grams of chemicals—or more than 250 times the weight of the finished wafer—and enough energy to run a 100-watt lightbulb for 18 hours, or 1.8 kilowatt hours.68 Additional energy is needed for the heating, cooling, and ventilation of the clean room. A factory making semiconductors can consume as much electricity in a year as ten thousand homes and up to 3 million gallons of water per day.69 Annual utility bills can be as high as $20 to $25 million.70 Finally, making a single chip results in 17 kilograms of wastewater and 7.8 grams of solid waste.71 The wastewater contains a lot of nitrates, which in turn cause an explosion of aquatic plant growth in bodies of water that upsets the balance of ecosystems. Air pollution also results from the release of ammonia, hydrochloric acid, hydrogen fluoride, and nitric acid—toxins one and all.72 And that’s all just the microchips.

  Then there’s the monitor—the glass, especially in older models, often contains lead, the lights behind the flat-panel display often contain mercury—and the housing, which is composed of various petroleum-based plastics treated with flame retardants and other chemicals for color and texture. Noxious PVC, which I’ll describe in more depth in an upcoming section, insulates the wires. The lithium batteries usually used to power laptops contain some toxic substances—for example, the lithium itself. These hundreds of materials, many of them hazardous, are all enmeshed and entwined, which is why recycling the components and materials from my laptop later, after its eventual disposal, will be such a hassle.

  Source: Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition/Electronics Take Back Campaign, 2008.

  My laptop—the one on which I’m writing this book—was made by Dell. In 2006, when I was in the market for a new computer, I chose it because of Dell’s high ranking in Greenpeace’s regularly-updated Guide to Green Electronics, which rates electronics manufacturers on three areas: toxic chemicals, recycling, and climate change/energy consumption. Since 2006 Dell has dropped to a much lower ranking due to its backtracking on a commitment to eliminate toxic PVC and brominated flame retardants by 2010.

  There’s also some upsetting news in terms of worker safety at Dell. Their company policies discuss their commitment to ensuring safe working conditions, both at their own factories and for contractors that produce materials for Dell computers. Unfortunately, a number of investigations by labor and human rights organizations have found ongoing labor violations at factories producing for Dell. The Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO), a nonprofit Dutch research and advisory bureau, investigated eight Dell suppliers in China, Mexico, the Philippines, and Thailand. SOMO uncovered “violations including dangerous working conditions, degrading and abusive working conditions, excessive working hours and forced overtime, illegally low wages and unpaid overtime, denial of the right to strike, discrimination in employment, use of contract labor and ‘trainees,’ workers without a contract, and lack of freedom of association and unionization.”73

  Uh-oh. Greenpeace’s guide doesn’t investigate working conditions. And who but a materials geek like me has time to do all this research and cross-referencing? Luckily, my colleague Dara O’Rourke, professor of environment and labor policy at the University of California, Berkeley, is creating an online tool called the GoodGuide, which provides wide-ranging information on the environmental, social, and health impacts of many thousands of consumer products all in one place. GoodGuide’s section on electronics hasn’t been launched as I write this (and O’Rourke’s team is fighting against the same corporate firewalls I faced in researching my laptop).74

  I don’t want to portray Dell and other electronics manufacturers as totally resistant to change, though. They are attempting to lighten their environmental footprint by eliminating some environmentally sensitive materials like mercury, PVC and some toxic flame retardants; by increasing the percentage of renewable energy used to run their facilities; and by reducing packaging and increasing the recycled content of packaging.75 I applaud these efforts, but I’m afraid they just don’t go far enough.

  It seems ludicrous that electronics can’t be made differently. Electronics designers and producers are smart people—it’s mind-blowing how fast they come up with improvements in speed, size, and capacity. The oft-quoted Moore’s law predicts that computing capacities can be doubled approximately every two years. So these guys can figure out how to fit thousands of songs on a device the size of a matchbook, but they can’t eliminate the most toxic plastic—PVC—from their high-tech wonders or reduce packaging waste by more than 10 percent? Please! These brainiacs should be able to figure out how to phase out toxics, reduce waste to a minimum, and expand the durability and life span of their products too.

  Environmental health activists tracking the industry have challenged the high-tech manufacturers to achieve the same level of improvement in environmental and health impacts as those Moore predicted for technical capacity. More than a decade ago, in May 1999, the Trans-Atlantic Network for Clean Production adopted the Soesterberg Principles, which added environmental, health, and social issues to the quest for technical innovation in the industry. The Electronic Sustainability Commitment of the principles reads:

  Each new generation of technical improvements in electronic products should include parallel and proportional improvements in environmental, health and safety as well as social justice attributes.76

  If semiconductor capacity can double every two years, how about likewise halving the number of toxic chemicals and doubling the usable life span of these same devices every two years? Sadly, more than ten years since the Soesterberg Principles were adopted, technical improvements continue to get far more attention and make far greater progress than corresponding environmental and health improvements. And the vast majority of the environmental health advances that computer companies have made have only come after sustained campaigns by NGOs. Those NGOS—Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Clean Production Action, Electronics TakeBack Coalition, Good Electronics, Greenpeace, Basel Action Network, and others—are going to continue to work hard to press the electronics industry for improvements, but it would be a lot easier for us all if electronics producers embraced sustainability and social goals as seriously as technological and economic goals.

  In the meantime, what I do is resist the impulse to trash my old electronics and replace them with the latest, shiniest versions. My appointment book and 2006 laptop do just fine.

  Stupid Stuff

  Some consumer products are so inherently toxic or wasteful or energy intensive that improving production just isn’t a viable option and it would be better to just stop making and using them. If I could wave a magic wand and do away with two everyday items in order to have a huge positive impact on human health and the well-being of our planet, those two things would be aluminum cans and PVC. And if you’re looking for some really easy, immediate things you can do
to lessen your own impact, start by eliminating these two toxic and totally unnecessary materials from your life.

  Platinum—I Mean Aluminum—Cans

  As I was walking along in downtown San Francisco the other day, two enthusiastic promoters were handing out freebies of some new caffeinated drink. “Try it! It’s fair trade! It’s made with organic ingredients! It’s good for you and the earth!” I declined the offer and decided not to rain on their feel-good parade by telling them what a joke it is that a fair-trade organic drink is packaged inside one of the most energy-intensive, CO2-producing, waste-generating products on the planet: a single-use, single-serving aluminum can.

  In the United States we consume about 100 billion cans per year, or 340 per person: almost one a day. That’s ten times more than the average European and twice as many as the average Canadian, Australian, or Japanese. In places like China and India, people are only consuming about 10 cans per person per year on average (with wide disparities between social classes), although that number is expected to rise as their economies explode.77 People like cans because they’re light, they don’t break, they chill quickly, and they have a reputation for being widely recycled. If the real story were more widely known, people might stop using aluminum cans so carelessly.

  A can starts its life as a reddish ore called bauxite, which gets strip-mined in Australia, Brazil, Jamaica, and a few other tropical spots.78 The mining displaces native people and animals and cuts down legions of those brave soldiers in the war against global warming—the trees.

  The bauxite is transported elsewhere to be washed, pulverized, mixed with caustic soda, heated, settled, and filtered until what’s left is about half the weight of the original ore in aluminum oxide crystals. But something else is left over: a waste slurry known as “red mud,” made of the extremely alkaline caustic soda, as well as iron from the bauxite. The mud is often just held in huge open-air pools.79 Were a major storm to flood these reservoirs, the environmental damage to the surrounding environment would be devastating. Incidentally, we could be using the iron in that sludge, but no one has figured out an economical way to extract it yet.