Under the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, the outgoing Biden-Harris administration continues to pour billions of dollars into the construction of huge new microchip plants, a signature domestic policy and one primed to continue into the next. Those plants will have significant continuing environmental impacts through their energy use, water use and release of hazardous substances into the environment.
Documentation of those environmental impacts was abruptly abandoned in early October, when President Biden signed another bipartisan bill, the Building Chips in America Act, exempting the vast majority of CHIPS Act projects from mandatory environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act. The consequences of those pen strokes could likely show up in American bloodstreams for generations to come.
The semiconductor industry argues that these environmental reviews cause delays that could undermine the federal effort to re-shore chip production. Industry lobbyists successfully reassured lawmakers that their operations pose little environmental risk. I’ve heard those arguments from the semiconductor industry many times before — and the groundwater under my community as I write this would beg to differ, if it could.
Today, Santa Clara County, the heartland of Silicon Valley, contains the highest concentration of federal Superfund sites — that is, extremely toxic sites — of any county in the U.S. This is the often overlooked legacy of the birth of Silicon Valley. For decades, many of the world’s microchips were fabricated here. Though over time the industry relocated its chip “fabs” elsewhere, the poison remains, primarily in the form of toxic groundwater plumes.
The fabrication of semiconductors today is largely automated, but was highly labor intensive in the industry’s early years. Santa Clara’s chip fab workers were primarily women of color, and their exposure to solvents and other chemicals used in the production process resulted a wide range of health complications, from miscarriages to cancer. And it wasn’t only workers who suffered, as improper handling of these poisonous substances caused leaks and spills that contaminated the region’s groundwater and soil.
Then, as now, the industry insisted that it was clean and safe. And they didn’t have to do environmental reviews then either.
Bringing semiconductor wafer fabrication back to the U.S. is a good idea and worthy of government support. But funding from the government should only come on the condition that workers and host communities are not endangered by the industry’s domestic revitalization. Exempting CHIPS awardees from environmental review makes it easier for the industry to degrade the environment and threaten public and worker safety. And it denies crucial information to the public in the process of siting and permitting massive new plants in their communities.
The new exemptions are essentially a return to the old policy approach that poisoned Santa Clara County, but the names of the contaminants have changed. The semiconductor industry has become hooked on PFAS — perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances — a class of thousands of highly toxic, extremely persistent and now ubiquitous compounds commonly known as “forever chemicals.”
A vast number of studies have demonstrated that PFAS, which are building up in our environment and in our bodies, cause numerous, serious health conditions. This research has sparked a movement to remove PFAS from a number of products and manufacturing processes, but the semiconductor industry insists there are no substitutes for the hundreds of distinct PFAS chemicals that serve roughly a thousand essential uses in microchip fabrication.
The use of PFAS by the semiconductor industry is unregulated, and in most cases unmeasured. However, data collected by the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation found a variety of PFAS chemicals being released into the Winooski River, and researchers at Cornell University found that most PFAS in chipmaking effluent is not identified. I call that “dark PFAS.” As CHIPS Act projects come online, this wastewater remains unmonitored, untested and unregulated, as are the plants’ releases of potent, persistent greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
I’ve spent more than four decades fighting to get companies and regulatory agencies to clean up the mess the industry left behind in Santa Clara County. That work is far from finished, and to this day residents are exposed to harmful solvents in the ground that enter their homes and workplaces as vapor, resulting in an increased risk of health issues such as cardiac birth defects, Parkinson’s disease and cancers. This is the result of industry “self-regulation.”
Beginning in the 1980s, through organizations such as the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, we in Santa Clara Country raised awareness of the dangers the industry posed to our communities, and forced the adoption of rigorous standards for the use and management of hazardous substances. Eventually, many of these standards were widely adopted throughout the nation and across the globe.
Communities hosting new and future chip plants still have an opportunity to press for protective permits under other environmental laws, such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and to insist upon transparency from the companies and their government funders. If the government won’t hold the industry accountable for putting our bodies and futures at risk, then it’s up to the rest of us.
Lenny Siegel is executive director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight.
