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Up here in Oregon the largest employer is Intel, and there are always questions about how safe is the air and water for people living next to the fabs. An article in the Oregonian discusses the dialog going on between Intel and two environmental groups.
I live maybe 40 miles away from the nearest Intel fab, so am not as directly impacted as people living in Aloha or Hillsboro, next door to the fabs.
It always fascinated me that chemicals like TCE could etch away aluminum, yet somehow were disposed of safely without harming the environment or people.
When my wife and I decided to buy a house and start a family in the late 1980s she looked at environmental concerns which included health issues, birth defect rates, etc.... I worked at a Fab in Sunnyvale and we had an apartment not far from there. What she found was that the areas with fabs were health hazards so I changed jobs and we moved to the East Bay. I'm not kidding, the health data was that bad.
That was my suspicion too, so it's great to have these watchdog groups that keep the semiconductor foundries honest and more transparent about what is being pumped into the air and water systems.
There have been a number of actions in the metro Phoenix, Arizona area against Freescale going back to Motorola Semiconductor days ... you can probably pop them up with an online search. I also seem to recall that activists protested fab waste in Crolles, France (STM) and Dresden, Germany (AMD - now GF, and Fronhofer Institute, I think).
Thanks for that article on contamination coming from leaking tanks, our family used to live a dozen miles away from that Fairchild/IBM plant on Bernal Road in San Jose. Our semiconductor industry needs to be transparent about the chemicals used, storage plans, and have stringent measurement systems in place to ensure the health of both workers and residents living nearby.
