Producers of PFAS chemicals and semiconductors, a key part of most electronics, have formed a group that develops industry-friendly science aimed at heading off regulation as the facilities release high levels of toxic waste, documents seen by the Guardian show.
The group, called the PFAS Consortium, was formed during a boom in domestic semiconductor production spurred by the Chips and Science Act that has led to $825bn in investment aimed at shoring up the industry.
Left unchecked, however, the boom could also generate huge levels of toxic waste, experts fear. The semiconductor industry is a prolific polluter and a major source of unregulated and unmonitored toxic PFAS, or “forever chemicals”, some of which also turn into potent greenhouse gas.
“Hardly anyone has been paying attention to the toxic waste from the industry as it grows at an enormous rate,” said Lenny Siegel, a member of Chips Communities United, a group working with industry and administration officials to try to put in place environmental safeguards.
“Next time you do a Google search or chat, you’re using chips … that were produced in a way that released PFAS in an environment irreversibly.”
Testing data from 2022 from one US production plant, or fab, seen by the Guardian showed as much as 78,000ppt of PFAS in wastewater from some samples. The EPA legal limit for several common compounds is 4ppt.
Public health advocates are increasingly sounding the alarm and calling for simple protections to curb semiconductor PFAS waste while pushing the industry to find safer alternatives, but manufacturers have mobilized in response.
The consortium’s white papers circulated among policymakers make their case against regulations. In a document titled “Impact of a potential PFAS restriction”, the consortium acknowledges its PFAS pollution, but repeatedly stresses that there are very few regulations and opposes proposals to monitor or restrict waste.
Finding safer alternatives is “impossible in some instances”, the paper states, adding that finding alternatives would require “stepping back decades in technological advancement”.
It touts industry efforts to cut back on waste, stating that the industry would continue to voluntarily reduce pollution “if exemptions [to regulation] are granted”.
That seems to have caught lawmakers’ attention: a bipartisan amendment in the defense bill that is likely to be approved would exempt new semiconductor manufacturing projects from environmental review – legislation on which federal records show lobbying by the Semiconductor Industry Association trade group, which organized the PFAS consortium.
In a statement, Laurie Beu, the Semiconductor Industry Association executive director, said the consortium “is a purely technical effort comprised of industry experts around the world and dedicated to collecting the data needed to formulate an industry approach to PFAS based on science”.
The Chips Act is at odds with the Biden administration’s 2021 sweeping plan to rein in PFAS pollution, and policymakers were largely ignoring the public health consequences, Siegel said. However, a group of US senators, including Ed Markey of Massachusetts, recently urged the commerce department to impose stricter regulations on chip producers.
“The public provided over $50bn in investment in this industry and they should be able to reasonably expect they won’t in turn be exposed to toxic chemicals … or breathe polluted air,” Markey said.
PFAS are a class of about 15,000 chemicals often used to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down, and are linked to cancer, liver problems, thyroid issues, birth defects, kidney disease, decreased immunity and other serious health problems.
Producing semiconductors is a highly complex process and PFAS are an essential ingredient used in as many as 1,000 steps at the nanometric level, industry documents state, including photolithography and plasma processing.
Production plants are notorious for contaminating nearby drinking water and the air with an array of dangerous toxins like TCE, arsenic and chloroform. Silicon Valley is the nation’s Superfund capital in large part because of the industry’s toxic messes, and when public pressure prompted the tech companies to open plants abroad, their operations sickened employees in those countries.
“It’s not just PFAS – this is a very dirty business,” said Arlene Blum, head of the Green Science Policy Institute, a public health advocacy group.
Still, the amendment to the defense bill authored by the Democratic senator Mark Kelly would kill the environmental review of semiconductor production projects in which companies are required to disclose the types and quantities of pollution from their proposed facilities.
Environmental groups use the review as an opportunity to push for the commerce department to require monitoring and treatment of PFAS wastewater, which is not currently required by law.
“It seems like a really bad idea to exempt these plants from regulation,” Blum added.
‘It’s a hard challenge’
The chipmaking process emits PFAS into the water and air. Industry uses fluorinated gases, or PFAS gas, in a range of processes, and the toxicological risks of the gases are largely unknown.
Their climate consequences, however, are clear – once in the atmosphere, the fluorinated gas can turn into TFA, a greenhouse gas with a life of more than 1,000 years. Researchers in recent years have been alarmed by the ever-growing level of TFA in the air, water, human blood and elsewhere in the environment.
Though industry captures some fluorinated gas, it cannot be destroyed. Sometimes manufacturers attempt to incinerate or destroy the chemicals thermally, but that often fails to fully eliminate the compounds and can create dangerous byproducts.
“It is a hard challenge because they are using so many different kinds of PFAS,” said Ariana Spentzos, science and policy associate with Green Science Policy Institute. “Industry says, ‘Incinerate it and it’ll be fine,’ but it turns out … you’re just emitting different PFAS.”
As with other industries, chip makers have switched from using PFOA and PFOS, two of the most toxic PFAS compounds, to using smaller replacement chemicals. The PFAS Consortium touts the switch in its white papers as evidence of its environmental stewardship, but studies increasingly show replacement PFAS chemicals are also dangerous.
PFBS, a common replacement compound found in industry wastewater, is comparatively less toxic, but still more toxic than most other regulated substances, Siegel noted.
Some chip makers ship captured PFAS to hazardous waste facilities. But deep-well-injection facilities are prone to leaking, while other shipments end up at incinerators that simply send the chemicals into the surrounding environment.
That’s why public health advocates are pushing for alternatives to PFAS instead of waste management, Siegel said.
“They want to ship PFAS to a permitted treatment facility, but the way I interpret that, in the absence of more data, is they’re going to send it to a community of color to be incinerated and that is likely to create toxic byproducts,” he added.
Chip makers lobby Congress to kill regulations
Chipmakers with the PFAS Consortium are largely part of the Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade group that does legislative and regulatory battle for the producers.
Chipmaker TSMC, a Taiwanese multinational, has paid about $160,000 for an annual membership to the trade group and $50,000 annually to be a part of the consortium, documents show. Federal election records detail how the Semiconductor Industry Association, armed with its PFAS Consortium science highlighting the industry’s case for avoiding PFAS regulation, spent about $1.5m lobbying Congress and the Biden administration last year.
It is on pace to far exceed that figure this year, and that includes lobbying for the defense bill that would kill environmental reviews.
“The consortium lobbies very strongly against those measures,” Siegel said. Though industry is working to find alternatives, “they are trying to figure out what they can do without disrupting their production”, he added.
The consortium’s Beu said in a statement that it cannot speak to individual members’ lobbying.
“We remain focused on providing the tools needed to support industry commitments to track and reduce PFAS, the availability of alternatives, and the development of further abatement technologies,” she said.
The consortium also claims in its white papers that it will take years or decades to remove PFAS from some parts of its production process, and that it may be impossible to remove some of the chemicals.
That may be, “but they don’t get to wash their hands of the issues” and should increase research and development into alternatives, said Spentzos. She pointed to the University of Massachusetts working with the hi-tech materials manufacturer Transene in 2022 to quickly and successfully develop an alternative to PFAS in the semiconductor etching process.
“They really do have to innovate and make safer alternatives for PFAS … but this is a great example of that taking a lot less time than they expected,” Spentzos said.
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