The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [52]
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