Does High Technology Mean High Pollution? --Pollution Control in the Semiconductor Industry

In spite of Taiwan's two-year-oldeconomic slump, the semiconductor industry remains the island's fastest-growing industry. As Taiwan raises its technological standards, upgrades its industries and works towards turning itself into a "Technology Island" or "Silicon Island," semiconductors have become the locomotive pulling the rest of the island's industries forward.

On July 2, a breaker on a pump motor at the science park's water discharge station was tripped. This caused waste water from the park to flow out via the No. 1 3 rainwater drainage channel, leading to the most recent series of conflicts over environment al protection.

But the "base camp" of the island's semiconductor industry-the Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park-was recently sued by environmental groups alleging water pollution problems. And the knowledge gap which separates the general public from industry professionals is deepening the public's suspicions-Is high technology creating high levels of pollution?

On the night of July 2, a watchman at the science park's water treatment plant was making his two-hourly rounds of the facility when he discovered that a pressure overload had tripped a breaker on a pump at a discharge station. A large quantity of water was rushing down the No. 13 rainwater discharge channel towards one of the park's perimeter walls.

The watchman immediately restarted the pump, slowing the flow of water. However, those who live on the other side of the wall had been given a major fright. "Is the science park secretly releasing waste water at night," they wondered.

This was not the first time that water of questionable purity had flowed out of the park, and some of this water has even ended up in the irrigation ditches used by local farmers. Local residents can't help but worry that the science park, known for its strict measures on pollution, is actually creating pollution problems, and creating them right on their own doorstep at that.

High tech, high pollution

Twelve years ago, the Hsinchu City Environmental Protection Association was established to fight Lee Chang Yung Chemical Engineering. Lee Chang Yung has long since moved its factory, but Hsinchu residents remain very sensitive to the quality of their living environment and have kept a close eye on the pollution prevention and control measures of the science park.

Silicon Valley, which like the Hsinchu science park has a concentration of high-tech industries, is often cited by local environmentalists to disprove the pollution control claims of the science park. As far back as 20 years ago, the ground water and soil of Silicon Valley were found to contain harmful pollutants which were later discovered to have leaked out of the underground storage facilities of local firms. Even now, 29 locations in Silicon Valley remain on the US Environmental Protection Agency's pollution watch list.

Shih Shin-min, a member of the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union, believes that if the semiconductor industry does one day cause an environmental accident, the resulting pollution will be no less severe than that caused by the petrochemicals or textile industries.

Trichloro ethylene contamination was recently discovered in groundwater in Taoyuan and Chubei at the former sites of factories belonging to the American firm RCA. But 10 to 20 years ago, Taiwan welcomed the building of electrical appliance factories by companies including RCA. It was Eric M.L. Liou, secretary-general of the Environmental Quality Protection Foundation, who brought these cases to the public's attention. Liou says that in the past pollution came from smokestacks which you could see. Now, however, the threat is invisible. Liou feels the public must be more careful with its new "loves" and be especially demanding with the semiconductor industry.

Technology's new aristocracy

The Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park was established 18 years ago, and has grown dramatically along with Taiwan's high-tech industries. The park's more than 200 companies include communications, photo-electronics, computer and computer peripherals, precision equipment, and biotechnology firms. Semiconductor companies account for nearly 100 firms out of the total.

High technology has long worn a halo. Its factory districts are neat and clean; the factories themselves are sealed and lack both smokestacks belching black smoke and the never-ending streams of trucks typical of traditional industry. "[The public] knows nothing about the firms and has no dealings with them," says Chung Shu-chi, a Hsinchu native who is both a delegate to the National Assembly and one of the founders of the Hsinchu City Environmental Protection Association.

While 60-70% of the science park's semiconductor firms manufacture nothing and are engaged purely in research and development, the remainder manufacture chips. From the upstream processes of cutting and polishing, to developing and etching in the midstream, to dicing and packaging downstream, the products, processes and specifications vary, resulting in pollutants of great variety and complexity. The use of hydrofluoric and nitric acids to chemically etch wafers and chips and of massive quantities of ultrapure water to wash them creates a great deal of acidic and alkaline waste water containing fluorine, all of which must be treated.

Chang Fang-shu, vice manager of Axiom Environmental Engineering, which handles waste water treatment for the science park, says that all the waste water from companies within the park is routed to the waste water treatment plant before being released together. According to Chang, 80% of this waste water originates with semiconductor firms.

In fact, most of the censure which has recently been directed at the science park has involved waste water.

Where is the water going?

Chung Shu-chi says that in October of last year, the science park's rainwater discharge channels released water containing unidentitfied contaminants into the nearby Lung-en Irrigation Canal. And even in the dry season, water flows from the outlets of these drainage channels. Lin Sheng-tzung, convener of the Life Protection Union, is suspicious. According to Lin, the amount of water going into and coming out of the park every day should be about the same. But the figures his group got from the nearby water pumping station indicated that there was quite a difference. After seeing these figures, they couldn't help wondering where the water was going.

Although testing indicated that July's overflow had already been treated and met the EPA's standards for effluents, the water treatment facility was nonetheless fined NT$300,000 for failing to immediately notify the local environmental authorities of the problem. Environmental groups in Hsinchu City also continued to put pressure on the Science Park Administration in the hope of pushing the administration to take full responsibility for the event. In the end, these groups sued the administration.

As a result, one recent morning an inspection crew from the EPA pulled a surprise inspection on the science park's water treatment plant. At noon, the media turned up to report from the scene. And then in the afternoon, personnel from the provincial government's Department of Environmental Protection arrived to conduct their own inspection. The staff at the water treatment facility ended up spending their whole day meeting with their visitors.

The Science Park Administration feels itself unduly blamed for the waste-water discharge. The park was originally approved to release a maximum of 28,200 kiloliters of treated effluent per day. But in October and November of last year, the electronics industry was booming and the volume of effluent increased rapidly. Treated waste water from the park hit a record high of over 72,000 kiloliters. And recently average daily discharge has been running at around 53,000 kiloliters.

According to regulations, when the volume of effluent exceeds the approved maximum by 10%, a report of this fact and an application to increase the approved maximum must be submitted. But the approval process takes six months and the volume of waste water was continuing to grow at an explosive rate. As such, the park was unable to avoid exceeding the stipulated volume. Su Yueh-e, an assistant researcher with the Science Park Administration who was responsible for submitting the application, says that the difference in the two volumes was a problem that they were certain to encounter while the application was being processed. She says that the treatment facility did not violate the law.

Not a drop

Considering the more stringent environmental protection laws and pollution standards being put in place, and the experiences of highly polluting industries such as petrochemicals, textiles and steel with picketing and protests, when semiconductor firms now build a factory, they always design in pollution control equipment.

Because the semiconductor industry requires high production yields to turn a profit, all manufacturing is done in very expensive, dust-free "clean rooms," where temperature and humidity can be controlled. Every step of production, every cable and every pipe is carefully planned. Exhaust gases and waste water, too, are strictly controlled. All of this is made necessary by the fact that even one small slip-up can cause severe financial losses.

Semiconductor plants consume enormous quantities of water, and therefore nearly all recycle and reuse this resource. Take Powerchip Semiconductor as an example. It recycles about 80% of its water. This means that of every 100 kiloliters of water it uses, Powerchip saves and reuses 80 kiloliters. Only 20 kiloliters are supplied from outside. "From the firm's perspective, this is purely business," says Kathen Lee, a section manager in Powerchip's ISEP center.

When the water that has been used to wash chips becomes so heavily fluorinated that it is no longer recyclable, the company sends it to its own in-house water treatment pool. There calcium carbonate or calcium chloride is used to precipitate out a calcium fluoride sludge. A waste treatment firm then handles the removal and transportation of this sludge, while the water is routed to the science park's water treatment facility.

Chang Fang-shu, who has analyzed the quantities of suspended solids and the chemical oxygen demand of many firms' waste water, states that the water released by most semiconductor companies not only meets the standards for entry into the science park's water treatment facility, but in some cases even meets the most stringent waste water standards of the central government-the 1998 standards.

At the beginning of this year, the Science Park Administration also signed a "Contract for the Environment" with the park's firms by which the administration can award demerits and even shut down factories. Even a demerit will delay the start of production or a rights issue by three months. Such delays have an enormous impact on firms in the highly competitive semiconductor industry, and a few have already been penalized.

Cleaning up the air

It is not only water pollution problems which have been making waves recently; semiconductor makers have also been building special piping to collect the waste gases that are created during semiconductor production.

Most firms currently employ activated carbon to filter their exhaust gases before releasing them into the atmosphere. But a few companies are beginning to build zeolite concentrate rotor systems (ZCRS). These systems filter out and incinerate toxins which are produced in the burning process. ZCRSs are extremely expensive. But Kathen Lee points out that that any kind of semiconductor plant costs several tens of billions of NT dollars to construct, and installing a ZCRS adds only a few tens of millions of NT dollars to that amount. She feels that since such devices makes up such a small percentage of construction costs and since environmental protection standards are climbing ever higher, they will become more and more common.

To avoid the dangers of leaking barrels in underground storage facilities which caused such troubles in Silicon Valley, many firms in the science park store their wastes in barrels kept above ground. They have also built low walls around their storage facilities so that even if solvents do leak out of their barrels, there is still a wall separating them from the outside world. Moreover, piping is on the outside of walls, allowing employees to immediately detect and fix any leaks.

Vanguard International Semicon-ductor's Fan Kuang-jung says that the chemicals used by semiconductor manufacturers, both in aerosol and liquid form, are extremely concentrated. If they were to leak out, employees would be the first to be harmed. He therefore emphasizes: "To people in the industry, environmental protection and industrial safety are two sides of the same coin."

Employees are first to get it

Take, for example, hydrofluoric acid, which is the chemical most frequently used in etching chips and which is known in environmentalist circles as "the bone dissolver." Most firms use the calcium ions in calcium carbonate or calcium chloride to neutralize the hydrofluoric acid in the water that was used to wash the chips. This creates calcium fluoride which precipitates out of the solution. But David Hsieh, an environmental engineer with China Technology Consultants, says that if this reaction were to happen on your body, the calcium in your bones would be dissolved leaving only the collagen. Semiconductor firms therefore store solvents very carefully. If a leak were to occur, it would not only pollute the environment, it would also directly endanger people. Moreover, an industrial accident means substantial losses, providing firms with still another reason to be careful.

The fire at United Integrated Circuits (UIC) last year was one such industrial accident. UIC estimated its losses from the fire at more than NT$10 billion. After receiving compensation from its insurance companies, it only had to pay out a few hundred million NT dollars. But Fan Kuang-jung points out that there were intangible losses: the company's operations were disrupted, it lost clients, and employee morale was affected. There was also damage to the image of the science park.

"This is an example of the 'iceberg theory,' which states that the losses you can see are only about 20% of the total; there is another 80% down below the ocean's surface," says Fan, who is the convener of the Science Park Industry Association's Environmental Committee in addition to working at Vanguard.

These tangible and intangible losses are a sharp lesson. "On the day of the fire, nearly every semiconductor company in the park hurried to lend a hand. It provided a chance for everyone to really test their own safety plans," says Fan.

First, the supplies of electrical power, chemical aerosols and liquid solvents had to be shut down. Then the water used to fight the fire had to be stopped before it reached the rainwater drainage channels; it was pumped to the water treatment facility. Solvents remaining inside pipes within the burning factory had to be collected, and both the chemicals and the scrapped equipment from the factory had to be given to qualified environmental engineers for disposal. The only pollutants which escaped were in the smoke from burning plastics and solvents. Because it is just not possible to collect and dispose of smoke from a burning factory, it was left to disperse in the atmosphere.

Testing at every point

This fire not only burned down a factory, it also burned up much of the public's confidence in the semiconductor industry. Chung Shu-chi says, "They don't even do a good job of protecting their own assets. How can they be expected to do a good job with pollution control, or with something that doesn't profit them, like protecting the environment."

It is for this reason that Hsinchu's environmental protection groups have no choice but to keep an even closer eye on the science park. At the beginning of last November, a company's release of water from an air-conditioning system into the park's rainwater drainage channels prompted allegations that it was releasing waste water in secret. Huang Yu-chang, head of the Science Park Administration's construction department, says that semiconductor manufacturers must control the temperature and humidity of their facilities, and therefore use a great deal of water in air-conditioning systems. In the past, a portion of this water did not have to be sent to the water treatment facility. Now, however, it is all run through the water treatment system to ease the worries of those outside the industry.

To better control where waste water goes, as of August 1, Axiom Environmental Engineering has increased the frequency of its examinations of the park environment and of the employees, equipment and processes of park firms engaged in manufacturing, particularly of those 10 firms which account for 80% of the park's waste water. This is in addition to continuing its testing of samples taken from park manufacturers, an activity in which it has been engaged for five years.

Axiom has also installed six automatic sampling devices on the park's waste water discharge pipes. If the samplers detect anything out of the ordinary, Axiom immediately investigates the firms upstream from the sampling point. In addition, Axiom has put automatic samplers on the park's 11 rainwater discharge channels. If an an aberration in water quality is recorded, Axiom immediately seeks the source.

As for environmental groups' concerns that the release of waste water might affect or pollute the local ground water, Yeh Hund-der, a professor in the Graduate Institute of Environmental Engineering at National Chiao Tung University, says that there are currently 18 test wells in the park, the deepest of which goes down to more than 30 meters. The park administration has requested academics to take regular groundwater samples. The results of five years of testing and monitoring indicate the presence of heavy metals in the groundwater. However, Yeh points out that the Chutung area's geology is igneous, and therefore naturally contains a number of heavy metals. Whether the park's stratum has been affected by these metals or other factors is awaiting investigation. As for organic pollution, none has yet been discovered, but monitoring and testing will continue.

In response to rumors that firms are probably secretly releasing water underground, Yeh Hund-der says that doing so is expensive and would easily be discovered by the monitoring wells. He therefore feels it is unlikely that companies would do so.

In addition to all this, the Science Park Administration bills each factory for waste-water treatment based on the amount of water that it pumps in, not the amount it pumps out. For this reason, Chang Fan-shu says, "They've already paid [for waste-water treatment]; they have no need to release water [secretly]."

Consciousness but no knowledge

Speaking about the pollution problems faced by the science park, Yeh Hund-der says that there are any number of things which can create pollution including leakage from pipes carrying waste water and from the waste containment area. For this reason, we must continue to be extremely careful. However, the technology used in environmental engineering has been improving rapidly. This leads Yeh to say, "There are fewer problems at the newer facilities. It's those that were built more than 10 years ago that we really have to keep an eye on."

Kao Cheng-yen of the Green Party believes that while compared to other industries firms in the science park have done well with regard to environmental protection, you cannot rule out the possibility of problems at a small number of companies. In order to attract the attention of the government and the public, environmental groups feel they have no choice but to take strong measures against some particular firms that they are unable to monitor. Unfortunately, some good firms get pulled down with the bad, but the goal is to push all firms to do their utmost to ensure that there are no mistakes.

Although the waste-water affair made environmental groups extremely anxious, the fact that not a lot of information comes out of the science park means that their knowledge of what is going on inside is limited. Even Shih Shin-min, who is a professor in the chemical engineering department at National Taiwan University in addition to being a member of the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union, says with exasperation that because environmental groups don't understand the production processes employed by manufacturers, they are ridiculed as having "environmental awareness, but no environmental knowledge."

In fact, when an environmental problem occurs, it is the firms themselves which are the biggest losers. Take last October's fire at UIC as an example. As a result of this accident, international insurers re-evaluated all of Taiwan's semiconductor firms. Those for whom coverage was not dropped immediately have since faced higher premiums.

Similarly, in the future, the success or failure of a product is going to depend, in part, on how "green" its production is. Kathen Lee explains that from the perspective of manufacturers, domestic laws are only the first consideration. In fact, the greatest pressure on manufacturers comes from their customers, who must comply with global environmental laws.

Fan Kuang-jung says that whether you are talking about a new factory or an old one, the first concern of domestic semiconductor firms is to meet local laws. If they don't do so, they can't complete construction of their plants. The next consideration is industrial safety. After this, they must consider global trends in environmental protection. Their final consideration is choosing the most cost-effective method of meeting their needs.

A never-ending process

The whole world is moving towards higher levels of environmental protection. Everyone, from the international marketplace to governments to environmental groups, is working towards the same goal. But these recent events make it apparent that although the goal might be the same, each group has its own way of thinking about the issues.

Perhaps when industry is able to take the next step towards its goal of "zero pollution" and makes the public aware that it has done so, the sharp criticism from environmental groups will soften a little. Perhaps then the interaction between the two sides can take on a more positive and pro-active aspect.

p.42

High-technology and zero pollution are prerequisites to a "Green Technology Island." This cup of water has just been taken from the water release station at the Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park's water treatment facility. It has already been treated and now meets the government's standards for release into the public waste-water system.

p.44

Local environmental groups in Hsinchu sued the science park over its treatment of waste water, bringing out reams of data to make their case.

p.45

On July 2, a breaker on a pump motor at the science park's water discharge station was tripped. This caused waste water from the park to flow out via the No. 13 rainwater drainage channel, leading to the most recent series of conflicts over environmental protection.

p.46

Storing chemicals above ground avoids some of the problems associated with leakage. In the event of a leak, a low wall surrounding the storage area keeps chemicals from flowing into the surrounding environment.

The semiconductor production process utilizes a large volume of solvents. With appropriate recycling, these can be reused by electronics and printing firms.

Although very expensive, water treatment equipment makes up only a tiny fraction of the cost of building a semiconductor fabrication plant.

Rotating Biological Contactors (RBC) are one step in the treatment of waste water. Microorganisms on the RBC break down organic compounds in the water, reducing their concentration.

p.47

Since the dispute over the allegedly secret release of waste water, the science park's water treatment plant has attracted frequent visits from concerned officials and the media. The picture shows officials from the provincial government's Department of Environmental Protection listening to a report by plant employees.

p.48

In 1990, after much hard work by the Hsinchu City Environmental Protection Association, a chemical plant located in Hsinchu was forced to shut down. The now-derelict factory still reflects the hard work and glory of Taiwan's industrial past, while also reminding us of the importance of pollution control.

p.50

A group of modern buildings rises up in the midst of a dense forest. This is the headquarters of Taiwan's high-tech industry-the Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park.

p.51

No longer burdened by heavy industrial wastes, this pristine creek meanders through green fields.

Storing chemicals above ground avoids some of the problems associated with leakage. In the event of a leak, a low wall surrounding the storage area keeps chemicals from flowing into the surrounding environment.

The semiconductor production process utilizes a large volume of solvents. With appropriate recycling, these can be reused by electronics and printing firms.

Although very expensive, water treatment equipment makes up only a tiny fraction of the cost of building a semiconductor fabrication plant.

Rotating Biological Contactors （RBC） are one step in the treatment of waste water. Microorganisms on the RBC break down organic compounds in the water, reducing their concentration.

Since the dispute over the allegedly secret release of waste water, the science park's water treatment plant has attracted frequent visits from concerned officials a nd the media. The picture shows officials from the provincial government's Department of Environmental Protection listening to a report by plant employees.

In 1990. after much hard work by the Hsinchu City Environmental Protection Association, a chemical plant located in Hsinchu was forced to shut down. The nowderelict factory still reflects the hard work and glory of Taiwan's industrial past, while also reminding us of the importance of pollution control.

A group of modern buildings rises up in the midst of a dense forest. This is the headquarters of Taiwan's high-tech industry--the Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park.

No longer burdened by heavy industrial wastes, this pristine creek meanders through green fields.