Micron would bring a new era of manufacturing to Central NY – and fears of new pollution

Syracuse, N.Y. – Central New York’s long-standing legacy of manufacturing everything from auto parts to soda ash has had a dark side: environmental pollution, still being cleaned up today.

So along with the progress and economic development promised by Micron Technology come renewed fears of long-lasting pollution from a new industry.

“We’ve been abandoned by tons of corporations that took away really good jobs and left us with incredible amounts of pollution,” Tom Judson, a co-founder of the Alliance for a Green Economy, said at a public hearing recently. “We’re not going to let that happen here again.”

As Micron promises to build a semiconductor manufacturing complex in Clay and revive the region’s role as a manufacturing center, activists say they’re worried most about the semiconductor industry’s widespread use of what are known as “forever chemicals,” so named because they don’t break down in the environment or the human body.

“The release of toxic contaminants through water pathways is one of the most serious threats of semiconductor productions,” said Lenny Siegel, executive director for the Center for Public Environmental Oversight, in Silicon Valley. “There’s so many of these chemicals that have been untested, and we don’t know the quantities that are used.”

Many of these forever chemicals, referred to collectively as PFAS, are essential to making computer chips. They’re used in many stages of the complicated process that turns silicon wafers into chips.

More than 3,000 PFAS chemicals are in use in the U.S. They have been used since the 1950s in consumer products and fire-fighting foam, yet many PFAS compounds are not well-studied. Of those that have undergone scientific scrutiny, some are linked to high cholesterol, several kinds of cancer, damaged immune systems and liver damage.

Plus, there are not effective laboratory tests to detect the presence of most PFAS compounds, and there are few regulations for this ever-growing group of chemicals.

In early April, the EPA for the first time issued PFAS standards for drinking water, despite them being a waste product of manufacturing for decades. The agency is still working on regulations for PFAS discharges in industrial wastewater for local treatment plants, like Onondaga County’s, that are the front line of defense against PFAS contamination of waterways from industry.

With Micron and other chipmakers, there’s an extra conundrum: Many chemicals used in chip-making will be kept secret from the public and even Micron itself. Chip makers and suppliers guard their trade secrets in the name of competition and national security. We may never know all the chemicals Micron will use.

Yet there’s a possibility that forever chemicals could end up in our waterways. That’s according to everyone with a stake in the industry, from environmental activists to the federal government to the semiconductor industry itself. Without proper precautions, we could have a new generation of toxic chemicals seeping into our lakes, rivers and groundwater.

Even the U.S. Commerce Department, charged with awarding $52 billion to jumpstart semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S., is worried.

“Wastewater discharge from semiconductor manufacturing facilities presents the greatest risk for PFAS contamination of the environment,” the department’s CHIPS Program office in December.

That potential puts pressure on Micron and local and state officials to ensure that toxic chemicals don’t make their way into our rivers and lakes. The front line will be Onondaga County’s Oak Orchard wastewater plant, which will have to undergo dramatic expansion to handle Micron, let alone the business and residential development expected to follow.

Micron says it will comply with all local, state and federal standards for discharging wastewater into Onondaga County’s sewage treatment system. The company says it will build a treatment plant on site to remove chemicals from wastewater before sending it to the public sewage system.

“It will be treated to the appropriate standard or better, and then discharged,” said Carson Henry, Micron’s senior director of strategic U.S. expansion.

Yet it’s not clear how well fab treatment systems even work because most PFAS can’t be detected with current lab tests, the CHIPS office said.

“Analytical methods for the detection of PFAS compounds in wastewater are needed to determine the removal efficiency of such treatment technologies.” the office said. “The current detection methods are limited to a few PFAS compounds.”

Government regulations lag behind

There are few regulations at the state or local level for Micron to comply with.

State and federal regulators are playing catch up to understand and regulate semiconductor chemicals even as the federal government pushes chipmaking plants to open in the U.S. in the interest of national security. Micron is expected to get $6.1 billion in CHIPS funding to build fabs in Clay and Idaho that will produce leading-edge memory chips used in everything from cell phones to fighter jets.

The New York state Department of Environmental Conservation is only now proposing its first PFAS regulations for local wastewater plants. Those regulations would apply to three PFAS chemicals; Micron says it has already stopped using two of them.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency just this year finalized a new test that can detect a few dozen kinds of PFAS. And even if many PFAS chemicals could be detected, EPA is still hasn’t set guidelines on how much industries should be allowed to discharge. EPA plans to issue guidelines on those limits later this year.

The semiconductor industry employs PFAS chemicals in many of the 2,000 steps it takes to transform silicon wafers into the tiny computer chips. The semiconductor industry says it can’t live without PFAS.

“No known alternatives exist for many of the industry’s uses of fluorocarbon-containing material,” said the Semiconductor Industry of America’s PFAS Consortium said last year. And while the industry is looking at non-PFAS alternatives, those could take years or decades to develop them and put them into widespread use, the consortium said.

The industry also admits it needs to be a better job of removing PFAS from wastewater.

“Most PFAS are not regulated pollutants and therefore unless company specific provisions are in place, the wastewater from processes that use aqueous wet chemical formulations that contain PFAS would likely be discharged to the publicly owned treatment works without substantive removal,” the SIA said.

PFAS stands for poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances. They are synthetic compounds that bind together carbon and fluorine atoms. The chemical bonds between those elements are extraordinarily strong, making them valuable for industry but also long-lasting in the environment.

A 2021 study by Cornell University professors found that three unnamed fabs in the U.S. discharged dozens of types of PFAS into wastewater.

“Little is known about the PFASs discovered in this study, and future work should focus on the occurrence, persistence, and toxicity of these PFASs,” said the study, co-authored by Damian Helbling, a professor in Cornell’s civil and environmental engineering school.

Local treatment plants are first line of defense

While state and federal regulators scramble to develop guidelines, local wastewater treatment plants like Onondaga County’s will be the first line of defense against PFAS pollution. The EPA says that local plants don’t have the technology to test for or neutralize any PFAS that does get into treatment plants and eventually into waterways.

Before Micron can start production, it would need a permit from the county’s Water Environmental Protection department to discharge wastewater into Oak Orchard Wastewater Treatment plant, in Clay. The plant’s effluent empties into the Oneida River and ultimately Lake Ontario.

Shannon Harty, commissioner of the department, said she expects that Micron will process chemicals on site.

“We’re anticipating that it’s going to be Micron’s responsibility to manage and remove PFAS before their wastewater gets to us,” Harty said.

Micron will have “significant water treatment infrastructure so that wastewater leaving the site meets or exceeds applicable water quality standards,” the company said in a statement to syracuse.com. “Micron will comply with local regulatory standards before wastewater is sent for further treatment at the Oak Orchard Treatment Plant.”

The company also said it will comply “with all legal requirements to sample wastewater in accordance with EPA’s evolving sampling methodologies and analytical procedures.”

But as of now there are no local standards in place for most of the chemicals that fall under the PFAS umbrella. On the standard application for industries who want to discharge into the local treatment system, Onondaga County asks industries to indicate which of 120 “substances of concern” they might discharge.

PFAS is not on the list.

Harty said she will rely on the federal Environmental Protection Agency for guidance.

“EPA is really going to be the one that’s going to be helping us develop, what those constituents are and what the permit limits will be,” she said.

That guidance has been slow in coming. EPA concedes that it knows so little about how much PFAS wastewater treatments are already dealing with that it needs to do more testing. The agency just last month announced it would take steps to require up to 2,000 wastewater plants across the country to test incoming flow from industrial plants.

“This collection effort is necessary because there is only very limited publicly accessible data on PFAS discharges from industrial categories,” the EPA said in March.

EPA also conceded that most treatment plants “do not operate processes and technologies that effectively reduce or destroy PFAS, (which) are subsequently discharged into surface waters.”

“That’s proprietary”

Micron said it plans to build four fabrication plants, or fabs, over the next 20 years at the corner of Route 31 and Caughdenoy Road, in Clay.

When all four fabs are operating by 2041, Micron says it could discharge 42 million gallons of industrial wastewater per day into the Oak Orchard plant. That’s more than four times the plant’s current design flow.

The county plans to spend more than $400 million to upgrade the Oak Orchard treatment plant to accommodate Micron and the explosion of development it could generate.

Micron has not said what kinds of chemicals it will use in Clay. In an exchange with syracuse.com last summer, Henry, the key public face of Micron’s Clay project, said the company will not release information on all of the chemicals it discharges and emits.

Syracuse.com: “Are we going to know what all the chemicals are there, or is that proprietary?”

Henry: “That’s proprietary.”

Syracuse.com: “So we won’t know what you’re using there, what’s going into the air and water?”

Henry: “Correct.”

In fact, Henry said, Micron itself won’t be aware of all of the chemicals that will enter its factory doors.

“In some cases, our suppliers don’t tell us what (the chemicals) are, because they have their own intellectual property and trade secrets,” Henry said.

All that secrecy has activists worried.

“At this point, there are many more questions than actual facts,” said David Sonnenfeld, a retired SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry professor who has studied the electronics industry for more than 30 years. “The tricky stuff is, what do we not know?”

PFAS are ubiquitous

What we do know is that PFAS compounds were once widely used in manufacturing firefighting foams and in consumer products like non-stick pans. PFAS compounds have been in use since the 1950s, and were banned from many consumer products in 2002.

In areas where PFAS were used intensively and dumped, dangerous levels built up in groundwater. In the New York village of Hoosick Falls, decades of PFAS dumping led to a $65 million settlement and a new water line. More than 700 military sites, including Hancock Field, in Syracuse, were being studied for potential PFAS contamination in soil and groundwater.

Despite many PFAS compounds being phased out in the past 20 years, they remain ubiquitous in the environment. One study found that 97% of Americans have some PFAS in their blood.

Fish in the Great Lakes have high levels of PFAS. And the chemicals are found closer to home: Refugees who ate fish from Onondaga Lake had “markedly elevated” levels of PFAS in their blood – as much as 27 times higher than the U.S. median, a state Department of Health study found.

The Onondaga County Water Authority and the city of Syracuse have detected low levels of some PFAS compounds in drinking water drawn from Lake Ontario and Skaneateles Lake. The levels are well below the EPA’s new drinking water standards.

Micron said it no longer uses two major classes of PFAS, called PFOA and PFOS. The company said it is working to find alternatives to the PFAS compounds it does use.

“We are actively working on identifying alternative PFAS chemistries as part of our focus on responsible chemical stewardship,” the company said.

The CHIPS office said coming up with suitable alternatives to PFAS could take 15 to 20 years.

PFAS are just part of the chemicals in fabs

PFAS is just one group of chemicals semiconductor plants use. The CHIPS office says that about 170 chemicals used in semiconductor manufacturing are listed on the federal Toxic Substances Control Act.

At Micron’s fab in Manassas, Virginia, it stores nearly 300 kinds of chemicals, according to a 2018 report filed with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. Micron last year provided the New York DEC with a list of chemicals it might emit into the air. The total was 96.

In Silicon Valley, where dozens of Superfund sites are still being cleaned up after decades of pollution from the semiconductor industry, advocates for the environment and worker safety said they remain skeptical, but hopeful, that chip companies can avoid a repeat.

“I’m not arguing that they can’t do their work relatively safely,” Siegel said. “It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that they’ve introduced chemicals without adequate concern about the environmental impact, and now they have to play catch up.”