And hopefully, is this my day to achieve a hole-in-one? Golf is a game of variables, a game of tradeoffs. If I smack the ball too hard, it will go too far. Too lightly and it won't go far enough. Hit the ball too far to the left and I may crown an innocent foursome! Pondering these issues brought me immediately back to the lead problem. We've known for hundreds of years that lead was a deadly poisonous substance, yet that didn't stop us from using it for hundreds of products. On the South side of Chicago, near where I grew up, it was not uncommon to hear about children getting violently sick, or dying, from eating paint chips from a lead-based paint. We used to point with pride to electronics, and particularly semiconductor manufacturing, as "clean, green industries." We were proud that we didn't pour ugly black smoke into the environment, like the steel mills in Pittsburgh or Altoona. At the same time we gave lip service to the environment, our semiconductor fabs were polluting the ground water. This is the same water that we drink. Remember the Superfund sites? These are areas beneath semiconductor makers where the ground is so polluted that hundreds of millions of dollars must be used to clean them up. An example? Certainly, how about the most illustrious member of the chip-making community, the original Fairchild Semiconductor fab, in Mountain View, Calif. Or Raytheon Semiconductor, also in Mountain View, where I once worked. Both, along with most of the chip makers in Silicon Valley, have their own Superfund sites. It's going to be painful, initially, to stop using lead for so much of electronics. Most change usually is. But the time to start is now, without taking our lead from Japan and Europe. Bouquets to the IPC, one of the most pro-active groups acting on the lead issue in the U.S., although not the only one. I welcome your thoughts on this critical issue.
Gene Selven |
