by Elaine Cohen

This week, for the first time, Apple disclosed the names of most of the suppliers in its supply chain. The list, which appeared alongside the company's 2012 Supplier Responsibility Report, represents some 97 percent of Apple’s procurement expenditures for materials, manufacturing, and assembly of Apple products worldwide. It includes names of well-known and reputable multinational companies as well as unknown local companies in several countries.

The news of the disclosure has been hailed as progress, though not without reference to Apple's alleged complicity in a long string of human rights violations in its supply chain: the spate of Foxconn suicides; explosions and other workplace issues; alleged chemical poisoning of workers at Wintek; and a host of additional human rights abuses in Apple contractor factories including low wages, unpaid overtime, lack of adequate safety measures and more.

The iTransparency Route

Perhaps these accusations—many of which seem to have substance—have now reached such a critical mass that Apple feels that the brand image of its otherwise impressive product range may start to suffer irreparable damage. Perhaps Apple has understood that there is more to be gained than lost in taking the iTransparency route.

Is There An App for That?

Whatever the reason for the disclosure, the fact remains that Apple is several years late. In the apparel sector, such disclosures have been common practice for some years now with Nike being the first to make a full disclosure of suppliers in 2005, followed by Levi Strauss, Gap and others. Hewlett-Packard disclosed their supplier list with their 2007 Sustainability Report.

(Ironically, the ultimate in sustainability mobility has to be the flurry of Sustainability Report applications for your iPhone or iPad.A quick visit to the iTunes App store will leave you spoiled for choice. You can download for free the sustainability reports of Royal BAMGroup NV, Kmart, Wacker, Prudential, Corio, Chemring, MAN Trucks, Itau Unibanco, Fuji Xerox and more, and take them with you wherever you go.

Yet, while Apple's technology and innovation have enabled everyone else to weave their transparency offerings into the intimate lives of citizens-consumers-investors-employees everywhere, the company itself resisted transparency for so long.)

But this is not only about transparency for its own sake.

Intent to Disclose: Motivating Factors for Apple

Underlying the move to disclose supplier names is an admission that stakeholders are entitled to information, which may affect their purchasing decisions. It is also the intimation of a willingness to engage both in dialogue about supply chain issues and accept the criticisms that may follow.

Even more importantly, Apple's disclosure reveals a genuine willingness to do things better, in an area of business which all global companies with outsourced supply chains have never ceased to grapple with: No company has excelled at eliminating human rights abuses in extended supply chains; No company has recorded perfect scores in supplier audits.

Despite the huge amount of resources ploughed into monitoring, auditing, training, warning, incentivizing and, if all else fails, terminating contracts, outsourced suppliers are just not getting it right 100 percent of the time.

Taking Stock: Supply Chain Transparency

Apple conducted 229 factory audits in 2011 and reports an overall level of 74 percent compliance with required labor practices, and 64 percent compliance with management practices requirements. This means that at least a quarter of Apple facilities are not compliant.

A sample of findings from the audits:

- 93 factories were found to have more than 50 percent of employees working excessive hours.
- 90 factories did not apply appropriate hours of rest.
- 68 factories did not provide worker benefits as required by law.
- Five factories were using underage labor.

Moving Forward: Using Innovation to Solve Supply Chain Dilemmas

While it is commendable for Apple to disclose such sobering facts about its own business, all eyes remain on the firm to see how it addresses the root causes of these issues, and whether it can eliminate them from its supply chain.

More auditing, more training and more termination may not be the answer.

Perhaps Apple should focus some of its renowned innovation capability on fixing the root causes of supply chain issues, in addition to preparing the launch of iPhone 5.

Launching the report, Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly wrote to all Apple employees, saying:

"No one in our industry is driving improvements for workers the way Apple is today."

The truth of that statement is a matter for debate, but the fact remains that when it comes to transparency, Apple is doing today what so many other global manufacturers started doing yesterday. It may still be too little for Apple, but it is definitely not too late.

It's key that pressure on Apple to continue to make progress, both in human rights and environmental aspects of its business, remain high. The demand for greater transparency must not cease. As we have seen, and other manufacturers have proven, there IS an App for that.

Photo by Procsilas Moscas/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from CSRwire

Major companies could reduce their carbon emissions by as much as 50 percent and significantly increase energy efficiency by shifting to cloud computing, according to a new report. In an analysis of UK, French, and U.S. firms that have used cloud computing for at least two years, the Carbon Disclosure Project calculated that by 2020 U.S. companies with annual revenues of more than $1 billion can save $12.3 million in energy costs and achieve carbon reductions equivalent to 200 million barrels of oil a year if they shift to shared data networks. The report said that large UK companies could achieve annual energy savings of GBP 1.2 billion if they move to cloud computing. Cloud computing — in which data can be stored, managed, and processed on external servers as needed — allows companies to buy less hardware and also improves efficiency and flexibility. According to the report — which was conducted by the independent firm Verdantix and sponsored by AT&T — large companies plan to accelerate their adoption of cloud computing from 10 percent to 69 percent of their IT spending by 2020.

Photo by NeoSpire/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

by Susan Kraemer

I am a huge fan of Google. And the company has done far more than any other company to help solve the problems of climate change by investing in game-changing renewable innovation, and even providing an education on climate change, directly. However, it’s core mission – finding stuff for you – is turning out to hamper progress in a weird way.

Google tries very hard to please you by finding you more stuff just like the other stuff you clicked on last time. That is the essence of google’s great cleverness. But that very brilliance is becoming more and more damaging to the shared view out to an objective fact-based world.

Who hasn’t gotten exasperated with someone else’s ignorance about climate change? Haven’t you finally said: “look, you can just google it!”

But there turns out to be one big problem with just “googling” it. It depends on who you are.

So if last time you looked up climate change and chose to open something by, say, Marc Morano, then Senator Inhofe, and then the Drudge Report, which would all poo-poo climate change, google thinks, “oh, this moron likes denier news about climate change,” and next time, more of its top suggestions for your search will be skewed even further to the right.

As you keep heading further into la-la land, Google is there, holding your hand, assuring you that indeed, this is the objective, google-able truth. Two people with different search histories get two entirely different sets of google “facts” for the identical search terms.

The problem is that science-based types, who click on the fact-laden science-based pdfs from the EPA and reports from the WRI and studies from NOAA – and then get more of these kinds of results; assume that’s what everyone sees when they just “google” it, but there is no one objective science-based google.

Google has become like a good but unobtrusive butler, that always obsequiously aims to please, by always giving you more and more of what you liked last time. Ultimately, as a result, we are now all living in what we believe to be the objective, self-evidently google-able truth. And we are not.

Climate scientists keep turning out more and better climate science, and scratch their heads at the apparent lack of effect on “rational” hearts and minds, but it is simply not being found by the other side, because googling it turns up the opposition. While scientists wring their hands over the problem that they are not communicating well enough, there is nothing they can do differently.

Together with the outright (deliberate) propaganda by the 1 percent against the 99 percent, Google’s (accidental) amplification of that propaganda, a mere accident of our technological history, is fueling part of the rage of this internet age. The civil war on science it amplifies – even by accident – is a danger to our survival, as it saps our commitment to change before it’s too late.

Reprinted with permission from Cleantechnica

by Eric Bloom

It was only a matter of time before someone in the smart building space took the best aspects of Facebook and the iPhone app store and weaved them into a solution that would help building owners, managers, and occupants harness big data to drive new levels of efficiency and building performance monitoring. Johnson Controls took a step in that direction recently when it announced the launch of the Panoptix platform at Greenbuild in Toronto.

At its core is an open technology platform that can pull together building data from systems that rarely, if ever, speak to each other – from the building automation system (BAS) to the meter system to weather data, security systems, and others.

A suite of cloud-hosted building efficiency applications allows users to link their own building management systems to the platform and start monitoring and managing their buildings. The initial suite consists of four applications:

- Continuous Diagnostics Advisor
- Measurement and Verification Monitor
- Carbon and Energy Reporter
- Custom Analyzer

Over time, Johnson Controls and its partners, such as IBM, will continue to develop new applications. By 2012, the app suite will be open to independent software developers, as well. Users buy the apps on a subscription basis rather than as a one-time purchase, thereby making them accessible and affordable to a broader base of potential customers. And the apps, of course, can be accessed from any Internet-connected device.

The platform also includes a live support system that provides online and telephone support as well as on-site building services to make the most of Panoptix – a must-have for a system that will be new and unfamiliar to many building owners and managers. In addition, a social networking system, the Panoptix Connected Community, will provide a forum for stakeholders to share resources.

Johnson Controls hopes to have a social network-like effect on building efficiency, which depends too heavily on systems that are constantly creating data but haven’t been synced up. In doing so, Panoptix addresses two core issues in the building efficiency world these days. The first is the disintegrated nature of many building systems, which rely on a fragmented set of technologies, communication protocols, and standards that make it difficult for anyone but the most sophisticated building manager or energy engineer to gain useful insight into building energy use patterns and efficiency opportunities.

The second is the fact that novel advances in energy efficiency in buildings are difficult to replicate because buildings operate as islands, and lessons learned in one case may never be communicated to other building managers that could benefit from the knowledge. By connecting systems as well as building professionals, Johnson Controls hopes to unearth a stockpile of efficiency opportunities.

I anticipate one of the key areas of interest in the near term will be the Continuous Diagnostics Advisor. Even efficiently-designed buildings have a tendency to drift from their initial design parameters, watering down the payback for efficiency measures and compromising occupant comfort. The Continuous Diagnostics Advisor essentially enables continuous commissioning by giving building managers real-time insight into building performance and allowing them to prevent small issues from becoming big ones. Over time, though, the Panoptix platform will be used in many different ways, connecting building equipment and data to the building professionals who can act on efficiency opportunities.

Eric Bloom is a green building and renewable energy analyst for Pike Research.

by Andrew Burger

UK telecoms and IT services provider Colt is well on its way toward building the world’s first zero-emissions data center, in all of four months. Being built for data center developer Verne Global, the plant will be built on a former NATO base in Keflavik, Iceland, where geothermal and hydroelectric power will supply all the electricity needed to power the 500-square meter data center’s servers and ambient cold air used to cool them.

Colt has manufactured the data center’s 37 modules in the UK and will begin shipping them to Verne Global’s data center campus in Keflavik in early October, according to a press release.

Sitting atop part of the Atlantic Ocean’s Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Iceland is the only country in the world that generates all its electrical power from clean, renewable sources — geothermal and hydropower. Its geographic location affords the country with access to plentiful geothermal and hydropower resources, as well as a cold climate that make it an ideal location for data centers. Its remote location is a downside, but undersea cables provide telecoms links between the island nation and the European and North American continents.

The Verne Global data center project is indicative of the drive on the part of the global IT and data center industry to reduce the intensity of its electricity use and minimize the environmental impact of its operations.

“This is a very interesting project and shows how the industry is transforming,” commented Chris Ingle, an associate vice president at IDC. “Verne Global’s Iceland location and dual source renewable energy provides a combination of sustainability and cost visibility. Colt’s approach to data center build provides a fast and flexible way of fitting out the space. The ability to provide a traditional data center more efficiently than is currently the case provides a strong alternative in the market.”

Added Verne Global CEO Jeff Monroe, ““Partnering with Colt enables us to have a purpose-built facility that will be in operation before the end of 2011, supporting our mission of delivering the world’s first dual-sourced renewably powered data center. We see a strong demand in the co-location market and we required a partner who could provide highly resilient, flexible data center space, configured to our specific technical requirements.”

Colt’s modular manufacturing approach to data center construction afforded Verne Global the ability to streamline the manufacturing process and assure its quality, as well as offering the potential to quickly scale-up and increase the data center’s capacity.

Through its data center division, Colt owns and operates 19 data centers across Europe and manages more than 21,000-square meters of data center space. The company also operates a 35,000-kilometer (~22,000-mile) that stretches through 39 major European cities with direct fiber connections to 18,000 buildings and 19 Colt data centers.

Verne Global’s data center campus in Keflavik, Iceland offers co-location and bespoke data center options to customers whose electrical power needs range from multiple kilowatts to multiple megawatts. Geothermal and hydroelectric power provide clean, renewable power for all its operations, enabling customers to lower the environmental impact and carbon footprint of their operations. Multiple high-speed cables provide connections to Europe and the US.

Photo by Ben Lakey/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Cleantechnica

Researchers are developing software that will help them better identify individual apes and elephants in their natural habitat, an innovation they say could improve tracking of species populations in the wild and provide insights into animal behavior.

Using video and photographs collected by camera traps, the detection software automatically scans through pictures of animals and then is able to identify specific individuals using algorithms based on biometric data. For great apes and elephants alike, distinctive skin fold patterns make it feasible to identify individuals even from long distances using high-resolution photography. Researchers say the software will let them know, for example, if the same gorilla or numerous individuals are appearing in a series of camera trap images, providing a better representation of the health of the population.

The software — which is being developed by a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the Fraunhofer Institutes IDMT and IIS, and the University of Bristol — also analyzes sounds made by individual animals, including an ape’s chest-pounding or threatening grunts.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

by Caroline Fraser

A rapidly expanding universe of citizens’ groups, researchers, and environmental organizations are making use of social media and smart phone applications to document changes in the natural world and to mobilize support for taking action.

Last year, the spectacle of 80 million people flocking to the faux greenery of FarmVille, a social networking game on Facebook, held particular irony for environmentalists who have ritually bemoaned low levels of public interest in biodiversity. Every traditional method and media has been tapped to penetrate this elephantine indifference, from documentaries to dire predictions. Rarely a week goes by without reports on crashing ecosystems or mass extinction, a blizzard of bad news inspiring little more than hand-wringing.

But in the spirit of joining rather than beating, conservationists have begun embracing the enemy, the very force that alienated people from nature in the first place: technology.

Social media have become the latest, hottest tools in natural history circles as scientists confront a populace that knows laptops better than landscapes. In the quest to give communities a grasp on complex ecological systems — particularly as they face decisions imposed by climate change — social networking promises to link scientists with the public, empowering naturalist armies to act on their behalf: monitoring species, observing behavioral patterns, and reporting the presence of invasives and changes in climate, vegetation, and populations.

Citizen science — natural history — has been the province of amateur enthusiasts for centuries, long before a young beetle-lover found himself in the Galapagos, flinging marine iguanas into the sea to see if they’d swim back. The popularity of the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, launched in 1900, brought new rigor to backyard observations, revealing the scientific potential of simultaneously gathering thousands of data points across wide geographical areas.

But with the explosion of cell phones equipped with digital cameras and global positioning systems, citizen science has migrated to the Web, emerging as a potent force-multiplier — and watchdog — for conservation. In May, Namibia’s government announced an SMS hotline for anonymous poaching tips: “Five fives for rhino.” After the Fukushima nuclear plant failure, Japanese citizens skeptical of government reassurances bought their own dosimeters to map radioactive hot spots on the Web. Likewise, during the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science transformed anxiety into “civic science,” moving residents to chart the spill with digital cameras tied to kites and balloons.

The most astonishing results from environmental social networking lie in such crowdsourcing. In March, the Smithsonian put out an emergency call on Facebook for specialists to identify 5,000 freshly collected fish specimens from Guyana for export paperwork. Within 24 hours, ichthyologists around the world supplied partial or complete answers for almost 90 percent.

But most projects, from traditional websites to social networking services and apps, are premeditated: Cornell University’s Citizen Science Central acts as a clearinghouse for over 130. Many offer training in species identification and invite the public to post targeted observations: the number of gray vs. fox squirrels (Project Squirrel), the appearance of buds in spring and other seasonal plant phases (Project BudBurst), the migratory behavior of Monarch butterflies (Monarch Watch) or hummingbirds (Operation Ruby Throat). Others organize and analyze data online from “BioBlitzes,” intensive biological surveys conducted by volunteers with the guidance of specialists. Offering land managers and stakeholders spatially referenced databases on the presence or absence of protected or invasive species, these range from local exercises — a 24-hour “snapshot” of every species in Wisconsin’s Beaver Creek Reserve, for example — to large-scale, long-term initiatives like the Adirondack All-Taxa Biodiversity Inventory.

Such efforts may seem modest. But Cornell professor Harry W. Greene, an old-fashioned field biologist and self-described “snake guy,” regards these observations as “absolutely at the core of all biology.” Greene points out that “for most organisms on Earth, we know almost nothing.” In years past, he often received frustrating reports of snake sightings from a public uncertain about key details — length, color, markings. Now, people send a digital image. “I write them right back,” he says, “and tell them whether the roadkill in their driveway is a Massasauga rattlesnake or a northern milk snake.” He describes the outpouring of data from citizens as “revolutionary,” not only for science but for amateurs: “When you make an observation,” he says, “you put yourself into the life of the organism. You care more.” With enough anecdotal reports and photos, meaningful statistical samples can emerge.

Greene and a former graduate student developed a prototype for “NatureWorm,” a social networking site designed to kindle interest in natural history on a wide scale. Investment lagged, but the niche has been filled by other opportunistic organisms, such as iNaturalist.org, an online community created by students at University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information where users can upload photos and hobnob about sightings. On a recent visit, “RussianNaturalistBrazil” had just posted an arresting image of Gongora meneziana, a fleshy, translucent red-spotted orchid found in Brazil’s Atlantic forest; Google maps pinpointed his location north of Salvador. Elsewhere on the site, a debate had broken out on the identification of a type of Indian paintbrush in California’s Wildcat Canyon.

Project Noah is a more commercial version of an environmental community, led by telecom entrepreneur Yasser Ansari, who grew up in southern California and developed a passion for poison dart frogs as a child. After studying molecular biology and bioinformatics at University of California, San Diego, Ansari collaborated on Noah (“Networked Organisms and Habitats”) with fellow students at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Launched in February 2010, it is now available as an app, downloaded to over 100,000 smartphones. So far, participants have uploaded over 60,000 “spottings.” Recent caches feature everything from the inevitable white-tailed deer and common garden flowers (“rose,” “lantana”) to images of a red-eyed tree frog, an Arctic fox, a Plains zebra rolling in dirt, a griffon vulture in flight, and mating common Indian toads.

Contributors to Noah plot sightings on a worldwide map, earn patches (reminiscent of the Boy Scouts’), and join “Missions” — the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Impact — to delve deeper into scientific projects. The National Geographic Society recently provided investment for new software, reposting on Facebook Noah’s “Spotting of the Week” — including a spectacular giraffe-necked weevil from Madagascar — for its 6.6 million fans.

For all the emphasis on documentation, Ansari’s view of his social network has evolved. He sees it primarily as a motivational tool, part of the “mass amateurization of everything.” While his original vision was to collect data, he now suggests that Noah is “more effective at getting people excited. We’re trying to create a powerful gateway drug. If you use Project Noah and then move on to hard-core science, that’s a huge win. The data is secondary.”

Not necessarily. Project Squirrel, which has expanded countrywide from its origins in Chicago, is keeping watch on both its target species and human observers. “We’re correlating what people tell us about habitat to what the squirrels are telling us,” director Steve Sullivan says, predicting that the project may document the accuracy of citizen science and its role in stimulating passion for nature.

Project BudBurst, sponsored by NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network, has registered nearly 12,000 volunteer observers since 2007. Participants have uploaded tens of thousands of observations on their chosen plants’ first leaf, first flower, first pollen, and other phenological phases (lilac is among the most popular), yielding datasets that have allowed scientists to extend a 50-year botanical study of Cook County, Illinois. Comparing historical data with three years of BudBurst observations has revealed that, as temperatures rise, forsythia is blooming 24 days earlier, black locust 19 days earlier, and red maple 14.

Both Squirrel and BudBurst are popular in classrooms, but lone individuals are also prolific — one Waco, Texas plant-watcher has been monitoring more than 25 species since BudBurst’s inception, including Texas red oak, Texas bluebonnet, spiderwort, and pink ladies.

Perhaps the most intriguing capability of social media involves something that goes deeper than data. The University of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay Game is an interactive computer simulation with the power to change minds. Beginning in 2000, it plays out over a 20-year horizon, allowing teams to take on the roles and responsibilities of oystermen, crabbers, crop and dairy farmers, real-estate developers, and policy-makers, everyone with an impact on one of the world’s most endangered watersheds. As teams make decisions based on economic and regulatory restrictions, determining how much land to cultivate or how many crabs to trap, they watch the real-time, long-term consequences of their choices playing out. Crucially, “the game is politically neutral,” says David E. Smith, professor in U. Va.’s Department of Environmental Sciences.

On Earth Day this year, teams from seven Chesapeake Bay-area universities played, each representing a major basin — York River, James River, the Eastern Shore, etc. It was a sobering experience. At the end, a College of William and Mary biology professor acknowledged that despite players’ best efforts, “the quality of the bay went down.”

The game is impressively accurate: Its recent iteration encompasses tens of thousands of data points, and IBM has selected it for the World Community Grid program, harnessing over a million volunteers’ computers to crunch numbers. Philippe Cousteau, grandson of the oceanographer, is partnering with the university to adapt it for other ecosystems, from Australia to Arizona. He foresees a day when younger students can input real data to model their backyards and lobby their parents — “Hey, mom and dad, let’s not use fertilizer on the lawn.”

Today’s social media may indeed spark a rebirth of natural history, but none have yet moved climate change or biodiversity loss forward very far forward on the political agenda. There are tremors: In 2009, 350.org, agitating for action on climate change, used social media to organize more than 5,000 events in some 180 countries, in what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.” Last year, 350.org mobilized tens of thousands of people against offshore oil drilling, holding hands across 900 beaches. Avaaz, the Web-based social justice movement, has inspired more than a million to sign a petition to protect bee populations by banning neonicotinoid pesticides in the U.S. and EU.

Meanwhile, the environment waits for a software wunderkind to find the social formula that may lure a fickle public to fall in love with the real world, not a fake one.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

by Jo Borras

In a bold move, South Korea’s ministry of education recently announced plans to remove printed textbooks from Korea’s schools by the year 2015. Called “Smart Education”, the plan calls for the creation of a dedicated cloud network – which will host digital copies of the students’ required reading and lessons – that can be accessed through “any” Internet-connected device, from low-power netbooks to tablets to (presumably) Android-powered washing machines, which will be provided to students’ families if they are unable to afford them (the netbooks, not the appliances).

The ministry’s office also has plans for online classes which will allow students who are ill or otherwise unable to attend school physically to”keep up” with their classmates, and also make adult and remedial education more easily accessible.

In addition to being a fantastic move from a conservationist standpoint (Seriously, how many millions of pounds of wood and paper are turned into textbooks every year? How many gallons of gas go into transporting those heavy books every year? I bet it’s a lot!), Korea’s plan will also provide a significant boost to the country’s private IT sector, requiring thousands of employee contractors to wire up schools, homes, and public spaces in preparation for the 2015 cut-off.

The head of the ministry believes these moves will help keep Korea’s students (who already scored “on top” in terms of internet and computer “literacy” compared to students sampled from 19 countries) ahead of the curve. “That’s why Korean students, who are already fully prepared for digital society, need a paradigm shift in education,” he said to the Jakarta Globe, while also expressing his belief that the plan to digitize schools will actually save his government money over the long term (!).

Let’s hope the multi-level wisdom being employed here by South Korea gets “picked up” by other countries in the near future – the trees, at least, will be thrilled!

Reprinted with permission from CleanTechnica

by Elizabeth Grossman

Workers groups in South Korea report an unusually high incidence of cancers and other serious diseases among employees at Samsung’s semiconductor and other electronics plants. While the company denies any link, the pattern of illnesses is disturbingly similar to that seen at semiconductor facilities in the U.S. and Europe.

To experts in health issues relating to high-tech electronics workers, the story emerging from Samsung’s manufacturing plants in South Korea is distressingly familiar: An unusually high incidence of leukemia, lymphoma, brain cancer, and other serious diseases appears to exist among relatively young people who have worked in Samsung’s semiconductor and other chemically-intensive manufacturing plants. While direct cause and effect are difficult to prove, the South Korea situation presents striking similarities to patterns of illness seen at semiconductor plants in the United States and elsewhere in decades past.

In 2007, a 22-year-old woman named Yu-mi Hwang, who had worked at Samsung’s Giheung semiconductor plant while still in high school, died of leukemia. A year later, a 30-year-old woman who shared a workstation with Yu-mi died, also of leukemia. In March 2010, a 23-year-old woman named Park Ji-Yeon, who had worked at Samsung’s On-Yang semiconductor plant since 2004, also died of leukemia, three years after her diagnosis. In 2005, a 27-year old woman named Han Hae-kyoung, who had worked in a Samsung LCD plant since 1995, was diagnosed with a brain tumor and is now seriously disabled. Another woman, Lee Yoon-jeong, who worked for Samsung in semiconductor production between 1997 and 2003, was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2010 at age 30. As of March 2011, Korean labor and occupational health activists have counted 120 such cases of severe illnesses and 46 resulting fatalities among Samsung workers.

According to Dr. Jeong-ok Kong, an occupational health physician who has tracked these cases for the Korea Institute of Labor Safety and Health (KILSH) and other nonprofit organizations, most of the workers who have become ill with serious diseases that could be linked to their jobs worked in Samsung’s semiconductor plants. Initial studies by KILSH and an organization known as SHARPS (Supporters of Health and Rights of People in the Semiconductor Industry) have found 74 people who worked in Samsung semiconductor plants and became seriously ill; at least 26 of them have died. Fifteen additional workers who worked in LCD plants became seriously ill with these diseases, and at least five of them have died, according to Kong; three others worked in cell phone plants, and two of them have died.

“The victims we have been finding are concentrated in several ‘old’ and manual facilities,” said Kong, whose work on behalf of electronics-industry workers won a 2010 American Public Health Association Occupational Health and Safety Section Award.

“SHARPS began collecting information on these cases in 2007, but the victims have work histories that go back before 2000,” said Kong, speaking by phone from South Korea. Most of the workers known to SHARPS to have become ill were born in the 1980s and 1990s. Many were diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses in their 20s and 30s, many within well under ten years of beginning work at Samsung. Kong said similar illnesses were now being reported by workers at other Korean electronics firms.

Samsung, one of the world’s four largest electronics manufacturers, ranks among the top 40 companies on the Fortune 500 and is the largest company in South Korea. With its products accounting for about one-fifth of the nation’s exports, Samsung is extremely powerful in South Korea, with more than $172 billion in sales in 2010. In addition to its extensive electronics businesses, the Samsung Group includes chemical manufacturing, heavy industry and construction, financial services (including life insurance and a credit card business), hotels, resorts, and a medical center. Samsung Electronics’ 2009-2010 sustainability report lists 157,701 employees, 80,115 of whom are listed in the “production” sector in South Korea; but it does not list how many work directly in manufacturing operations.

According to Kong, despite repeated requests by SHARPS, the Korean Ministry of Labor has not made available information showing how many Samsung employees work in manufacturing operations vs. white collar jobs; Samsung has also not provided such information. That these numbers are not public is not surprising as such details have also not been available at the initiation of epidemiological studies of the semiconductor industry in the U.S. and the UK. But it means there is no available count of the number of Samsung employees who work directly in jobs that would expose them to hazardous chemicals, which complicates efforts to establish the significance of the reported cancers and other serious illnesses.

The Samsung workers diagnosed with serious illnesses that may be linked to their employment worked in a variety of operations, according to Kong. Some worked on printed circuit boards for LCD screens; others worked in various aspects of semiconductor fabrication, including chip burning (a process that tests semiconductors by subjecting them to high heat and voltage), ion implantation, and using x-rays to check the quality of chips. While there is a lack of firmly verifiable data about the identity of all the substances used in these processes, what is known is that they involve dozens of chemicals that include organic solvents, among them benzene, and heavy metals, including lead.

Benzene and other volatile organic compounds used widely in semiconductor and other electronics manufacturing also include trichloroethylene (TCE) and methylene chloride, which are associated with cancer and nervous system damage and are also known to affect developing embryos. Benzene is classified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a confirmed human carcinogen. It is known to cause leukemia and dangerous blood disorders including aplastic anemia and thrombocytopenia, a disease that interferes with blood-clotting, from which at least one Samsung worker is suffering. Benzene is also known to cause cerebral edema and kidney disorders. Exposure to TCE has also been linked to elevated levels of certain cancers, including brain cancer, leukemia, and lymphoma. Lead, mercury, and other metals used commonly in semiconductor and other electronics manufacturing are known neurotoxicants. Arsenic, also used widely in electronics production processes, is toxic to blood cells and carcinogenic.

Most of these processes involving hazardous chemicals take place in so-called “clean rooms” — manufacturing facilities where the enclosed environment is engineered to remove dust and other particles that can damage sensitive equipment such as semiconductor chips and other high-tech components. What makes this potentially significant is that air in clean rooms re-circulates rapidly. This keeps dust and other particles away from sensitive equipment and products. (Those head-to-toe coveralls known as “bunny-suits” were designed to protect microchips et al. — rather than workers — from contaminants.)

Yet this recirculation of air also increases the rate at which workers breathe chemicals and the number of workers exposed, explained Joseph LaDou, former director of the International Center for Occupational Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. When the air circulates rapidly in the clean room’s enclosed environment, the effectiveness of any hoods or filters are diminished, he explained. “In an 8-hour shift — or the longer shifts worked in Asia — clean room workers are breathing a cauldron of chemicals,” said LaDou. And when it comes to any protective standards, “there is no regulation for exposure to groups of chemicals or circulating exposure,” he noted.

“The cases at Samsung fit a pattern of what we saw in the IBM study,” said Richard Clapp, Boston University professor emeritus of environmental health and epidemiologist who conducted an epidemiological study of cancer and death rates among IBM workers between 1969 and 2001 that found elevated rates of blood, brain, lymphatic, and other cancers among workers likely exposed to manufacturing chemicals.

Said Amanda Hawes, an attorney based in San Jose, Calif., who specializes in occupational health issues related to chemical exposure: “What’s being seen at Samsung is comparable to other situations where there’s been an excess of lymphoma and leukemia incidence among workers (particularly women) working in mixed chemical environments with solvents.” Hawes has represented former IBM workers in lawsuits involving chemical exposure. (IBM has settled a number of such cases out of court.)

According to Samsung, studies conducted in 2007 and 2008 by the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency and a private consulting team found no correlation between the workplace environment and employee illnesses. “Nevertheless,” Reuben Staines, of Samsung’s corporate communications team in Seoul, wrote in an email, “Samsung Electronics has commissioned an additional independent third-party review, which began in July of last year.” This review is being conducted by a team led by Environ International, a private consultancy, and its work will be reviewed by a panel that includes experts from Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Michigan, and other institutions. “The inspection team has been and continues to be given complete access to Samsung’s semiconductor manufacturing facilities,” wrote Staines. Samsung says it will “carefully review” the Environ findings and “make any necessary changes to our environmental safety and health infrastructure and procedures.”

In December 2010, four Korean NGOs that have been working with SHARPS and labor groups issued a critique of a report released last fall into conditions at Samsung’s semiconductor fabrication plants. The report, known as the “Advisory Report” and overseen by Seoul National University, “found no instances of regulatory breaches in our manufacturing operations,” says Samsung. However, the NGOs say the report failed to account for all the chemicals used in the various production lines (some apparently use as many as 99 different chemicals) or to fully account for how chemicals have been managed – lapses they contend include safety and monitoring equipment failures and leaks. The NGO critique also notes that both the Advisory Report and a 2006 assessment by the Korean Institute for Environment Hygiene and Safety cautioned about the potential for exposure to highly concentrated toxic chemicals despite proper operating procedures.

Samsung has taken issue with SHARPS’ assessment of workers’ health and with the critique, calling the NGO account “inaccurate and misleading” and one that “cannot be viewed as a credible epidemiological study.” One criticism is that the NGO document includes illnesses outside of the semiconductor business. Rather than the 120 cases counted by SHARPS, Samsung says it “is aware of 22 cases of leukemia or lymphoma among all workers employed in its semiconductor business from 1998 through April 2010. Among these cases, we are aware of 10 former employees who have passed away as a result of their illnesses.”

“Samsung maintains a world-class environment, health, and safety infrastructure,” wrote Staines, “and we continually make improvements and enhancements to ensure that it is state-of-the-art. We make these ongoing investments in the normal course of business, which includes careful review and implementation of recommendations that are presented to us through credible research.”

Samsung’s findings thus far mirror what the semiconductor industry has found in its investigations undertaken in response to revelations of comparable illnesses in similar circumstances in the U.K. and the U.S. While academic epidemiologists have found higher than expected incidences of cancers among semiconductor workers based on records from National Semiconductor in Scotland and from IBM in the U.S., the companies involved and the Semiconductor Industry Association have maintained that these studies are scientifically flawed and that there is no proof of a connection between chemical exposures and these illnesses. In 2008, the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety (NIOSH) launched a study of cancer incidence among 28,000 former New York State IBM electronics plant workers, but it does not yet have any preliminary results.

In South Korea, two lawsuits brought on behalf of sickened Samsung workers against the Korea Workers Compensation and Welfare Service are now pending. The workers are suing the government agency for denying their compensation claims against Samsung. (In Korea, the government collects workers compensation funds from employers, adjudicates, and pays out claims.) One suit has been brought on behalf of six workers, five suffering from leukemia and one from lymphoma; the other, begun in 2011, is on behalf of four workers suffering from different diseases that include brain cancer. “It is important to note that Samsung is an interested party but not a defendant in this lawsuit,” wrote Staines.

Staines also noted that Samsung “has strengthened its support programs for employees who have developed serious illnesses” and that “the company is committed to providing support for hospital expenses and living expenses.” The Environ report commissioned by Samsung is due this summer.

In a May 31 email, Kong said that she had just met with the family of another leukemia victim who had worked in a semiconductor factory and was diagnosed at age 37, having worked in electronics plants for 14 years. “He had told his wife to go and meet me when he cannot overcome the cancer,” Kong wrote, “So his wife called me and we met.”

These illnesses — the blood cancers, lymphomas and nervous system and other blood diseases — are all symptomatic of solvent exposure, according to Hawes. These cases are “a red flag,” says Clapp. “If you want to find a cause for these illnesses, this is where you’d go to look.”

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

by Nino Marchetti

For those riding mass transit every day, a harsh reality is that it often doesn’t run on time. One ends up standing at a bus stop or subway platform, impatiently looking at a watch and wondering when the bus or subway will show up. Live update options for when mass transit will actually arrive do exist, however, and now Google is looking to corral that data into its Google Maps software, which is already useful to green tech lovers for finding electric vehicle chargers and bike routes.

Google announced today on its blog that real time mass transit data is now available for free to users of Google Maps for mobile and also desktop. It isn’t a big pool of transit providers Google is drawing from initially, but if you live in the regions of Boston, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco, Madrid and Turin, you’ll now be able to actually know when your bus arrives, as opposed to the regular scheduled time.

Google explained that when one clicks on a transit station or plans a transit route through the Google Maps interface, a special icon will indicate what are called “live departure times” as well as service alerts (i.e. a change in a bus route). The company said as well it is working with our public transit agencies to help them provide live data to more people in more cities.

Live transit updates, according to Google, are available “in the latest version of Google Maps for mobile (requires Android 1.6+), as well as Google Maps on all supported desktop and mobile browsers.”

Reprinted with permission from EarthTechling