US EPA Enforcement and Compliance on Apple Fabrication
dropbox.com
dropbox.com
We merged half a dozen of these threads. Related URLs follow. If there are others, let me know here and I can add them.
https://twitter.com/ashleygjovik/status/1805006150410162322 and https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1805006150410162322.html
https://echo.epa.gov/detailed-facility-report?fid=1100011682...
Maybe the document is from a FOIA request or something similar (and therefore not public)?
> The US EPA notified her they finalized the report but are currently unable to share it with her as Apple apparently declared the report of their (assumed) numerous environmental violations is Apple Confidential. Gjovik has a pending FOIA request as well.
But, in 2021 (at https://sfbayview.com/2021/03/i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apart...), "I wanted to get some formal data in the brief time before I moved out, so I hired an industrial hygienist to sample the indoor air and some of the topsoil. Despite the $1,555 I had to pay for it, the results were inconclusive."
From the linked post: "In September 2020, Gjovik hired an industrial hygienist to test the indoor air at her apartment. She purchased an inspection, soil testing, and a two-hour sorbent tube-based TO-17 air panel. Only half the total contaminants were accounted for in the test and the California EPA informed her that testing with Summa canisters for 24 hours is superior and would have yielded better results. Still, Gjovik’s limited testing returned results showing a number of the chemicals in use by Apple at ARIA including Acetone, Acetonitrile, Acetaldehyde, Benzene, 1,2-Dichloroethane, Ethanol, Ethylbenzene, Hexane, Isopropanol, Isopropyl toluene, Methylene Chloride, Toluene, and Xylene."
From the 2021 SF Bay View article: "I did try to do my own testing, but it was incredibly expensive and turned out to be insufficient. I wanted to get some formal data in the brief time before I moved out, so I hired an industrial hygienist to sample the indoor air and some of the topsoil. Despite the $1,555 I had to pay for it, the results were inconclusive. Apparently a different test – a “summa canister” – over a longer period of time would have been better. "
That doesn't align with how industrial air pollution works.
If someone else is wrong, the thing to do is either (1) respond with correct information and better arguments; or (2) let go and move on.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
YMMV but some people are crazy. The EPA is however not. But what the EPA say and what the woman claims are disparate.
Edit: to be clear I'd expect the EPA to install independently maintained monitoring equipment which is not subject to the bias of Apple or the reporter. Then collect more data!
To complicate it further, this woman did in fact live on top of an industrially-zone area which had industrial contamination on site. The apartments are very new (finished construction in ~2019) and they had to agree to a ton of cleanup to get permits to build.
There are so many confounding factors that mean she could still have been poisoned by toxic industrial byproducts and the factor next door could still be innocent.
Indeed. May 2022 TechCruch [0] about sexism at workplace:
"Privacy watchdogs in Europe are considering a complaint against Apple made by a former employee, Ashley Gjøvik, who alleges the company fired her after she raised a number of concerns, internally and publicly, including over the safety of the workplace." "At the time, Gjøvik had been placed on administrative leave by Apple after raising concerns about sexism in the workplace, and a hostile and unsafe working environment which it had said it was investigating."
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/11/gobbler-complaint-europe/?...
But she's not the only resident and I haven't heard any indication of a class action.
I’m sure the area being so desperate for housing is part of why this was allowed. Adding 1800 housing units is a huge deal in a city that size.
Yeah, the reports quoted with scary big red boxes seem to be... mostly minor or procedural stuff?
In general, I find that people are hit or miss regarding their observations. Sometimes they are so on point that they seem like a savant, and sometimes they miss the mark so hard that I find believing anything further impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_misinformation#List_of_prot...
I feel the best type of public education would have been the listing of the many electromagnetic radiation sources we already have. Taking a sample person, say, from inner London, and enumerate just how many of the radiation gets to them already, from the 4G and previous sources, radio, the different equipment that a city has, and so on. I feel like people are missing the historical context is these cases, same with the COVID vaccine. We were already subject to many of the vaccines, and in many cases, the COVID vaccine wasn't anything different.
https://www.immunize.org/official-guidance/state-policies/re...
Also, they weren't doing chip fab there. It was R&D for Titan and MicroLED. There's a reason she's litigating her case against Apple pro se and without any expert witnesses and other lawyers. She's a basket case who went from almost fainting one time to now saying she almost died. She scared a lot of people at work who live in the same apartment building with this: https://sfbayview.com/2021/03/i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apart... We all bought equipment thinking we were being poisoned. TL;DR, we weren't. I was on the bottom floor and 0000000000 VOCs.
https://www.siliconvalley.com/2018/03/19/apple-secretly-deve... https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/apple-tech-layoffs-...
If the source of the chemicals was actually the emissions from the other facility and not the soil below the building, you would expect none in the lower floors where you were and more on the higher floors where this person was.
None of the rest of us got sick, including the people who worked in that building and the one next to it (we have 2).
I'm not an environmental policy enforcer or scientist, but I can read from this report that the issue was mislabeled/unlabeled containers and haz waste treatment w/o EPA-required permit. None of that is going to make 1 single person in the entire area sick.
I live in the western hemisphere's largest integrated industrial complex (Freeport, TX integrated with the eastern edge of Houston as well). Note that Freeport, TX has ZERO state or federal EPA VOC analyzers which can actually detect which chemical is leaking. They can only detect "this amount of something with either {sulfur, N-O bonds, aromatic carbon rings} -- no clue what precisely though!". This is the same capability of the most advanced atmospheric pollution satellites. Completely fucking useless for an area which manufactures something like 15-20% of all USA domestic chemicals. The technology to measure individual chemicals exists, but the government isn't paying for it or installing it.
The ENTIRE east side of Houston metropolitan area is dedicated to or "next door" to massive chemical manufacturing. This is an industrial area nearly equal to the area encompassing all of Seattle+Bellevue+Redmond+Renton+Tukwila. That's not including nearby housing - that's just how big the manufacturing facilities themselves are! This massive area has only THREE air quality monitors which test for these kinds of chemicals[0]. During huge major events like the ITC fire[2], they typically show no increased pollution at all, which proves that it's woefully inadequate even during big emergencies that very obviously affect breathing air quality. I lived next to leaks every day and because I worked in the plants I knew the smells - one day acrylates, next day thiols, next day hydrocarbons, etc. But all 3 monitoring sites (over 10 miles from me) showed nothing at all.
Here is the one "correct" monitoring station near the chemical plants of Houston: [0]... but several of its analyzers are often offline/broken/pending maintenance. Here's a map of all the other ones: [1] Generally single/dual color dots mark "not-useful" monitoring sites which might measure only PM2.5 or Ozone, for example. The 4+ color dots are generally useful, they measure specific (large) families of chemicals so you can see very roughly what is leaking, even if it doesn't have "soot" in it.
The data used by ProPublica[3] is actually far worse than the woefully inadequate data collected by TCEQ/EPA air monitoring stations -- because what ProPublica used was "self-reported" data from the chemical plants. But I know from working in them and living next to them that many leaks are never reported and many leaks are never even known internally! Our government's data collection is a travesty. ProPublica couldn't use the real air quality measurements because having 2-3 points across 1000 mi^2 is completely useless for the wind models they wanted to apply to the problem. We don't actually have any data. The government is failing us.
ITC fire which blanketed houston's sky in smoke: [2]
: https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id...
1: https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id...
2: https://abc13.com/deer-park-fire-2019-itc-houston-air-qualit...
This seems a bit high, closer to $100k installation cost for fairly basic real time regulatory monitors seems about right. CEMS (automated stack testing) monitors should be somewhat cheaper if the engineers didn't screw up the housing location on the stack/vent.
Otherwise, your prose very much matches my experience with air quality monitoring in Australia. It's an absolute mess and very much amateur hour compared to water monitoring or meteorology.
Like in this case, if they only wanted to test for fluorinated compounds. Testing for "Acetone, Acetonitrile, Acetaldehyde, Benzene, 1,2-Dichloroethane, Ethanol, Ethylbenzene, Hexane, Isopropanol, Isopropyl toluene, Methylene Chloride, Toluene, and Xylene." might be somewhere in the middle of $100k to $1M, depending on desired level of differentiation between similar chemicals.
0: https://www17.tceq.texas.gov/tamis/index.cfm?fuseaction=repo...
https://syft.com/industries/environmental/mobile-monitoring/
third-party press release:
https://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=23241#
Not affiliated, but I did tour their mobile demo van when it was in the US.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28477392
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28811746
3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28830236
4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35778735
In one unit that I personally worked in and was responsible for, an intern was analyzing our procedures for emptying our tanks of waste products and realized that we had been "illegally" venting (without a permit) a lot of vapor from a waste tank every couple weeks when the liquid was full and needed to be emptied into trucks for proper disposal. We told the state regulatory authority that we realized we were out of compliance, and asked for permission to continue doing it this way until we had time to fix it. We got permission to continue doing what we were doing for another 2 years, with options for additional extensions. So the "illegal" emissions became "legal" overnight once we reported ourselves, and there were no consequences for the 10+ years of "illegal" emissions. This is very typical - in general if a company "self-reports", they do not face any punishments, but will face some small punishments if the regulatory agencies are the ones who find the problem. This encourages companies to be upfront about acknowledging, reporting, and (eventually) fixing their own problems.
One woman I know worked in a facility that produced a chemical known to cause issues with pregnancies, and suffered 4 miscarriages while trying for a baby before she simply refused to go out into the plant she ran at all during her fifth pregnancy, which she successfully brought to term. It's still not cut-and-dry that the chemicals caused her miscarriages, and there's no hard "evidence" that she was even exposed to those chemicals at all, or in concentrations above EPA limits.
Unless a pipe bursts suddenly and coats you with a chemical and sends you to a hospital, it's very difficult to prove that you were ever really "exposed" to the chemical. Even if you do get an obvious harmful exposure, it's difficult to assign any long-term consequences to that particular exposure.
When you're inside the gates of a chemical plant, the vapors may or may not be as toxic as on the neighboring property.
Whether or not the neighbor is residential or another chemical plant.
Depends on where you are.
And everything is supposed to be within OSHA limits, but many times there will be a concentrated location within the plant which is the source responsible for making the whole place barely pass the monitoring they do have. There can be upsets but also some routine or occasional releases which can add up.
If you really simplified, a new plant can be justified for the production of one particular chemical. When they build a plant all by itself way out in an otherwise undeveloped area, there may be a huge quantity of final product (sometimes 100% toxic) being handled that was not being done before, but the variety of chemicals in the vicinity will be very small compared to what you find among the neighbors when they build a plant within a chemical complex. Louisiana has some real bad chemical concentrations too.
For all the time you spend within the gate there, you really need to spend the rest of your time as far removed from those exact same toxins as you can reasonably do. I say any kind of toxin requires a detox period.
When I'm in downtown Houston it's like night & day, but it's still Houston. I think the pollution in central Houston is more from traffic. Spend a weekend twice as far away in the woods outside of Conroe or something, and when I get back it makes me want to change my indoor air purifiers.
Anyway, I came intentionally to work in the industrial environment and it was much rougher for miles around back in the late 1970's. Plus it was plain to see if you wanted to inhibit the proliferation of toxicity to unspoiled parts of the country, you would be better building within established complexes precisely because this is where total abatement is likely to be furthest out-of-reach forever. Besides, it's already been that way since before anybody living was even born.
Didn't Apple start out in California and witness the environmental disparity as it evolved?
From what I know you're not welcome to work with any kind of chemicals in California for decades now, much less research involving chemicals themselves. Not unless you're willing to settle for greatly reduced progress than you could make in so many other places.
It's got to be a dingbat move trying this in a California neighborhood.
Why not a neighborhood that arose (healthwise or not) because of its proximity to the plants?
In my case, yes, since I was a young teenager.
Even before then I tried to learn as much as I could and gain as widespread experience so they wouldn't be so random any more.
see: https://youtu.be/pGK4_sR1CvY?si=KEK9xh0mUEStV76-&t=2680
So no, it doesn't counter the hypochondria theory.
And I would very strongly doubt the word of a People Team member as the conclusive evidence of any lying.
People Team are there to reduce the liability for the company, the company in this case are the very company in question for alleged environmental issues.
What actually happens vs what a trained People Team member knows to document are seldom the same thing, and people on the receiving end of the consequences of this seldom have their full wits about them at the time and are almost never lawyered up at that time.
If you had other receipts I'm sure people might consider them, but if your main gripe is based on what a People Team / HR person says... yeah, that's not conclusive either.
The one party I would trust most here are the EPA, and the author didn't fabricate (pun intended) the reports made by them.
On the other hand, it's entirely reasonable to assume that a large corporation would maximize its profits: it has a duty to. If the expected profits exceed the expected costs of breaking the law, guess what's going to happen. Probably the fairest outcome here is better enforcement mechanisms. Unfortunately, this outcome leaves both parties worse off in exchange for an improvement to society.
We’re not talking about some agile startup that rents the nearest place where they can assemble their hardware. This is one of the three most valuable companies in the world, essentially purchasing residential real estate to use as a venue for unsupervised high-tech manufacturing that flouts all environmental regulations they’d otherwise be subject to. And the reason is so that their highly paid employees can have a shorter commute to their R&D lab.
Personally, I’d prefer living next to a low vol semi lab to a whole myriad of other enterprises: petrochem, industrial scale chemistry, coal powerplants, GA airports using 100LL avgas, the list goes on. But hey, that’s just like my opinion man.
What the absolute @#$% is this??? Would I be wrong in assuming this should've made national news but was probably kept low thanks to Apple's deep pockets/connections?
On a side note, Fluorine is bad stuff but I believe it doesn't have a long lifespan so any impact would be immediate or not at all
Factory workers working in dangerous conditions and losing their lives is unfortunate, but their effects hurting/killing the general population (a-la Bhopal Gas Tragedy) should not be legally possible.
One of the test samples he opened (unexpectedly) had a flourine compound in it that strips calcium from bones… he jumped in the lab shower which sets of an alarm when activated, which leads to lab evacuations and an emergency team in hazmat gear arriving
I've done some work with the public data from the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). OSHA does a great job of making detailed data on inspections and accidents public. If memory serves me correctly, it turns out there are about two deaths per day from work-related causes in the US...
And while it's not wrong that fluorine is a lethal gas, it is heavily used in many industries and in medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorine#Inorganic_fluorides
Her documentation shows a careless attitude on Apple's side. And there are enough independent parties documenting accidents that she can sue and win. But overall, this doesn't look worse to me than how many other industrial companies operate.
The issue being, of course, the proximity of residential to a "light industrial" vs. "heavy industrial" plot sure changes things for the people moving into those residences...
I think the bigger untouched issue is this is already contaminated land. Unclear if it’s apple or the residential built on top of contamination.
These cleanups seem to almost never work well.
This looks strange indeed, I thought light industry is like bicycle repair and large bakeries, definitely wouldn’t expect a chemical plant
They make device screens: https://www.siliconvalley.com/2018/03/19/apple-secretly-deve...
She never faced to industrial chemical exposure, let alone 24/7. She didn't work in that building. She worked as a program manager for a software engineering team in an office building in Sunnyvale.
It's a bit weird that most of discussion seems focused on the person sharing the report rather than it's contents.
Edit: OK, dang's comment sort of clears things up but the "thread consolidation" really results in some confusion.
Helpful context on the validity of this heavily editorialized site. Seems like Apple definitely is not in the right here but very unclear if it has anything to do with this persons claims. If you follow her history of forming complaints it is hard to take her serious as most of her complaints get dropped and these are complaints filed against different agencies.
It seems she originally got fired by Apple, where she was a product manager, for leaking NDAed info. It also seems she's been on an anti-apple tear since.
Personally, I worked as an engineer in Apple for several years, and it was by far the most ethically run and conscientiously run place I've ever seen, so her sequence of Apple complaints originates in a non core division, so is not like the engineering core world I was in, but sets off my "wait, what?" sense honed from experience.
That chemical court case seems very strong to me, with multiple indipendent parties having measured the gas in the air. (Edit: and multiple government agencies reporting chemical accidents at Apple) So it doesn't seem like she's trigger happy to sue, which would imply that there might also be merit in her other case.
Good thing Apple never had "don't be evil" as their slogan ;)
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/04/05/appletoo-founders...
https://nypost.com/2022/04/03/apple-whistleblower-movement-t...
https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/ScarlettvGjovi...
Gjovik is self-publishing this for a reason, multiple journalists tried to corroborate her constantly changing story, and when the media interest disappeared she had a w̶e̶l̶l̶-̶p̶u̶b̶l̶i̶c̶i̶s̶e̶d̶ somewhat-infamous-in-Apple-circles meltdown and in an increasingly implausible conspiracy allegation attacked multiple former allies for being out to get her, many of which have remained silent.
The rest of it was things being managed under state/local rules that should have been managed under federal rules which Apple still has time to fix and make them not violations.
Apple started to clean up only after getting tipped off of an EPA raid. They also didn't test or analyse chemicals. And conveniently stopped having weekly inspections. Truly a case of ignorance is bliss. Huh, toxic what now? No no it's NOT toxic, we marked it as non hazardous so it's OK.
Or "we fired the guys who complained until we stopped receiving complaints."
The one thing I found most disgusting, though, was the open tank in the basement. They said the tank would explode if they left it closed, so VOCs must have been venting out. But they left it open in... the basement... without any REAL ventilation. This belongs on r/OSHA.
And their oft lionised 60B$ cash reserves.
The problem is really most of her examples seem like she is forcing the connection. Like her 3am dying spells and one of the times it happened her VOC measurements went up. It could very well be there is an issue with the plant exhaust but it could also be the land the apartment was built on or any number of issues with the new construction.
Robust chemical safety systems (both equipment, procedures, and employees) are expensive to implement and maintain, and they don’t scale downward easily. Companies doing small-scale production or R&D tend to have the worst practices.
That said, the findings in this EPA report don’t seem terrible, just indicative of a sloppy small-scale operation. Finding labeling issues is the lowest of low hanging fruit for any sort of chemical inspector, and Apple not being able to manage even that is just sad.
> "EPA observed that the sign posted on Solvent Tool 8-113 (B(4)) in Apple’s B(4) Area needs to be updated to remove the chemical “B(4)” from the posted sign, which according to Apple is no longer being used in the facility’s semiconductor process."
Wonder how Apple got approved to even construct this facility so close to residential (or, if Apple was there prior to residential usage, why residential construction was allowed so close to them), in California of all places that's even known here in Germany to have really strict zoning requirements.
[1] https://recht.nrw.de/lmi/owa/br_bes_text?anw_nr=1&gld_nr=2&u...
Which is not to say that the rules are unreasonable, mind you.
And, like it or not, if an argument relies on confusion (especially if intended to bring the other party's credibility into question with the general public) then that argument can easily appear specious.
Note, I am not a lawyer or anyone who could professionally give an opinion on this.*
The most egregious violation the author purports Apple did is the illegal venting of hazardous chemicals.
IMHO, the most plausible evidence supporting the author's claim can be found in the (redacted) EPA report in observation #11.[1]
My understanding is that waste streams (hazardous materials being vented into the environment) must be accounted for in order to accurately calculate how often you must change carbon filters (called breakthrough time in the report) and that carbon filters lose efficacy as hazardous gasses are passed through it.
Anyways, the report found that Apple did not account for all the waste they were putting through the filters and thus could not accurately assess the "breakthrough time" of the filters. There is a plausible case that could be made that a filter had reached its "breakthrough time" -- potentially leaking hazardous gases into the environment. This reportedly has been occurring since atleast* Dec 2020, which could be around the time the author moved in which was also 2020 (unspecified range).
1. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/312oqvretg7yyhfx0ohx4/AGZduVX...
It likely was happening way before this and the EPA could likely pinpoint the exact date based on simple log entries, but they won't stick their neck out farther than corroboration goes.
Thats not imagination. However, they're simply following up the "corroboration" part. Because someone identified a problem, _now_ they have to be a detective.
I'd posit, _it is their job_ to find incriminating evidence and thus enforcement. In many places, they are not doing this. They are purely reactive.
Thats my point; has nothing to do with imagination.
This author wastes no time mixing her imagined claims with the EPA report, such as insinuating that Apple was doing worse things but hid them before the inspectors could get there.
Sign me up!
A GP scenario doesn't mean there's no blame either, but it's markedly different than the Dark Waters scenario described in the Mastodon thread, the latter which does read like it's using all the incendiary social media tropes.
Which one it is in reality I don't know and certainly won't claim I do.
No basis in fact, just pure ragebait conjecture.
Her agenda is about getting clicks and followers first. She’s not making companies operate safer, she’s just editorializing a public report from the agency that actually works on making companies operate safely. All of her editorializing and fake claims is undermining the actual situation by making the facts unclear and making people trust reporting on the subject less.
Yeah, that one claim is definitely hard to take seriously. Companies usually try to look their worst when they know an inspection is due.
1. Apple doesn't do chip fab at Scott Blvd. They did R&D for Titan and microLED screens and were part of the layoffs in April.
2. The EPA says that they didn't have permits WITH THE EPA, but were permitted with California and Santa Clara County/City.
3. She says the carbon filters weren't changed, not the EPA.
4. She says Apple said materials weren't hazardous waste, but the report says they were labeled "California Waste", meaning they weren't properly reporting the materials to the EPA, but were to the state of California.
5. How is it this woman was nearly killed, while the employees who WORK in the building are perfectly healthy, the next door businesses have no sick employees, and the other thousands of residents in the apartment building are also not sick?
6. Why isn't the news covering this? Why aren't they shut down?
None of this makes any sense and looking at her lawsuit, she seems like she needs to serious mental help.
> How is it this woman was nearly killed, while the employees who WORK in the building are perfectly healthy
This is quite ignorant of how this actually works. How is it possible that Union carbide plant in Bhopal killed 16,000 people in one day but most employees were perfectly healthy?
> the next door businesses have no sick employees other thousands of residents in the apartment building are also not sick?
You are obviously wrong, have you ever tried going around your neighbourhood and asking people: "hey, there has been consistent release of dangerous chemicals, is anyone sick?". That's a population of thousands of people, dozens of people will have bronchitis, asthma, inflammation, cancer, god knows what. How do you know if it is related to the chemical pollution?
Perhaps dozens of people have felt symptoms and went to the doctor, and maybe they were diagnosed with Asthma or allergies or some other erroneous disease. Maybe they moved to the countryside by now, believing themselves to be ill.
Unless someone knocks on the door, polls the residents, takes blood samples and tests them at an independent lab, conducts statistical analysis of all the medical records, etc. you have no moral right to assert this.
However, what we can assess is the ex-employee's actions and multitude of claims, which while in isolation seems benign, together makes her look more like a vengeful ex-employee than a credible victim
Perfectly healthy? I doubt that. There were several casualties at least ans probably many more with long term problems.
> She says the carbon filters weren't changed, not the EPA.
I'm going by what the EPA says and not what she says.
> How is it this woman was nearly killed, while the employees who WORK in the building are perfectly healthy, the next door businesses have no sick employees, and the other thousands of residents in the apartment building are also not sick?
I don't know. It's a matter worth investigating. Also, it's perfectly consistent for people inside the building to be fine whilst working inside considering the toxic fumes are vented outside the building and aren't just circulating inside it.
> Why isn't the news covering this? Why aren't they shut down?
This is out of my wheelhouse. I'm guessing government agencies are bit more reticent with regards to shutting down businesses unless there is a readily apparent danger to public health (i.e. something that could hold up to scrutiny in court).
I don't think that any of this is as serious as even you are making it out to be, though I understand I misunderstood the carbon boxes thing.
At the risk of sounding snarky, but it seems like you have a recurring pattern of just not reading what I've typed. First you've misunderstood the carbon filter and now. It's like I say X and you've heard Y and Z.
Do you also believe that Apple has broken into her homes across three states, follows her in unmarked vehicles, threatened to mail her a severed head, intercepted her home internet, and bugged her apartment, too?
Or is bringing up her own dubious allegations against this company off-limits when she's analyzing an EPA report without any qualifications?
Fact of the matter is, EPA reported that Apple was under accounting their waste streams leaving open the possibility that filters were not changed as often as they should have been.
I didn't see anywhere that they weren't changing the filters enough, only Ashley said she figured that out from public records requests. I don't trust her to understand anything she reads.
She has confused everyone at work into thinking we're breathing/drinking toxins more than once.
I don't think you've read observation #11 or my comment.
From observation #11:
> Apple does not appear to have included all the solvent waste streams when calculating the breakthrough times for the "Activated Carbon" boxes to ensure no VOCs are released into the atmosphere onsite.
Breakthrough times are a function of how much VOCs you are putting through them. If you under account for the amount of VOCs you will overestimate the "true" breakthrough time.
That said, Santa Clara is basically a giant industrial superfund site already from the semiconductor industry, so I’m sure there are plenty of people being poisoned by the pollution in the area.
That doesn't make a good headline though.
You would go to the doctor and get some random incorrect advise. If you go online and check air quality you would not find anything obviously alarming. Maybe you decide you have asthma and move out of the city.
I personally had a condition with an obvious cause that took me 4 years to pinpoint and doctors were bloody useless.
If, hypothetically, I was being poisoned by some random industrial activity a mile away, I would never know
"Emergency Permit for Treatment of Hazardous Waste, Apple, Inc., Sunnyvale, California" https://ceqanet.opr.ca.gov/2022120706
… but it's for half a liter of some weird shit that seems to primarily be a fire hazard(?)
I personally wonder if this is why I have been occasionally smelling weird chemical odors from time to time. I live about 7 miles away, so probably not, but maybe.
The blog paints this as some secret lair of nefarious experiments. It actually refers to the facility as a "Secret Silicon Fab" which is quite the logical leap. I would suspect they're etching PCBs, perhaps? One thing is for sure, it's not a silicon fab.
I'm sorry, but if you're going to come with grandiose claims, your foundation should be solid and not hypothetical.
Why do you say that? Yes, the EPA report seems to be redacted to obscure what they're actually doing there. But there are multiple reports, some from Apple employees, that refer to it as a being some sort of small scale, "skunkworks" silicon fab.
Mainly because Apple's custom silicon could not even be prototyped in a small scale facility. It'd likely be in Taiwan.
> But there are multiple reports, some from Apple employees, that refer to it as a being some sort of small scale, "skunkworks" silicon fab.
I apologize if I missed them. Please highlight. Curious of the credentials of the folks reporting such a thing, as well.
For sampling new nodes and producing the bulk of their chips, sure. But anything that's not tied to ASML doesn't inherently need to take place in Taiwan. TSMC is in a hugely advantaged position with IP and scalability, but I think it's feasible that Apple could test new lithography techniques or large-scale dies in any sort of environment they choose. Nobody is necessarily implying that they're prototyping low-yield iPhone hardware there.
This is clearly not a factory.
And Bloomberg reported in 2018 that's where they've been prototyping their microLED display screens.
https://www.siliconvalley.com/2018/03/19/apple-secretly-deve... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-19/apple-is-...
They try treating the smell as a nuisance complaint rather than a health hazard (tbh probably on purpose). Then they'll send someone to your property to see if they smell it.
They need smell it for 15 continuous minutes and consider it intolerable for anything to be done about it. But the wind constantly shifts a little back and forth so it's impossible to get 15 continuous minutes and what they consider intolerable is so subjective. Even when it's strong the person tries telling me its barely noticeable and has the audacity to tell me it smells like popcorn (wtf?!?).
The town doesn't care at all because it doesn't want to give residents preference over business.
Now people are just starting to move away because they can't tolerate it anymore. It feels helpless when you're likely breathing in toxic VOCs and the people that are supposed to be the ones that help and protect you seem to be working for the companies.
And even if we did that we'd have to prove that the poor air quality was coming from the plant, which you can't do unless you setup monitoring in their property, which they'd never allow.
The company has a history of violations, but were somehow allowed to expand during COVID. That's when we started smelling it even though they were around for decades. They had air scrubbers before, but I haven't seen any new ones on their roof since the expansion, so all that new stuff from the new building must be just venting out.
I feel horrible for the people that have to work inside. They're all foreigners that don't speak English. It doesn't seem like any of them are given breathing protection either. They're all getting taken advantage of.
If you know which specific gases may be present in the plant exhaust, there may be an existing low-cost (~$50) sensor [1] which can be assembled in a custom DIY air quality monitoring circuit like AirGradient (who post on HN). There are consumer particle counters (0.5 micron) for about $300, which have a serial port for continuous data logging.
> setup monitoring in their property, which they'd never allow
Once there's a low-cost (sub $500) continuous air quality data recording device, then 4 of those devices in different directions from the plant, along with local wind data, could show a pattern over an extended period of time. In theory, wind-borne flying objects like kites and drones could also collect data on air quality indexed by GPS location.
[1] MQ series of gas sensors: https://www.open-electronics.org/presenting-mq-sensors-low-c...
They’re not exactly poor and land a little bit out is usually cheaper
> at least 19 potential violations
Is about 00.00% noteworthy to me until it is defined as to what those are, and I guarantee that none of them will be “poisoned employees living quarters”.
Same with the repeating “illegal” over and over. Not having the right sticker on something might be illegal (EDIT: good guess? More like I know this game, the EPA isn’t what you think they are), transporting at night without filling the right form might be illegal, not following a process because you chose an objectively better system that isn’t on the books might be illegal.
I have some idea how Apple handles their materials, the same way every other major company does, which good or bad, is almost definitely more legal than the majority of small companies. But this is a scale discussion.
I can hear the ax grinding in every post. What is clear is that she is in it for a payday.
EDIT: read some of the report. Apple marked a bucket as waste, the EPA could not determine if it was state, federal, or even waste at all. HOW LONG WILL THESE BASTARDS KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS!!?
THIS BEHAVIOR GOT A WOMAN ALMOST KILLED
If there is an issue, it’s that these apartments were built (in ~2018). There are a number of other industrial sites nearby and the building was built in industrial zoning, after agreeing to numerous requirements to clean up the land to make it safe.
https://www.envirostor.dtsc.ca.gov/getfile?filename=/public%...
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.41...
Ashley Gjovik's lawsuit against Apple claims that Apple broke into her home in three different states, intercepted her home internet, follow her in unmarked vehicles, threatened to mail her a severed head, and bugged her apartment.
This reads like a meth-induced psychosis
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
Look at the chemical exposure Samsung treats their workers to. It happened in south Korea, but that's an other country, so it didn't matter. But it also happened in Canada, now it's news.
For example, she says that EPA typically arrives unannounced but because the Apple EH&S team were present this is indicative of some conspiracy to allow Apple time to cover-up issues.
But this is just her opinion with a more logical explanation being that Apple Security simply contacted the EH&S team when the EPA arrived at the front door.
Only Dan or a moderator would be able to see details about the accounts that flagged it.
The "vouch" link works like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch
I'll keep an open mind, but it seems strange that this lady was an Apple employee and happened to also be the victim.
Have other people been identified that suffered similarly to her? Where are their lawsuits? Or is there something special about her health condition, or her specific apartment unit, or something which means only she was susceptible to this?
And pay your fines to the government and move your fabs to remote areas so this doesn’t happen again.
There, problem solved. I’ve saved everyone millions of dollars in litigation fees, time, and now our judiciary system can tackle other problems.
https://mastodon.social/@ashleygjovik
Of course a big corp cannot give in easily to behaviour like that as it would just open the flood gates.
They prefer doing keeping their skunkworks small, and the easiest way to do that is to just install a charcoal filter and call it a day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_negotiation_with_te...
Imagine if you happen to be a neighbor and a disaster happens in the fab. That's just nuts.
What is it they saved here? Could they not fab this in a less populated area and just follow a few more regulations. We’re not talking about a company with razor thin margins. They spent outrageous amounts of money building the spaceship HQ.
I genuinely want to understand if this is stupidity or if there’s really a profit incentive that makes “fiduciary” sense.
TLDR; EPA discovered that Apple was: - illegally treating hazardous waste
- illegally transporting hazardous waste to disposal facilities
- illegally dumping hazardous waste into the ambient air outside the facility (into the apartment windows)
- leaving stockpiles of extremely dangerous chemicals unattended on weekends
The way the plant operates normally and when they're there is night and day. We will shut down lines and clean for whole shifts leading up to it and when they're there we'll double the staff to have a whole shifts worth of people just constantly cleaning while the others work.
We'll also slow down the lines to make sure things run smoothly and do more quality checks.
For example, violation #6 appears to be about a tank holding diluted solvents such as isopropyl alcohol, acetone, and NMP. And the violation is that they labeled it as "CA-133" waste while it should be also labeled as "D001" waste because it's flammable. That's shitty, but I don't see how that could've poisoned someone from afar. You don't want to huff these solvents, but they are common and have modest toxicity.
Or, take violation #2: a bucket labeled "adhesive liquids and tape", which should've been closed but wasn't. Violation #3 is that a bucket labeled "silicone" has been on the site for more than 90 days. And on, and on.
Don't get me wrong, if you're operating in a location like that, you should do everything by the book, so I hope Apple gets in enough trouble to notice - but I see a pretty sharp disconnect between the Mastodon thread and the report.
The EPA report appears to imply the opposite. Apple's potential violation was not for their air exhaust system, but rather for using an activated carbon filter because they had not declared it in their permit application.
Like it isn't a lack of resources for Apple, it isn't a lack of education or safety awareness.
It's wilfull disregarding of the health of innocent strangers.
People need to go to jail for this.
Because of that, this case really looks like a mistake, not willful disregard, when I consider all we were trained in earnest back then. It seems the EPA found no violation, and Apple learned someone had failed to change filters as frequently as needed.
Is this the same person that wrote about how their apartment complex was constructed on an un-mitigated FEMA site? I think she should move to a more rural location, many cities have this kind of contamination.