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.
The author of this has been on a crusade against Apple for years, stemming from an incident that was probably hypochondria. They've outright lied about multiple incidents (see https://twitter.com/shantinix/status/1433297575914971136), and I would very strongly doubt any new claims made. For example, a spot check of one of the claims has them currently saying "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."
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."
This is in line of when I worked in a semiconductor lab in suburban UK in the 90s. We had a couple of local residents report problems immediately even though we hadn't even started fabrication at that point. They eventually sent out a press release saying that we had moved manufacturing to Scotland. The complaints stopped instantly. The lab was running until at least 2017 with no complaints and regular inspections from local authorities.
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!
> YMMV but some people are crazy. The EPA is however not. But what the EPA say and what the woman claims are disparate.
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.
Well it would require more data which is the problem, and something I outlined elsewhere. Is she the only person complaining? The case is put forward as if that is the case. If that is the case then there is little evidence to discard the null hypothesis that there's nothing wrong and either alternate hypothesis that it's the Apple facility or the previously contaminated site seem very unlikely.
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."
I'm honestly surprised the area is zoned for residential; the central expressway corridor has lots of industry nearby, including Intel. Plus that apt complex is right next the intersection of a major highway and major expressway, which won't be helping anyone breathe.
But she's not the only resident and I haven't heard any indication of a class action.
EPA isn't the only governing body. It says right in their report the facility is being properly managed by the city of Santa Clara and the state of California.
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.
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.
That's because in 2020 she said it was vapor intrusion from the Superfund the apartments were built on.
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.
Similar hysteria surrounds the 5G rollout as well. I remember anecdotes of people reporting health issues, when the already erected tower wasn't even on, but unfortunately I can't find the source for this again.
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.
5G was a fun one. When they built the 5G tower near me they didn't put any equipment in it. People complained about it at local planning meeting saying that it was giving them migraines, then someone burned it down. I moved and I have 5G but they still don't.
This is exactly the type of story I remember reading about too.
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.
We should provide science teachers in public schools a little SDR receiver so they can show kids all of the RF in the air around them, pretty much everywhere all of the time. If RF radiation caused health problems, it would easily be the most widespread and persistent condition known to medicine simply because of how steady and ubiquitous RF radiation has been for the last 80 years.
> and I would very strongly doubt any new claims made
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.
I've seen non-redacted versions of what she's shared on Twitter versus her redacted versions which tell a completely different story, and she puts her own spin on it that is detached from reality. I've seen her lie directly on at least one occasion (and play the victim card about it), and when combined with everything else makes me trust her 0%.
I'm still looking into this and forming my opinion. It's very curious how at the end of her YouTube video she mentions other residents in her building came forward and said they too were sick (numerous ER visits over 2 years), and they DIDN'T KNOW WHY, until they saw her expose in the newspaper. That seems to counter your hypochondria theory, no?
There are many situations where people assign causality when there is no true evidence or mechanism. One of the best examples are cancer clusters. There have been examples of well-understood (almost certainly causal) cancers caused by industrial occupation, but cancer is common enough that some things that look causal are purely coincidental. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls was almost certainly causal, while "high voltage electrical lines cause cancer" probably is not (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/01/health/long-after-an-80s-...)
So no, it doesn't counter the hypochondria theory.
People get strange symptoms all the time. I currently have a chronic scalp condition that doctors haven’t really identified and a really stiff neck. Of course I’m going to go ‘aha!’ If someone gives me a plausible explanation
As someone who lives in that building and works at Apple, I don't believe her. We were all pretty mad that she caused us to panic about being poisoned and gettin cancer.
It's really hard to "catch" these things in the moment. I work in chemical plants and there are tons of huge releases of extremely toxic gases all the time, which I can often smell from my apartment. I know what they are by smell because I manufacture them myself. Proper continuous monitoring for a broad range of chemicals would cost about $1 million per monitoring station and we'd need to build them along the perimeters of each plant so that leaks can be assigned to the offending companies, and they need to be built near housing so that we know how families are being affected. That sounds expensive, but really isn't that much added cost for a $100 million to $10 billion manufacturing site.
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]
>per continuous monitoring for a broad range of chemicals would cost about $1 million per monitoring station
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.
$100k is about right in the USA as well for a single family of chemicals.
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.
Yes, and that is for regulatory monitors. You might need one such monitor at a critical sensitive location and then get by with various e-sampler monitors elsewhere which kinda suck but are good enough to help build a picture of emissions.
News articles about the user behind this twitter account have gone through a few rounds on HN in the past: [1][2][3][4][5] and she has a personal blog documenting her various legal battles with Apple: [6]
I don't know anything about this... I'm curious how small could the monitoring station be. Could it be something that could be mobile, like in a trailer or cargo container format, and dropped off at a site temporarily and moved.
Yes, there are vehicle and even aircraft-mounted options but typically a comprehensive station would be the size of a decently large shed / medium hauling trailer. Here you can browse a set of photographs[0] of one of the rare "comprehensive" air pollution monitoring stations in Texas.
Moving from the plant areas to downtown houston has brought a massive improvement in my health. I suspect that 4 years of living next to the plant has caused long-term damage ... but it's extremely difficult to prove anything, especially when there is no data at all that supports an assertion that my apartment was exposed to any leaks at all - not a single one of those near-daily emissions events was caught by the air quality monitoring stations, only a few were voluntarily reported to the EPA, and all of the emissions are permitted by the EPA / TCEQ either on an ongoing basis or one-off "forgiveness" basis after voluntary pro-active reporting.
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.
I'm with reaperman and have some first-hand experience too.
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?
this isn’t a residential neighborhood, this is industrial zoning with ONE apartment building that got an exception. Probably due to the generally horrible housing situation over there. Nonetheless, it’s actually not that uncommon to find semiconductor labs in suburban areas, mostly low vol or R&D of course, but it’s far from unheard of.
If there were ever a use for the EPA, surely “stopping megacorps from releasing toxic chemicals into residential neighborhoods and retaliating against whistleblowers” would be it.
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.
have you actually read the EPA report? This has never been proven, the issues they found are more on the level of procedural scrutiny and unmarked waste buckets. That’s FAR from "releasing toxic chemicals into a residential neighborhood", which it isn’t, it’s industrial zoned land. The one apartment building is also literally built on a EPA superfund site, entirely unrelated to Apple. So even if the issues reported aren’t hypochondria or part of the myriad of other vendettas this woman had with Apple, it’s still just as likely that it may have something to do with the superfund site.
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.
Did you read the report and specifically the areas of concern the EPA had? They seem minor at best. More than half of them are mislabeled containers that are too broad.
I understand dang but I worked at Apple. There is way more to this than these snarky replies are making you think. They aren't just herp derp we think Apple is despotic.
You know the audience of this website. Why does Apple get this response from your highly educated tech audience?
Perhaps we have personal experience we cannot speak more openly about due to NDAs but would still like to let out a quip.
If your comment is motivated by substantive personal experience, that's great, but then the thing to do is to share some of the information that your view is based on. You know it, but the rest of us don't. A snarky swipe with no information is just as bad a comment whether it's posted by someone with relevant experience or not.
If you don't share relevant information, it may as well not exist. If you do share it, you should follow the site guidelines and edit out snark and swipes, so your substantive comment has a better chance of persuading the reader, and a lesser chance of provoking (f)lame responses from others.
> Why does Apple get this response from your highly educated tech audience?
> Perhaps we have personal experience we cannot speak more openly about due to NDAs but would still like to let out a quip.
It looks like you can speak openly enough about it to say more than just "Hello Apple Global Security", which is the run-of-the-mill internet stuff we're trying to avoid on this site. If that's what you mean by letting out a quip, please don't.
> It looks like you can speak openly enough about it to say more than just "Hello Apple Global Security", which is the run-of-the-mill internet stuff we're trying to avoid on this site. If that's what you mean by letting out a quip, please don't.
> If your comment is motivated by substantive personal experience, that's great, but then the thing to do is to share some of the information that your view is based on. You know it, but the rest of us don't.
I didn't know Ashley by name but after having watched her video last night from the Mastadon link on this thread, I now remember I had seen her earlier posts. Either way she comes off extremely legitimate, I spent at least an hour reviewing the things she posted yesterday. It is impressive if anything the data she has collected.
Calling her a hypochondriac like one of the GP replies did, trying to convince the reader to brush this whole thing away as someone who is squeeze money out of Apple. Some of the response on this thread is immediately recognizable by people who have gone through it themselves as Apple Global Security damage control.
She was on here a few years ago socking to promote herself, she makes commentaries about things, but then when you look at the evidence, it doesn't add up. She wrote in Slack before she even went mega viral that if we never heard from her again it was because Apple gave her enough money to go live in Hawaii and start a private law practice.
I don't like Apple secrecy and after what they did during the wage survey, I don't trust anyone on the People team or in Security. But that doesn't make Ashley right or credible. She was a bully to other women in nearly every situation like everyone else in leadership. She baited us into confiding in her about our issues with management and the People team and then she ratted us out to the People team and we were all harassed into deciding whether or not we wanted a coerced investigation into our issues. What's worse is that Ashley convinced us that the People/Security teams were spying on us, when really it was her using us as some kind of leverage trying to squeeze them for money. She uses us still in her evidence in all her litigation against Apple. She never asked us for consent, she doesn't care. Just like when she worked with us, we were just things to be collected and used for her to get ahead.
If you're seriously accusing me of being Apple Global Security, it should be fairly obvious from my comment history that that's not the case (and explicitly: I have only ever been employed as an engineer, and only by companies that are antagonistic to Apple).
Calling out the fact that she appears to have constantly changed her story makes her look untrustworthy. It could be a smear tactic by corporate enforcers, or it could be that she's genuinely untrustworthy!
That's one of the things the site guidelines specifically ask you not to do, so if you'd please not do any more of that, we'd appreciate it.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note that this also includes "Don't be snarky.".
You haven't shown the lie you claim exists. Those could be references to completely different tests. (Or not, but from the limited information we can't say either way)
The surrounding context makes it clear that isn't the case.
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. "
This doesn't prove that she's lying. It proves that at a particular moment in time (day:hour:minute:second) she tested the air and had to spend $1500 to do it and it came up inconclusive.
That doesn't align with how industrial air pollution works.
I am interpreting that as her testing the air at a particular moment in time, and in 2021, the results from that specific test were inconclusive, but in 2024, they were very much not inconclusive. Either the article in 2021 was misleading, or the current one is.
I'm naturally inclined to be suspicious of people claiming pollution is the cause of a disease. It's certainly possible, and it certainly happens, but every individual case is a sample size of one, and the best we can say is it's likely an environmental factor played a part. On top of this, it seems the claimant has either through frustration or with malicious intent exaggerated or fabricated some of the claims. So, I'll agree with you to be highly skeptical.
On the other hand, it's entirely reasonable to assume that a large corporation would maximize its profits: it has a duty to. If the expected profits exceed the expected costs of breaking the law, guess what's going to happen. Probably the fairest outcome here is better enforcement mechanisms. Unfortunately, this outcome leaves both parties worse off in exchange for an improvement to society.
> (...) Apple engineer “accidently” turning on lethal fluorine gas. Similarly, another incident, the TEOS leak, was root caused to an Apple engineer accidently installing the gas for a tool “backwards.” Further, less than two weeks following the April 30 2021 phosphine leak, Apple’s manifests included sixty pounds of “vacuum filters contaminated with glass dust,” implying there may have also been a phosphine explosion.
What the absolute @#$% 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?
I think not because all the concentrations were pretty low. The problem that Ashley faced was that she was exposed 24/7. But to me it looks like almost all of the gas concentrations would have been considered an A-OK working environment for up to 8 hours of exposure.
And while it's not wrong that fluorine is a lethal gas, it is heavily used in many industries and in medicine.
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.
Isn't a bigger factor here, in addition to their careless attitude, the fact that they've started manufacturing semiconductors on land specifically only zoned for light industrial use, when, at least per her article, fabricating semiconductors is work that is required to be zoned heavy industrial?
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...
> The problem that Ashley faced was that she was exposed 24/7.
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.
Inside industrial settings I would presume stuff like this happens all the time. In fact, people even die sometimes. Even when a refinery blew up in Texas a few years back it barely made the news.
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
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'm not surprised that such stuff happens often, I myself know people who've worked in such factories and lost colleagues. What I find odd/unusual is more about how this occurred (occurs?) in an urban area where regulations should've done something.
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.
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...
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.
She also filed a 650 page complaint which so irritated the legal system that new case law was formed to bound the permissible lengths.
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.
I find it surprising that apparently she's suing Apple not only for dumping toxic chemicals into the air directly next to her apartment, but also for an unrelated case of Apple's security videotaping the women's toilet rooms.
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 ;)
19 potential violations, most of which were mislabeled and unlabeled things or poor storage habits and addressed (meaning they aren't violations).
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.
I do not think that is reasonable to believe that because a report has some mundane findings that it indicates that the whole report should be dismissed.
I do not think that can be so confidently asserted entirely one way or another with the information we have now, unless we have in our midst someone who is an expert in reading EPA reports.
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.
Reminds me of Minamata, Japanese company was dumping mercury into the nearby lakes and hushing everything up. Movie is great BTW, thank fk I don't live near a chemical plant.
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.
This is what's so strange to me. They weren't testing for the presence of hazmats and seemed to not care. This lab clearly isn't a prod lab, likely just research, and maybe that's why they were so comfortable leaving everything where it was.
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.
This is pretty awful. And if Apple, with all their supposed green credentials, are the ones dumping toxic industrial chemicals into the environment in the middle of Santa Clara, you can only imagine what the rest of the industry is like.
This person seems unhinged and not of sound mind. I had to skim through this…article because it jumped around too much.
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.
As a chemist who has actually done micro fabrication work, this reads to me like a classic case of a non-chemistry company trying to do chemistry R&D and finding out it’s a lot more complicated to follow all the rules than they thought it would be.
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.
Page 22 indicates there is some sort of semiconductor process at the facility:
> "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."
I live near Santa Clara area so I scanned the EPA report. It mentioned improperly covered activated charcoal and possible improper storage of chemicals, but no mention of releasing solvent vapor in open air. Apple absolutely should be held at higher standard especially operating near residential and school areas, but in this case it looks like a disgruntled ex employee trying to settle a score. I don't think this belongs on HN.
Issues surrounding the author's personality aside (that have been raised enough in other threads, and quite a few of them in a tone I'd say borders on unethical): in Germany, we have strict zoning rules for heavy industry - some particularly bad polluters have up to 1500m of required distance to residential use [1], even if the area they're planning on operating in is already zoned industrial.
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.
Silicon Valley is so littered with superfund sites that it would probably be near impossible to find places safe for human habitation under such rules.
Which is not to say that the rules are unreasonable, mind you.
Your comment gets the cake. The guy just expressed surprise at how zoning works in California and he is absolutely right. Your comment sounds like you didn’t read through.
Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but there are nearly always clues to that in the comments. Now that the threads have all been merged, I think it's fairly clear what the arguments are.
Me too. Plus, since this is the 'first' article about it on HN, all the others are being closed as duplicates. I feel like this deserves more attention.
HN is almost my ideal link aggregator, my only nitpick is that flagging is too easy, there's no transparency or accountability. It's not the 90's anymore, we can't solely rely on honor these days.
Not that it should matter, but it seems impossible to conclude anything from the publicly available information and neither party seems interested in building a coherent narrative that strengthens their position.
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.
There is a disappointing amount of character slander rather than refutation of the author's claims happening on this thread. The foremost trustworthy party is the EPA.
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).
The problem is that the EPA report doesn't say what she says it does.
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.
With regards to 1 and 2: This is inconsequential to what the EPA reported. It doesn't matter whether they do R&D for plushies or whatever, fact is Apple was under accounting their waste stream.
> 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).
Just for some background, the "nearly killed" thing is new. She said at first she was getting light-headed a lot and over the last 4 years it has become "almost killed."
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.
Is every word coming out of my mouth just incomprehensible? I feel like I've been really specific. How can you possibly interpret anything I've said as me believing every word out of her mouth? ** I am strictly going off what the EPA says ***
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.
Why are you so keen to whitewash potential mishandling of dangerous chemicals and poisoning of the public?
You do not appear to have any more understanding of the situation that a layman. Your points to do not sound convincing and do not engage with the issue at all.
> 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.
As you have said, neither you nor the other guy is qualified to make a technical assesment on this and we just have to wait for yhe investigations to play out.
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
Thanks for taking the time to read the actual reports. The Mastodon thread is editorialized and manipulated to an extreme and it’s clear that the author is pushing an agenda. I wish we had some better news coverage and analysis, rather than a social media post to link to.
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.
I used to follow her on Twitter but as the cases dragged on and she started losing various arguments the editorialization and manipulation of facts to be almost-but-not-quite-untrue to serve her agenda became way too much.
The agenda of injecting completely unsubstantiated claims into the story and trying to pass them off as fact, such as the claim that Apple hid many more violations before the inspectors could get to them.
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.
There's a notable difference between fucking up the filter efficacy lifetime expectancy - meaning there are filters that were expected to work - and "I don't care" venting toxic fumes straight out the window like a Breaking Bad meth homelab or a Dark Waters dig dump cover 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.
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?
To be honest, I give very little if any credence to anything she's said, especially if it's unsupported by evidence. Notice I'm not relying on anything she's said. Even if she is mentally ill, it's not reasonable to always assume the opposite of everything she asserts; that's called being a reactionary.
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.
The EPA said that Apple may have been under accounting the types of waste because they were treating it without the permits the EPA requires, it said in the document they had things labeled as "California Waste Only" that should be under EPA jurisdiction.
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 didn't see anywhere that they weren't changing the filters enough.
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.
the coincidence between the author and the "atleast" date simply means there's not enough evidence before that date. Dealing with EPA and other pollution control agencies will tell you very much they dont want to get into these situations because it makes them look bad.
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.
it's not imagination to look at log books and say "well, they weren't reporting things here that they were reporting there".
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.
Yea I was really surprised reading this that I know a few people who lived in that apartment complex. The complex holds 1800 households, and the whole city has ~50k, so that single complex accounts for 3-4% of Santa Clara’s total households. And only one woman has reported any issues, as far as we know.
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.
Yeah this is not within the realms of even an 0.1% confidence interval. Indistinguishable from chance. Hypothesis should be investigated and then discarded!
This is also what I wonder. So far the EPA has found a few faults, but with only one self reported case of humans affected among thousands of potential victims this whole story could still tip towards either "this is bad but all too common" and "this is a gigantic scandal of obscene proportions." The latter one makes for a better news story and twitter threads, but that also doesn't make every suspicion in there true by default.
It could be a combination of a few things. Maybe some people aren’t as sensitive as this lady. Maybe some moved out. And possibly many just haven’t spoken up or even are aware of such a factory releasing gasses.
Let’s imagine you suddenly feel bad at 3 am, how would you know you should file a complaint against a specific lab run by a specific company? How would you even know it exists?
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
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.
Let's go with "definitely not", given the amount of other things that could be within a 7 mile radius of your location.
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.
> "One thing is for sure, it's not a silicon fab."
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.
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.
Apple uses lots of other chips in the products besides the M-class mega processors being built at TSMC. Think of peripherals and MFI authentication chips.
It seems obvious to me that not every prototype needs to be done in TSMC's factories, and there are things that you can validate with cheaper processes.
This makes sense. A lot of the chemicals listed in the reports are those used in chip fabrication, but I'd imagine the same ones are also used in microLED fabrication.
I've called the county environmental service on a plastic recycling plant 0.5 mile's away from my house because any time the wind is blowing our way there's a really thick burning plastic smell that makes you want to gag. It makes it impossible to enjoy outside or open our windows.
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.
We were having trouble finding anybody that would want to help and the costs were astronomical. Like we were getting quotes in the $250k range for the tests and the study.
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 there's a terrible smell, it should be detected by a $100 off-the-shelf TVOC air quality meter, the type that can detect perfumes. Have you tried one?
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.
Have you contacted the EPA? This sounds like a violation of the clean air act. Your county enforcement might have limited powers vs what the EPA can do.
It's close to Apple's home base in Cupertino, and this is more of an R&D facility than an actual factory. Apple will have smart employees working there that live in the area and who aren't easily replaceable.
Agreed, also, if anyone has ever dealt with regualtors before things like:
> 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!!?
> 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!!?
There should be more strict zoning laws. You can't have industrial processes happening anywhere near homes like these. I thought California was strict on zoning?
“Silicon” Valley was a super-fund site full of contamination long before this was desirable to live in. The semiconductor industry poisoned the valley decades ago. Santa Clara county has more superfund sites than any other county in the US.
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.
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.
Or third world countries in general. As sexy as made in home country sounds, modern day manufacturing is truly deadly.
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.
yups. Not to mention the amount of environmental damage such things do. For instance, all the rare earth metals have huge open air mines with of all kinds of acid & arsenic poisoning which is used during leeching & refining process
One of the many reasons. The biggest reason the last place I worked at that did manufacturing was that there were import tariffs on components but not assemblies so they just built the assemblies in China.
It won't come this far. First of all the website itself won't be allowed to be hosted. Moreover, the person would most likely be dead or in one of the reeducation camps for a long time. Most of the chinese large tech companies are funded by Chinese govt so complaining against them is like complaining against the govt or the party.
USA doesn't support China. It needs it because it increases the profit of megacos and saves them the hassle of dealing with litigious populace at home.
I wish she would just state the facts as it makes it hard to read.
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.
Reading the screenshots, it sounds like they showed up with the fire dept., which was going to do some sort of unrelated inspection. Apple wasn’t informed that they were going to be there, the author even highlights “EPA’s participation in the inspection was unannounced”. I’d assume the EH&S team was there for the (expected) fire department inspection
I asked that question myself for other submissions several times. It happens that I start to write a comment, post it and find that the submission was flagged and disappeared from the HN home page while I was writing. Sometimes they feel like absolutely innocuous submissions. I wish there is an unflag link, not the one to undo one owns flag requests (which happen due to fat fingers and tiny links.)
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?
A big corp can't give in because then they would have to install proper exhaust filtration and monitoring which would probably cost 10s of millions of dollars and require a lot of additional staff that would have to know what Apple is doing in those facilities.
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.
That is not how humans work unfortunately. If any word gets out that a settlement like that can happen, then suddenly there is going to be a lot of people sick with such symptoms. It's the same reason why the "not negotiating with terrorists" policy is in place.
This is an EPA report, presumably they do not base their findings upon any beef a whistleblower may have.
And, not knowing more about the story as you seem to, she claims her beef is based on the fact that she got sick from gases Apple was venting from this same facility. At least from what I saw on Twitter, this EPA report, in some sense, is the beef.
ONE of her beeves is indeed based on this, but I believe she has also sued Apple for unrelated labor related issues.
I agree that the EPA's report is based on first hand observations; OTOH I would not characterize the findings quite the same way she did. There certainly were a significant number of violations, but I don't have the context of knowing how many such violations are found in other facilities of comparable size (e.g. placing a waste container on a stack without immediately labeling it, or not having all labels in a stack be readable without rearranging containers). The regulations certainly seem sensible, but I wonder whether there are really any facilities of a certain size that manage to run without any violations whatsoever.
If I'm working and living next to a place with a ton of EPA violations around weird chemicals that may be dangerous, what good is it to me whether some other company elsewhere has a similar number of violations?
Yes, but the question to me is how dangerous the dangerous is.
As a comparison, if you look at a single health inspection for a single restaurant, e.g.: https://stgencep.sccgov.org/sccdineout/INSPECTIONREPORT_DADW... is that a safe place to eat or not? Do you insist on only eating in restaurants that have a score of 100?
While there is an underlying EPA report. The site hosting it is heavily editorialized. Its hard to read it and take it as anything close to facts. I am super skeptical of companies and recognize the whole Bay Area is one giant super fund site but this person comes off as someone a bit manic. Just looking at the first all caps message.
Gotta say, it was a 2 minutes Google Search away, btw, so not really sure why people wouldn't take the time to search a bit before lecturing fellow users and downvoting.
I am actually very critical of Apple in what I write, being European and all. Your comment is offensive and a personal attack.
What I was referring to is that the woman reporting the case to the EPA and making unproven allegation about Apple conspiring to cover up their mistakes is someone who has legal history with the company.
@dang, I am constantly reprimanded about expressing strong opinions here, but that's alright to get brigaded instead?
Could you walk folks through about how you find noting potential conflicts of interest as "offensive and personal?" I don't quite follow as I'm from the goose-gander school of things that are good for.
Disclosure: I have used a variety of Apple products since the mid-1990s. Also, I have participated in an environmental coverup: "Private! Put sand over that JP8 you spilt! You are holding up the whole lager! Yes sergeant!"
As far as I can tell, their original complaints[0] were about the Apple office they worked at, not about an Apple facility near their apartment. It is quite incredible that they've identified Apple as poisoning them by multiple different methods at different places.
It's possible to play both sides of the same coin. The pressure is 10x greater on Apple because in many ways, they're 10x larger than their competitors. They should be able to make the right bureaucratic calls, if not then why trust them with anything?
A company like John Deere can lead the industry in fuel efficiency while also destroying the environment with an anti-consumer artificial depreciation policy. The idea that Apple systematically destroying the environment is at-odds with their pro-green marketing is a fallacy. They can (and do) make decisions that harm the environment that they refuse to justify. When your business makes a mistake and nobody is willing to respond or fix it, that's a sign that your bureaucratic body has become a corpse.
> In early 2015, Apple started stealth semiconductor fabrication activities in a facility located at 3250 Scott Boulevard in Santa Clara California, less than two hundred feet from thousands of homes. The factory intentionally vented its exhaust of solvent vapors and toxic gases straight from the roof and into the ambient outdoor air, with little or no abatement. The factory was only one story while the apartments were four stories tall, nearly ensuring the factory exhaust entered the apartment windows and 'fresh air intake' vents.
> Gjovik lived at these apartments in 2020 and found herself in the emergency room within one week, disabled by symptoms of solvent and gas exposure. Later in 2020, Gjovik conducted air testing and bio-monitoring which found the presence of Apple's factory exhaust inside her home, and inside her body.
Furthermore, we're talking about a company that willingly sources materials from effective slave labor in the Congo and other areas, while gaslighting their customer base about their commitment to inclusivity. There is no defending Apple here. These decisions are made by multiple people who should all be in prison.
> There is no defending Apple here. These decisions are made by multiple people who should all be in prison.
Bingo.
There's this curious willingness from the HN community to jump in and defend the whole of a corporation when a single part makes a mistake. We've seen them come out in droves when rational people criticize the App Store, the Butterfly keyboard, inhumane working environments or unsafe centralized services. It's absolutely bizarre that these same apologists feel the need to justify genuine bureaucratic failure. They really want to champion Apple on the basis that they violate zoning laws and endanger their neighbors?
Sometimes this site needs to grow a pair and accept that their favorite business has to follow the law. I know it's a lot to ask from latte addicts that work in management, but I'm done accepting justifications for Apple's behavior that end without blame.
As an owner of Apple hardware, it is my basic duty to hold them accountable. Yet many of the people who rush to defend Apple somehow think it's hypocritical to be a customer of them while simultaneously criticizing them. And there is so, so much to criticize.
I dont think anyone here thinks it is a conspiracy. And I'm sure everyone here expects apple to take proper responsibility.
But whataboutism about other companies doesn't hide the fact that there were/are violations.
This isn't gonna kill apple, don't worry nor will it permanently tarnish their reputation you're so worried about. But it is a big deal when they do spout green initiatives then get busted for stuff like this. Notice some of those dates? How absent does corporate have to be to allow stuff like this? Months and months on end with no real inspections?
If Apple was as green as they say, this wouldn't have happened in the first place. They would understand these types of messes. So while the main cause may fall on some of the daily employees, where was management? Why weren't they doing their job as responsible environmental stewards as their image upholds?
Again, IMO this isn't _that_ big of a deal so long as they stop those practices and get their stuff together. No amount of handwaving/whataboutisms is going to change this. Just accept that they got busted messing up and move on. Don't try to play it off and minimize stuff.
All publicly traded companies with a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders will always externalize any cost they can. The problem is bigger than Apple.
I don’t know. As a shareholder it sounds like the dumbest move ever. In what universe would it make sense to have a fab so close to an appartment building and vent toxic gas. It’s a PR disaster waiting to happen. Whatever savings you make by avoiding regulation you pay back in fines and reputation damages.
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.
What reputational damage? I follow tech news very closely and it’s the first I’ve heard of it. A listed corporation’s first instinct (unless it has a conscientious board) is always to try their luck and see what they get away with. You don’t make profits by doing anything other than the absolute legal minimum, and that’s only if someone enforces those rules. Listed companies have proven they cannot be trusted to self regulate, never ever
I read the report, and while the practices are inexcusably shoddy, I am struggling to see anything to substantiate the poster's core claim that Apple was handling "extremely dangerous" chemicals at the site and that they could've harmed a person living a good distance away.
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.
> - illegally dumping hazardous waste into the ambient air outside the facility (into the apartment windows)
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.
And they were accidentally tipped off about the inspection when it should have been a complete surprise. I feel like stuff like this should be capable of piercing the corporate veil so that people involved could be criminally prosecuted. As-is, Apple is incentivized to just keep this kind of behavior in their ranks because it’s just the cost of doing business as they usually get away with this kind of stuff.
I worked at a Colgate manufacturing plant and we were given about a week heads up when the FDA would come do an inspection, we would know the exact day about 3 days before, and we would have about a 4hr heads up when they'll arrive.
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.
According to the mastodon post this situation is a bit different because it was a (whistleblower?) complaint and thus it was supposed to be a surprise vs typically announced inspections.
I worked as an engineer in Apple for several years in a core division, and there was extensive training, and not perfunctory, about being ethical and doing the right thing. It was a very serious core principle.
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.
This is just one small facility in the US. Imagine the damage being done world wide where there are fewer regulations and and even fewer inspectors. We're outsourcing our pollution.
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.
Moving away won't fix the problem. As someone who lives in a large city, The response to companies destroying our environment shouldn't be move away. I'm not even a "tree hugger" and this pisses me off. We only have us to rely on. Fixing and preventing this issue doesn't seem like a hard decision to make.
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://mastodon.social/@ashleygjovik/112668309100333232/
https://www.ashleygjovik.com/3250scott.html