Toxics in the ‘Clean Rooms’




An unusually high incidence of leukemia, lymphoma, brain cancer, and other serious diseases appears to exist among relatively young people who have worked in Samsung’s semiconductor plants  and other chemically-intensive manufacturing plants.High incidence of cancers and other serious diseases are observed while the company denies any link.The pattern of same illnesses are  disturbingly similar to that is seen at semiconductor facilities in the U.S.UK and Europe.


Dangerous chemicals are killing workers in semiconductor plants factories that assemble processor chips for smart phones, advocacy groups claim.
More than 100 victims so far and counting,


Industry is actively subverting the victims" pursuit of compensation and justice.
The problem originates in so called "clean rooms", dust-free environments where semi-conductors, used in electronics such as smart phones and LCD TVs, are produced.Only armed with "white bunny-suits" designed to minimize contamination, workers frequently handle and inhale deadly chemical cocktails whose purpose is to sterilize materials, including wafers but with the devastating effects on human beings.The chemicals like  benzene,and trichloroethane, which are known to cause occupational leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma are not the only problem.The same process of Semiconductors manufacturing is flowed.

In November 1999, only five months on her first high school job, Yun passed out on the floor of the Samsung plant in the city of Chonan. The then-18-year-old Yun had been cutting chemically glazed liquid crystal display (LCD) panels.  There was no protective gear.With bare eyes, she inspected the panels for cracks. Her hands were protected only by thin cotton gloves when she cut chemically drenched LCD panels in a “clean room” filled with chemical contaminants used in the process.  She is the 56th victim who died of leukemia.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is South Korea’s largest conglomerate, Samsung Group’s 80 affiliates in all major industries ranging from automobiles to electronics to financial services.
Samsung Group, controlled by second-generation founder Lee Kun-hee and his children, also owns colleges and universities  runs a vast bribery network uncovered in November 2007, when Samsung Group’s former in-house lawyer Kim Yong-cheol accused the conglomerate of operating a slush fund to bribe prosecutors, politicians, and bureaucrats, to curry favor and quash probes into its frequent irregularities.Samsung, one of the world’s four largest electronics manufacturers, ranks among the top 40 companies on the Fortune 500 and is the largest company in South Korea. With its products accounting for about one-fifth of the nation’s exports, Samsung is extremely powerful in South Korea with more than $172 billion in sales in 2010.


 180 Samsung workers diagnosed with serious illnesses that may be linked to their employment worked in a variety of operations.
Some worked on printed circuit boards for LCD screens.

Others worked in various aspects of semiconductor fabrication,chemical processing,including chip burning (a process that tests semiconductors by subjecting them to high heat and voltage.

Some of the diagnosed workers was involved  in process called ion  implantation, and using x-rays to check the quality of chips.


Samsung deny to present any verifiable data about the identity of all the substances and processes used  what is known is that they involve hundreds of high toxic chemicals and different organic compounds,heavy metals, associated with cancer and nervous system damage and are also known to affect developing embryos.Benzene is classified and  confirmed as human carcinogen.It is known to cause leukemia and dangerous blood disorders including aplastic anemia and thrombocytopenia, a disease that interferes with blood-clotting, from which some of the Samsung worker are suffering.
Most of these processes involving hazardous chemicals take place in the so-called “clean rooms” — manufacturing facilities where the enclosed environment is engineered to remove dust and other particles that can damage sensitive equipment such as semiconductor chips and other high-tech components. What makes this potentially significant is that air in clean rooms re-circulates rapidly. This keeps dust and other particles away from sensitive equipment and products.

(Those head-to-toe coveralls known as “bunny-suits” were designed to protect only the microchips  rather than workers — from contaminants.clean room workers are breathing hundreds hazardous chemicals. And when it comes to any protective standards, “there is no protective standards to the  groups of chemicals involved in  circulating exposure.


Samsung Electronics by that time has commissioned an independent third-party review, by experts from Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Michigan,The inspection team has been given unrestricted complete access to Samsung’s semiconductor manufacturing facilities.Their finding were made secret and presented only to the board of Samsung in order to “make the  necessary changes to their  environmental safety and health infrastructure standards“  


Samsung’s findings are the tip of the iceberg  what the semiconductor industry has found in its investigations in similar circumstances in the U.K. and the U.S.


The Semiconductor Industry Association have been actively denying these studies as  flawed as implying  there is no direct proof or a connection between chemical exposures and these illnesses .At the same time  the cancer incidence only in the former New York State IBM electronics plant workers are 28,000 .