[mschuster91]

> Just ask the semiconductor industry. That was also offshored to Asia from the west by the metric boatload because it was not considered high value and prestigious enough

It was and still is also incredibly dirty. Silicon Valley is among the top Superfund site collections for that reason - tons of semiconductor companies were very lax regarding pollution, and while the EPA cracked down on that pretty hard in the US, most Asian countries don't give a shit about the environment as long as the short-term profits are high enough.

[orhmeh09]

Despite all EPA efforts, the semiconductor industry in the US still imposes itself on the environment in nasty ways.

https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2022/02/environmental-...

> Samsung’s semiconductor facility spilled a large amount of acidic wastewater into its stormwater pond and into a tributary of Harris Branch Creek in Northeast Austin, killing virtually all aquatic life within the 1.5-mile stretch. As much as 763,000 gallons of the acidic waste was discharged into the waterways for a period of up to 106 days.

[Sakos]

I don't understand why the only instance monitoring this stuff "regularly" is Samsung itself. The ones with little incentive to actually care about the consequences or accurately monitoring this.

[lostlogin]

Outsourcing compliance monitoring and accreditation seems to have been a massive things across governments and countries. It’s got quite the track record of carnage too. We learn slowly.

[FirmwareBurner]

>It was and still is also incredibly dirty.

Humanity's entire industrialization process to date has been incredibly dirty and damaging to this planet. It would be silly to think it has all slowed down. It just moved from your back yard.

[makeitdouble]

> EPA cracked down on that pretty hard in the US

This is sadly an ongoing battle that never fully settles, be it in the US or the other developed countries.

There will always be more money made by cutting ecological corners, and where there's money there's politics. Fracking, regular industrial waste chemical, agricultural waste, any new spot where regulation isn't set yet, gets relaxed or there's an opportunity to push the issue under the rug it's almost guaranteed to be abused.