ABSTRACT
The use of elements such as arsenic, antimony, gallium, and indium has long been featured, in the manufacture of semiconductors for computer chips, cellular telephones, and light emitting diodes (LEDs). Over the last 30 years, tens of tons of these elements have been incorporated into these devices either as dopants (1, 2) for silicon-based computer chips or in the manufacture of the higher-speed III-V semiconductors such as gallium arsenide or indium arsenide (2). As the demand for higher-speed devices has increased, older devices with slower electronic speeds have been discarded, in the absence of well-established recycling programs, generating a large stockpile of electronic devices containing these elements collectively known as “e-waste.” The magnitude of this growing problem has only recently been appreciated in California and Europe (3) but much about the biological properties of these high-technology materials is not yet known. Experimental animal studies (4-9) have demonstrated that particles of GaAs or InAs are broken down in vivo resulting in the release of both constitutive elements (4-9). This creates a binary chemical mixture situation raising the issue of interactive effects. The situation in the semiconductor manufacturing plants is even more complex since a number of solvents are also present and semiconductor workers are exposed to a number of toxic agents in the clean room environ-ments (10). Epidemiological studies of these workers have shown an increased incidence of miscarriages and there are case reports of brain and testicular cancers among workers employed in a gallium arsenide plant.
