Workers Poisoned Making Touchscreen Hardware

SocResp writes "A chemical called n-hexane has been poisoning the nervous systems of Chinese workers who assemble touchscreen devices for Apple and other companies, an investigative journalist from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. It's scary to think that people are being damaged to pursue high production rates. For companies with soaring profits and share prices, and elaborate product development and marketing, it seems they should be all the more culpable if they fail to take care of the production workers."

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chemistry of n-hexane

[smellsofbikes]

In case anyone is interested, n-hexane is a straight-chain hydrocarbon, six (predictably) carbons long. It's similar to gasoline, which is a mixture of straight-chain and branched-chain hydrocarbons, that average about eight carbons (hence 'octane number': the reference for gasoline volatility is a specific eight-carbon molecule.) Hexane is often used as a solvent and cleaning agent, replacing the much better but much more toxic benzene, also a six-carbon molecule, and a number of other solvents that do a great job solvating but also do a great job poisoning people in both short and long term exposures.

It's pretty common in production facilities, particularly manufacturing lines, to start out with good chemical control: a fireproof safe from which people have to check out material, and over time, as the manufacturing process evolves, people keep finding they need to wash stuff up at one step and pretty soon a jug of solvent just gets left there and people start splashing it around. Gloves get in the way, or get caught in machinery, so people stop using those, too. Then, in the US, OSHA makes more and more drastic rules about allowing solvents of any sort, to try to prevent this happening, and manufacturers have to find another solvent, which then gets used in the same way with the same results.

Point being, it's not particularly OSHA that's the problem: they're trying to stop people poisoning themselves. The issue is manufacturing processes with unanticipated problems, and production workers who find ways to overcome the problems without realizing that they're endangering themselves. In China there's less concern over workers endangering themselves than in the US, although the difference is primarily in degree, but the same general problem is seen in most manufacturing environments.