Long known for tequila and mariachis, Guadalajara has another claim to fame. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994, this country’s second-largest city is seen as the Mexican version of Silicon Valley.

Here, factories assemble televisions, cell phones, printed circuit boards, computers and other electronic devices. Some 70,000 to 75,000 local residents earn a living producing goods for IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Jabil and other foreign-owned companies, says Braulio Laveaga, western regional director of Mexico’s National Chamber of the Electronic Industry, Telecommunications and Information Technologies (Canieti).

In a 2006 study, the Jesuit-affiliated Center for Reflection and Labor Action (Cereal) reported how this city of 16th century architectural treasures is now the modern hub of a thriving national electronics industry employing 380,000 people nationwide. Over 90% of components that electronics plants here use to make finished products are imported and more than 90% of the assembled goods are exported. In 2005, the electronics sector accounted for over 20% of Mexico’s total exports, or US$44 billion, Cereal says.

While the electronics-assembly trend has provided Mexico an economic boost, it has been accompanied by concern about environmental and public-health impacts. The concern focuses on the use of harmful substances ranging from solvents and flame retardants to epoxies and acids—and on the disposal of such substances by factories or in the form of so-called e-waste when electronics products are discarded by consumers.

The problem is well known north of the border. In the original, California version of Silicon Valley and in smaller U.S. high-tech hubs such as Albuquerque, New Mexico, the formative years of the electronics industry spawned not only economic gains, but also government-ordered cleanups and occupational-health claims filed by workers.

While electronics-industry impacts have attracted scrutiny and action in the United States, however, Mexican communities, nonprofits and environmental authorities only are beginning to grapple with the problems posed by a sector long billed as the clean alternative to traditional smokestack manufacturing.

Complicating that task is a dearth of reliable information. Though Mexico last year published its first Emissions and Pollutants Transfer Register (RETC), the document contains no data on the output and transport of contaminants by the country’s electronics industry. Alfonso Flores, director of hazardous materials management for the Mexican Environment and Natural Resources Secretariat (Semarnat), says this situation is about to change, however. He reports his agency is gathering the necessary information and by the end of this year will make it available to the states, which under Mexico’s 2003 Integrated Waste Management Law hold primary responsibility for policing the electronics sector.

The states, in turn, will draw on the Semarnat data to develop legislation and regulations aimed at bringing themselves into compliance with the 2003 waste-management law. The bulk of the electronics waste-control efforts will focus on the states of Jalisco, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas and Chihuahua, Flores says, adding: “We’re at the beginning of a new era.”

What studies have been done suggest that Mexico’s electronics industry generates substantial quantities of waste. A 2001 report by the federal government-run National Ecology Institute (INE) found that in Aguascalientes, near Guadalajara, the electronics sector produced about 183,000 tons of air contaminants, discharged more than 61,000 cubic meters of untreated wastewater and transported about 100 tons of hazardous materials.

At the same time, the absence thus far of reliable plant-by-plant emissions information can precipitate a confusing welter of claims and counter-claims.

A report released this February by British scientists and Greenpeace Mexico said flame retardants, chemicals and heavy metals were detected in samples drawn from two canals near the IBM plant in El Salto outside Guadalajara. It also stated that nickel extracted from a well behind a Sanyo facility in Tijuana registered twice the maximum recommended World Health Organization level. Marisa Jacott, Greenpeace Mexico’s toxics campaign coordinator at the time, called on authorities and company officials to investigate and take preventive measures to protect the environment and workers.

Industry representatives dispute Greenpeace’s findings. Alan Foster, Sanyo’s Tijuana spokesman, asserts his company contracted its own groundwater tests for the site. “We jumped on it and investigated it,” Foster says. “In this particular case, we’re clean.” The Tijuana plant, which manufactures television sets and compact refrigerators, ships any toxic wastes it generates in Tijuana to the United States, Foster adds.

IBM spokesman Jay Cadmus says his company is puzzled about the chemicals discovered in Greenpeace’s testing, because neither IBM nor its tenants use the chemicals mentioned in the report. Cadmus adds that IBM recycles its wastewater at the plant.

Amid such disputes, residents who live near Mexican electronics plants have begun voicing concerns. Raúl Muñoz, an organizer for the Environmental Defense Committee in the Guadalajara-area communities of El Salto and nearby El Castillo, says residents have no idea what hazardous substances are being transported and used near their homes, businesses and schools. Muñoz points to the area’s highly contaminated Santiago River as an example of the local impacts caused by unconstrained industrial development. (See Q&A—this issue.) The river receives pollutants from so many sources that pinpointing those responsible is complicated. “A big issue is being able to connect illnesses with specific sources,” concedes Amelia Simpson of the Border Environmental Justice Campaign, a California-based initiative working on both sides of the border.

Electronics industry best practices dictate the recycling of hazardous substances or the elimination of them altogether in the production process. Still, some wastes are shipped offsite. In the United States, Juan Jimenez, a unit chief for the enforcement and emergency response program of the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, has monitored electronics-industry waste shipments from Mexico for the past seven years.

“[Electronics plants] are a significant source of waste that is coming back,” Jimenez says. “That is because Tijuana and Baja California are the television capital of the world.”

Jimenez calculates that 15 to 20 trucks and vans at a time transport electronics-industry waste across the border four times a week at California’s Otay Mesa crossing and at the state’s Calexico crossing for legal disposal at U.S. waste-processing sites. Among other products, the shipments include solvents as well as materials such as glass from computer monitors. The California official says no reliable statistics on the Mexican hazardous waste shipments into the United States are available because of a funding cutback at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that resulted in the elimination of a tracking position. He says he has witnessed a decline in shipments over the years, but contends trucks that once entered California are now crossing into Arizona due to less stringent inspections there.

Before 2007, foreign-owned assembly plants in Mexico called maquiladoras were required to ship all hazardous waste to their home countries for disposal. But under the 2003 Mexican waste law, the maquiladoras also can recycle waste on site or send it to a Semarnat-approved plant for use as an alternative fuel.

For Flores, true waste reduction means finding benign substitutes for toxic production inputs and fostering recycling. Mexico is collaborating with the EPA and other international agencies to achieve these ends.

Emily Pimentel, EPA Region 9 waste-management border program coordinator, says the U.S. environmental agency will co-sponsor the next round of binational waste-minimization workshops for industry representatives and other stakeholders in Tijuana this fall.

Labor advocates worry that unless action is taken, Mexican electronics workers will pay a steep health price. Giving legal advice to nearly 600 workers from early 2005 to April 2006, Cereal heard complaints about skin irritation, asthma, back and leg troubles and reproductive problems in women, who constitute 70% of Guadalajara’s electronics workforce.

“This is only a small sample of the problems we know about,” says Jorge Barajas, Cereal’s Guadalajara coordinator. He adds that about 50% of workers do not know what substances they work with, even though Mexican labor law stipulates company disclosure.

Worries about chemicals

Virginia, a single mother of two who puts in 48 hours weekly at a Guadalajara computer-casing plant for US$65, says she uses paint thinner, acetone and isopropyl alcohol in her job. Her employer provides gloves and masks and gives training in hazardous substances, she says, and some—though not all—workers get ear plugs. However, high temperatures in the plant prompt some workers to remove their masks, Virginia says. She reports that she and other workers get frequent headaches, but she doesn’t expect changes will be made to remove possible causes, such as reducing chemical use.

“You can’t take away the solvents,” she affirms. “You need them for cleaning.”

Academic studies, government reports and lawsuits in the United States, Asia and Europe have linked worker exposure to electronics-industry toxics with serious health problems including cancers, neurological disorders and birth defects.

Last year, Cereal, with help from partner groups, hosted Mexico’s first gathering of electronics industry workers. Employees of 16 companies in Guadalajara, Tijuana, Chihuahua City, Reynosa and Monterrey called for greater disclosure of hazardous materials used in production and for steps to reduce exposures. Since the meeting, Cereal has been negotiating with electronics industry representatives, but no agreements have been announced.

Canieti’s Laveaga portrays concerns about chemical exposures and environmental problems as overblown. “There is no evidence to say [workers] have been exposed,” he says, insisting that plants follow the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct, a 2004 set of voluntary safety and environmental standards developed by Dell, Hewlett Packard and other firms.

Guadalajara’s electronics industry complies with municipal, state and federal regulations that govern hazardous materials and labor conditions, Laveaga adds. Additionally, he points out, companies now have economic incentives to follow the European Union’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive. Put in effect last year, it restricts sales of high-tech electronics made with lead, mercury, cadmium and three other toxic substances. Similar rules were implemented in California this year.

Such assurances, however, do not mollify labor and environmental advocates, who argue for full corporate disclosure, third-party plant inspections and independent monitoring. Says Cereal’s Barajas: “The first thing is for the companies to declare where they have these emissions, because they aren’t visible.”

Production is not the only challenge. Mexico is awash in millions of old computers, television sets, cell phones and other e-waste stemming from products that were assembled in-country, exported to the United States, then shipped back to Mexico as used goods. Much of this equipment winds up in landfills, where scavengers break it up to salvage components or materials. Careless disassembly can leak lead and other contaminants into the soil and groundwater. As on the production side, little official information is available about Mexico’s e-waste problem, but a study being conducted by Semarnat and INE could help fill the gap.

Guillermo Román of Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute, the study’s lead researcher, gives a preliminary Mexican e-waste estimate of between 50,000-100,000 tons per year, including PCs, television sets, sound systems and telephones. “This is significant,” Román says. “We’re at the level of Spain.”

Recycling venture

The recycling possibilities appear to be attracting private-sector interest, however. Recently the Mexican company Burillo Azcarraga Group and U.S.-based Electronic Recyclers formed a partnership called ERI Mexico to conduct environmentally friendly recycling of e-waste in Mexico.

Fredrik Broberg, an investor in the joint enterprise, says Electronic Recyclers disassembles old computers and other electronic goods without leaking toxics. The parts are then used to make metals, glass and other products. According to Broberg, ERI Mexico plans to begin operations before the end of the year and hopes eventually to open as many as eight e-waste recycling centers across Mexico, including outlets in the principal markets of Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey. “We’ve had very, very positive feedback from Mexico,” Broberg says. “We believe the political will is there, maybe even more so than in the U.S.”