Do Macs give off Benzene?

Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Computer Chemical Emissions Worse Than Ever In The MacIntel Era
Apple has been under attack for the past several months from the environmental activist group Greenpeace for allegedly being a laggard compared with some of its competitors at getting toxic substances out of its products and implementing "green" manufacture, marketing, and post-sale policies. I'm inclined to think that Apple is being unfairly singled out, but there is one area of environmental concern where they, along with other computer manufacturers are definitely not doing very well at all, and perhaps arguably worse than the were a decade ago.

I'm referring to chemical vapor emissions from computer systems, which have always been a problematical issue for persons like myself and an unfortunately growing cohort of others afflicted with a syndrome known as Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), which makes one's relationship with computers a bittersweet affair to say the least. On the one hand, a computer connected to the Internet is a welcome, even indispensable means of communication and a tool for interaction with a chemically-polluted world that many of us are obliged to keep at arm's length.

The other side of the coin for some of us struggling with this illness is that computers contain a lot of plastics, and plastics tend to gas off chemical vapors. Newer computers also tend to run significantly hotter, which amplifies their chemical emissions profile. For example, my PowerBook 5300, which I bought new in 1996 and which was built in Mountain View, California, never gave me any problem in this context from the time I first unpacked it from its box. Nor did the first generation, cacheless PowerBook G3 Series 233 MHz unit I used for a couple of months in end of 1998. That machine was built in Cork, Ireland, but the landscape shifted radically when Apple shifted PowerBook production from Ireland to Taiwan in the late summer of '98. While the second generation G3 Series PowerBooks looked the same, and had only a modest speed bump along with a few engineering changes, the Taiwanese-built WallStreets definitely smelled a lot different, and I soon discovered that the 233 MHz model I bought in January, 1998 made me very ill when I shared airspace with it, a problem that has afflicted every subsequent Apple notebook I've encountered, and the current stable of MacBook Pros and MacBooks are the worst yet, almost certainly due to their torrid operating temperatures.

Indeed, while I strongly suspect that the chemical formulation of materials used in internal circuit boards is a key factor, heat is also a biggie. That delightfully non-smelly old 5300 would barely get lukewarm to the touch even under hard use (and that anaemic 100 MHz 603e CPU always seemed to be hard pressed). The Irish-built "MainStreet" I used had no cache and was a relatively cool runner as well, while my Taiwanese 233 MHz PDQ had 512Kb of L2 cache and ran considerably hotter, although it did have an entirely different smell. My nephew bought an identical machine at the same time, and his father said it would make his eyes water when it was new. The Irish WallStreets did have an odor, but it was very different from the smell of the Taiwanese WallStreets, and I can only surmise that the chemical composition of the case plastics and circuit board phenolics used respectively must have been different.

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