“High-tech” provides a cachet of futuristic wonders to localities claiming cutting-edge technological research and industrial innovation. But the high-tech electronic manufacturing processes release hundreds of chemicals and are no doubt ridden with extremely high but hidden environmental health risks. This article aims to increase our understanding of “ignorance” about electronics hazards in the Asian context. It argues that the electronics industries have been under constant innovation, and novel uses of chemicals are introduced to the industrial operation at a much faster pace than the health and environmental assessment can work to comprehend the impacts of the chemicals. In such a context, regulatory science has often failed to effectively monitor and control toxic waste discharges in the high-tech electronics sector. Taking several high-tech pollution disputes in Taiwan as examples, and based on interviews with experts in pollution regulation, this paper discusses multiple constraints on scientific advance in studying toxics that are exacerbated by lagging regulations. These are further entangled with research resource limitations, privileging of high-tech industries in suppressing negative information about toxicity risks, and knowledge repression within the scientific community due to dependence on government and industry, all of which has crippled building knowledge for effective regulatory science–resulting in knowledge gridlock.
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Over the past three decades, high-tech electronics product manufacturing and consumption rates have grown exponentially. The Information Technology (IT) industries have played a vital role in driving the world economy. Many developing regions, notably Taiwan, have supported IT industries with public resources to promote national economic development. An increasing amount of the assembly of electronic goods has been shifted to large scale integrated contract assembly firms, which have emerged as globalized production networks in the electronics industry (Lüthje Citation2006). The rapid growth in contract manufacturing, which takes place through a complicated web of subcontractors, is often centered in Asia.
Riding the wave of global IT development, Taiwan has expanded its electronics manufacturing capabilities, beginning from the 1960s, and by 2018 held a global business share in the semiconductor industry valued at 62 USD billion (E.E. Times, 15 August, Citation2018). According to the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITIR), the output of Taiwan’s chip manufacturing and packaging testing segments is foremost in the world, accounting for 70 percent and 50 percent of world market share, respectively (Central News Agency, 21 March, Citation2019). Taiwan’s integrated circuit (IC) output value ranked third globally, only behind the US and South Korea, in 2018 (News Lens, 14 September, Citation2018). The electronics manufacturing industry is considered Taiwan’s primary strength.
