Some years ago, a plating company in San Jose dumped a plating bath into the sewer system. This was so toxic that it killed the bacteria that reduce organic sludge at the sewerage plant. This knocked the whole plant offline, releasing untreated sewerage into the bay. The lower bay was toxic for a week. It's normally swimmable. San Jose was fined by the EPA. The plating company was heavily fined by San Jose.

It's a good sewerage plant. The output is drinkable, and if you take the tour, you're offered some to drink. Some of the output is used for irrigation. In a severe drought emergency, water could be fed back into the water system. They've never had to do that, but in a big drought a few years ago, things got close to that point.

San Jose, which is more of an industrial city than most people realize, still has plating companies. Here's an inspection report for one of them.[1] This one was releasing too much chromium.

[1] https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/www3/region9/water/pre...

Years later, swimming in Hawaii, I found myself looking for wipes. I mentioned it to a snorkel-outfit operator, and she looked at me like I was insane. They didn't even put damaging sunscreen in the water, and there was no expectation of little 1-2 inch sticky spots of oil.

The good old days, in the 80's, where we swam in oceans filled with slow-motion natural disasters. I wonder how much of it was place (Hawaiians seem to have a stronger relationship with the land and nature surrounding them) and how much of it was the time (20 years later).

The regulations are to stop the pollution, if you can manufacture without polluting, then you'll comply and be able to manufacture.

The problem is that there are other regulatory environments where the people aren't protected from pollution.

What would fix that is enforcing the regulations nation wide, then applying tariffs on imported products that don't enforce the same regulations.

Net result, more expensive phones, better health and improved environment for the public. In the same way as car pollution was cleaned up.

Instead you have to ship things from out of state and other countries, which generates emissions and pollution itself that might actually be more than local production.

Its the same issue as housing. Endless rules and regulations, many of which make no attempt at doing anything but block, cause the wealth of socirty to be siphoned away. An apartment project in LA with permits complete is worth twice as much as one without. How do we see this and expect our economy to do anything except drown in bureaucracy?

My advice is dont ever manufacturing anything in CA. They will try and kill your business for simply existing no matter how perfect you are.

Things can appear banned even when they aren't merely because there is a new technology that's better and cheaper and it's a big investment so people go with the cheaper option.

Nobody is building new coal in the US because it's so expensive, not because there's an outright ban. Now, part of the reason it's more expensive than in the past is that using once-through water for cooling raises the cost of disposing of waste heat. And now, modern and much more efficient natural gas combined cycle plant is the obvious choice because not only is the fuel cheaper per kWh, but you also need to spend a lot less on waste heat disposal.

So is coal banned? No. Did some environmental regulations have an impact on just how bad of an idea coal is these days? Sure, but let's talk about the tradeoffs here, it's not a ban and framing it is a ban leads to bad solutions to real regulatory problems.

I thought they hadn’t been built for other reasons over the last decade. But according to this, not being built means banned. TIL!

Started reading this site but the massive gaps in logic and reasoning are like nails on a chalkboard.

No new fabs being built in CA means fabs are banned?!

Okay well fabs are banned in pretty much the whole country then, so why call out California?

Just because something isn’t done doesn’t mean it’s banned. Neither is it necessarily bad. There’s a lot of reasons why not to build certain things certain areas - labor cost, earthquake risk, land is more desired leading to higher cost, blah blah blah

That doesn’t mean something is banned. Maybe we should look at making some things easier but this website is just a hit piece and has a clear motivation rather than being a trustworthy evaluation.

It’s like those cringy billboards on highway 5 about Gavin newsom and water.

Edit —— Complaining that large factories can’t easily be built in dense population centers like the Bay Area means things are banned is weird - who in the right mind thinks a sprawling factory with emissions should go smack dab in the middle of population centers? Why can’t we build a new nuclear plant in Manhattan or maybe an oil refinery on wall street!? Waah waah so outrageous! None were built in the last decade so it’s the outrageous regulations fault! I want my lead battery smelter in downtown Portland but Oregon banned it! Waah waah!

Aside that, this site is mostly blaming California regulations for the nationwide manufacturing issues driven heavily by free trade

> Your smartphone contains materials processed through semiconductor fabrication, chemical etching, metal anodizing, glass tempering, and electroplating — none of which you could start a new facility for in California without years of litigation.

I agree that we should make it easier to do things, specifically by decreasing the amount of litigation involved in doing stuff. But the risk of a bunch of litigation isn't a ban, right? I get that it's trying to be attention-grabbing, but calling it a ban when it's not just sort of confuses the issue.

After the deindustrialization people started to enjoy healthy air and clear water.

As always when it comes to "the good old times" or "make great again", your brain will remember very selectively.

I used to live next to a large river for about 35 years. As a kid, it was forbidden to swim in it, and if you did, you had weird oily chemicals on your skin that felt unhealthy (burn, itching etc).

Back then we had huge production industries upstream, employing thousands of people.

Today you can swim in the river without any problem at all. But the industry and the jobs have shrunken a lot, because not polluting the air and water simply is expensive.

You can sum this up with: Producing stuff without polluting the environment in most cases is impossible. Reducing the pollution costs a lot of money, and can make your product non-competitive.

This is why you outsource to other countries and let them do it, because you simply do not care about them living in a polluted environment. Poison Outsourcing.

So, if the US wants production industry again, and want it to be competitive, than have a look on how the environment in the countries you will be competing with looks like, and then to an informed decision if you really want that.

I'd pick the clean air and water, and have people poisoned far away that I don't know and can ignore.

What would be your choice?

I guess there should be an ability to do this farther from the population centers though.

It says, for example, that it's impossible to manufacture batteries in California and cites Tesla moving to Texas as the example. But Telsa still makes batteries in California in Fremont. They last did expansions on their battery manufacturing plants in 2023.

It cites all the dangerous chemicals used in manufacturing, but those aren't banned in California. CA has safety requirements for handling toxic materials. And we should be safely handling those materials, it's crazy to suggest we don't because of progress or whatever.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_ocean_dumps_off_Southern...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Cal...

For instance, NC milling is done in California. Printed circuit board manufacturing is done in California. Small-scale integrated circuit fabrication is done.

The Bay Area is peppered with Superfund sites that used to be fabs in the 80s. Maybe CA is saying it's done its part and now it's someone else's turn.

"Semiconductor Fabrication (7nm/5nm)

The main processor requires ultra-clean rooms, toxic gases (arsine, phosphine), and chemical etching. No new fabs have been built in CA in over a decade. Intel, TSMC, and Samsung all build elsewhere."

Phosphine is pretty nasty stuff. California was full of EPA Superfund sites when the government got stuck with cleaning up all the toxic waste. Politicians and voters went, "Eff that!" after manufacturers left the state, but left their barrels of shit behind.

In addition to banning these manufacturing processes in California, we should ban the products manufactured with these processes from California. This would require products to "green up" in order to access California's vast market.

By allowing dirty products manufactured elsewhere, we've simply moved the problem and its harms out of our line of sight. And frequently to a place where the people are poor, non-white and under represented.

Do people want oil refineries that constantly catch fire or explode [1], or toxic superfund sites for fabs [2]?

There are opportunities to build safer systems of course, the capital is there but there's places with looser regulations where you can harm people for cheap.

Also, this website does not actually show what laws or reasons why things are banned, it just says it's impossible, no sources, how do I even know this is true?

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/A-look-back-at-s... [2] https://www.theverge.com/23990525/semiconductor-biden-infras...

The very first Google offices sat directly over one of these sites around 2004. It took decades to dissipate. People complained about noxious fumes and this was more than 20 years after the spills had occurred.

There are real tradeoffs to having heavy industry to human health and well being.

all sites: https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/EPA::epa-facility-registry-s...

npl sites: https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=...

Also funnily enough, the first place I checked from this site's list of facilities that have been grandfathered in led to this finding

> Lehigh Hanson's Permanente cement plant in Cupertino, CA, is permanently closing following thousands of environmental violations and over 80 years of operation. The plant was a major source of air pollution and discharged toxic selenium into Permanente Creek.

Not being able to build a destroyer in California seems like a small price to pay for an ecosystem not poisoned

Example: cites automotive paint shop restrictions as the quintessential example of what you can't do in CA, and qualifies it with a specific Bay Area regulation.

He clearly has an agenda against what he perceives as onerous environmental regulations: https://x.com/sdamico/status/2026536815902208479 https://x.com/sdamico/status/2026552845294792994

There was an EPA superfund site across the street (this all was adjacent to the beach).

The company also had a co-generator that they used to produce their own power (using natural gas) and sold excess power to the local electrical utility.

It's still in operation, though it changed owners ~4 times while he was there.

Not sure what the point of the website is. To me it looks like a bad faith argument. The secular trend in the US has been to increase margins by moving manufacturing to other countries.

The tariffs are certainly not making it easier to manufacture domestically.

This website misses talking about all the Tesla Fremont paint shop violations (see https://www.baaqmd.gov/en/news-and-events/page-resources/202... ) and various OSHA violations:

- https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-02-11/tesla-fine... (2025)

- https://www.thedrive.com/news/26727/tesla-had-3-times-as-man... (2019)

https://www.industryselect.com/blog/top-10-us-states-for-man...

https://github.com/MidnightBSD/src/commit/7d956a27123f2d77a0...

There are only a handful of shipyards in the US that build ships for the Navy. What makes him think regulation has anything to do with only 1 being on the West Coast?

Banned in California.. wait, I meant the Bay Area.

It's not all of CA, it's just the Bay Area, and probably some other urbanized areas with a history of really bad air quality.

A separate but related topic is the warnings California requires of products. It's gotten a bit out of hand because every product you buy has the same warning, which completely dilutes what I hope was the intention. Even buying something as simple as an electric guitar comes with the "can cause cancer" warning because it can have nickel parts on it (usually for the bridge and tuners and frets).

America did that. If it was just California then they could import iPhone parts from Alabama, but they don't do that do they?

People and businesses that are ok with being exploited and exploiting others, while externalizing the true cost of their products on to the environment and future generations by treating the air and land like an open sewer can do it elsewhere.

Top of the list is "sulfuric acid baths". The correct disposal of sulfuric acid is "dilute with water", or if about metal dissolved in it, yeah treat as waste to be cleaned up or compacted and stored into eternity at a cost. So even after skimming, this seems agenda driven, not a fact sheet.

This seems like a "we cannot do it cost efficiently, so we claim it is impossible since China underbids us"

Surely the answer is not let's just allow to pillage, pollute and extort again to build a car, ship or phone.

I like clean air, and rivers. They are good for every being.

Why not invest in ways to make these processes more eco friendly?

> A modern auto paint shop emits volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during primer, base coat, and clear coat application. The Bay Area AQMD makes permitting a new paint shop nearly impossible. This is THE classic example of what you can't do in CA.

Ah yes, the Bay Area, famously "all of California". And on top of that, the restrictions are mostly in highly populated areas.

It seems to me that there is a fundamental disconnect, between what society needs to function and what some societies are willing to tolerate. Almost everything we take for granted, like potable water, air conditioning, personal computers or long distance transportation, relies on industries generating some sort of externalities.

Regulating these industries is necessary. But we have reached the point, where the regulation makes many of them almost impossible. This has several effects.

First, the society is now dependent on delivery of these dirty products. This is obviously problematic if there is a major crisis that disrupts supply chains, or if those who manufacture them are no longer willing to deliver.

Second, working class collapses. Manufacturing jobs are one of the more stable available. They are generally unionized, or are conductive to unionization. This is unlike service sector jobs. White collar professions can mostly cope. But those who were already disadvantaged find themselves in an even worse position.

Third, the externalities move in locations with less oversight. This can, obviously, cause greater pollution and environmental degradation globally. Further, delivery of the manufactured goods across great distances adds to carbon footprint. This, again, leads to greater environmental toll.

Taken together, benefits of overregulating "polluting" industry to oblivion, are at best local and temporary.

I would also like to note, that the collapse of manufacturing jobs can be easily linked to increased political radicalization.

That being said, it's not all gloom and doom. I firmly believe, that as the impacts of this approach are felt more and more, there will be a push for sensible deregulation. Europe is already leading the way, weakening or delaying some of the more absurd regulation schemes.[1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

I dislike how misleading and emotionally targeted this is and I understand the hate we get as tech people if this is the best we can do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri

https://www.epa.gov/mo/town-flood-and-superfund-looking-back...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ElM_xAtbAY

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-10-04/chevron...

The guy who made this site is selling a $7k stove? Good luck with that, my dude.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/02/16/gasoline-starved-cali...

I appreciate some of the arguments here about pushing pollution outside the state, but this is madness.

How about the ban of asbestos and Chlorofluorocarbons?

What if you ... don't dump your waste in the river? Is it legal if you dispose of your waste properly?

Edit: Now that I’m doing the research a partnership isn’t even needed, just a contract. Which makes sense, the feds cannot hire a private individual to do what would be illegal for them to do themselves… conversely, a company who is contracted to do federal business also enjoys supremacy by virtue of acting for the feds.

"compostable - except in CA"

If this were real instead of dogshit lobbyist slop, you'd see the details, and there's be clear arguments and action plans.

But the action is that they're going to pay politicians off, and the politicians are going to give speeches that start "I went to a website the other day, and it was called Banned in California - you might like electric cars, think they're good, but because of bad regulation, we could never make them here." And that's going to provide cover as they vote for something horrible. And buy a boat with the money they made for doing it.

1) They forgot to list Kid Rock (https://x.com/GovPressOffice/status/1969256868364095868)

2) Good, I'm glad this toxic shit is banned.

3) I wish people that constantly complained about California's regulations/taxes/politics would just quietly see their way out rather than obsessively whine about it. Enjoy Texas/Florida/wherever you go. We'll be ok without you.

https://check-host.net/ip-info?host=bannedincalifornia.org

Just look at what they've done about rebuilding the Palisades, and the nonsense they've perpetrated, allowing people to live and build in places that are completely impossible to make safe to live because of incredibly stupid bureacratic policy conflicts. And then the staggering mismanagement of water resources, allowing huge tax breaks and claims on water rights to giant corporations, then completely taxing and running out farmers and landowners with legacy rights, making it impossible for them to live there.

At least if they drive everyone productive out of the state, the environment will be pristine.

It's like some insanely scaled up version of gentrification, but in the most aggressively, offensively stupid way possible. California is a tasteless joke.

That’s why so many solutions feel like de facto bans: not because the environmental goal isn’t valid, but because the cost of compliance in time, paperwork, and legal risk creates a barrier that only well-resourced actors can navigate. The real economic deadweight loss isn’t always in the policy text — it’s in the thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars spent just to prove you did the minimum.

There’s enormous opportunity right now with data tools and AI agents for qualitative assessment. We don’t have to keep defaulting to rigid checklists that presume every context is the same. With modern sensors, realtime monitoring, and AI that can synthesize qualitative evidence with quantitative data, we can finally shift toward performance-based permits that look at actual impacts rather than adherence to outdated procedural triggers.

Imagine a system where:

Sensors and connected data streams show real emissions or ecological outcomes,

AI agents help translate diverse evidence into risk profiles,

Permits adapt based on performance instead of fixed thresholds divorced from context.

That’s not just a tech fantasy — that’s a pathway to reducing administrative drag while improving environmental protection. The status quo isn’t sustainable environmentally or economically. If we cling to 20th-century process dogma, we’ll keep seeing well-intentioned policies backfire into de facto bans, regulatory bottlenecks, and inequitable access to compliance.