OT-ish - RoHS Compliance

[Tournifreak]

Dear all - I work in the electronics industry and we are having to remove cadmium and various other fairly nasty materials from our products. Which I guess is fair enough. But we're also removing lead from tin-lead solder. The reason that has been given for this is to prevent environmental damage when the product is eventually disposed of.

The thing I don't understand is - and I've been on training for this subject and no-one has been able to answer the question - is why doesn't it affect building materials?

I reckon my house has at least 2 square meters of lead on the roof. (It's a complex design) Rainwater runs off this all the time and then seeps into the ground and into lakes and rivers.

I still have a quantity of lead water pipes in my house (as do many, many people).

So is there really any good reason for removing lead from electronic components and PCBs when there's all this lead being sued in the building industry? Or is it just another piece of do-gooder thumb-twidling buraucratic EU nonsense? (With big fines)

Interested if anyone knows the answer...

Jon.

[Brian Sharrock]

Please, please; tell me that you have not written of your concerns to 'two-jags'!

[meow2222]

the concensus in the tron industry is that its bs, and the newer solders are in fact more toxic, not less. Just one more case of idiots nannying.

NT

[Tournifreak]

Don't worry Brian. I won't tell if you don't. Jon.

[dom]

Guess, but maybe electronics can end up incinerated and result in an increase in atmospheric lead (hence tackling lead in petrol first), whilst lead flashing is unlikely to.

[justcalledfubar]

There are also concerns over "tin whiskers" due to lead not being used in tin plating - there was a story on slashdot a year or so ago.

More info here:

[cupra]

[Tournifreak]

processes are inherently more difficult to make reliable.

Jon.

[Andy Hall]

There is an exemption from ROHSS for telecommunication infrastructure and management equipment plus anything classed as a server.

If you thought that this was a game led by idiots, take a look at the WEEE Directive. The government is in total disarray on that one.

[nightjar]

A few years ago, some scientists ran tests on the Holland and Holland shooting ground - an area that has been peppered with lead for a couple of centuries or so. They found that the lead had no significant effect on the toxicity of the soil, although the amount of lead shot made recovering it an economic proposition.

Colin Bignell

[Steven Briggs]

In message , Tournifreak writes

Yep, all complete and total bollocks. And the last thing that struggling industry needs right now in the face of far east competition is a huge wad of costs for new process plant and expensive engineering time to trawl thought all the component inventory checking lead-free / RoHS compatibility. If you're making huge volumes of a few products maybe its not so bad, but many smaller manufacturers make a wide range of products in small numbers, =big headache.

The nastier materials (cd, cr) being knocked on the head by RoHS I could understand, really it affects a small number of component manu's. But with the WEEE directive coming along, all the electronics has the scope to be recycled and the lead reclaimed, so why bother removing it in the first place? Lower product reliability may simply mean faster replacement cycles and more WEEE churning through the consumer chain. European Bureaucrats - shootings too good for them.

[AJH]

Yes it does look like incineration of residual waste is the target for a lot of this legislation.

AJH

[Chris Bacon]

Humph. Lead is very occasionally found "native". Other metals similarly found are silver, copper, mercury, gold, etc. IIRC.

[Chris Bacon]

If specifications are made, presumably everyone providing goods has to comply. That should put competition on an even level.

[Steven Briggs]

If only it were that simple. There's a lot of exemptions from RoHS (e.g. anything automotive), and also a lot of stuff that comes in from China under the distributors own brand names can be very time consuming to confirm the paper chase. 5% of the parts on a particular product can easily take 95% of the time to sort.

[unopened]

The problem is that current medical thinking is that there is no non-hazardous level of lead in the bloodstream. The following on-line American set of articles explains the situation quite well:

< >

"Blood lead levels once considered safe are now considered hazardous, with no known threshold."

RoHS makes exceptions for uses where there are no viable alternatives - whether building materials get through for flashing, for example, I don't know. How shotgun pellets make it, I don't know.

The article says also:

"Because lead is spread so widely throughout the environment, it can now be found in everyone's bodies; most people have lead levels that are orders of magnitude greater than that of ancient times (Flegal and Smith 1992, 1995) and within an order of magnitude of levels that have resulted in adverse health effects (Budd et al., 1998)."

Major environmental sources of lead have been dramatically reduced: no more lead in petrol; substantial removal of lead from paint; no lead solder in food cans; no new lead water pipes, which has had a good effect -

"=2E..the amount of lead in Americans' diets has declined substantially.In the early 1980s, adults ingested approximately 56 =B5g/day of lead in food; estimates from the early 1990s ranged from 1.8 to 4.2 =B5g/day (ATSDR 1999)."

Most of the easy gains have been made, so it now falls to make more difficult reductions in the use of lead, hence RoHS. Without it (and WEEE), the amount of lead in landfill (and incineration) would simply gradually increase, increasing the environmental burden.

I haven't seen a economic cost/risk evaluation, but I'll presume the projected amount spent on RoHS and WEEE will gain (across the population at large) extended, more healthy lives, and the dismal science of economics tells us this is a good thing, and is cost effective.

Regards,

Sid

[meow2222]

there might be some truth to that is everyone did what they 'should', but consumer electronics, primarily imported asian goods, routinely flouts basic legal requirements. So it will make us significantly less competitive, and thus as a society less well off, and thus in the longer run less able to implement safety improvements where theyre really needed.

Its strange to see all this faffing about over trivia when 25% of the population dies from easily prevented causes. Denial seems to be popular today.

NT

[Chris Bacon]

So why aren't the people importing them prosecuted? Why isn't the stock impounded?

[Andy Hall]

Who would you imagine will police that?

[meow2222]

I dont know, I suppose no-one cares enough to do it.

NT