I posted to this forum on April 30 my response to the official European
Union questionnaire on the costs of compliance with the RoHS directive
to the person identified on its cover as the contact. That person
answered me today, and I post below my response to that. Those who are
considering completing the questionnaire may find this to be of some
use.

 

Gordon Davy 

 

Thank you for your reply to my comments. The very fact that you replied
has given me a glimmer of hope that some day some RoHS relief will
appear. Of course, unless the other countries that were inspired by the
EU's "greener than thou" attitude of imposing its will on the entire
world enact the same relief, it might turn out to be too little, too
late. As I'm sure Greenpeace is aware, putting the genie back in the
bottle may be too difficult, not just for your company, but for your
client.

Thank you also for expressing your hope to convince me of the need for
my company to fill out and submit the questionnaire. Even though you did
not answer most of the questions in my previous email, I have chosen to
take that expression of hope at face value. (I hope you will understand
why I cannot accept your assurance about the EC's intentions at face
value.) To that end, if you are allowed to provide, as well as collect,
information, answers to these questions (as well as the previous ones)
would help. 

1.	What use do you see for an estimate of the cost of dealing with
RoHS submitted by a manufacturer of EEE outside its scope? My employer
is in that category. In addition to the tin whisker costs I identified
in my previous email, here are a few more examples of how, even though
my company is not required to comply with RoHS, we have found it
necessary to spend time and money a result of it. 

On a part-time basis I have been following RoHS, and before that, WEEE,
since 1999 to keep management informed and advised so are no unpleasant
surprises. I estimate that I have spent five to ten thousand hours doing
this. I've learned a lot, but had it not been for environmental activist
organizations and the legislators they were able to influence with their
disinformation, what I've learned would have little intrinsic value.
There are plenty of other things I would have preferred to use that time
to learn. But because of WEEE and RoHS, I believe that spending that
time in that way has been more important to my employer than other
activities I might have engaged in instead. 

I spent many hours scrutinizing the WEEE and RoHS directives to
determine whether our product line was covered or not. My company also
retained legal counsel for the same purpose. As things stand now, the
military exclusion in WEEE Article 2.3 remains conspicuously absent in
RoHS. Some of the product descriptions in the WEEE Annex IB are so broad
that they could be taken to apply to just about any electronic system.
So even though there by now seems to be a universal consensus that the
WEEE military exclusion applies to RoHS, it has never been made
official, and in fact, the TAC issued an unofficial opinion a few years
ago saying just the opposite.

I participated in a meeting just this morning to discuss how we can deal
with components that we have previously bought with a tin-lead
termination finish and now are available only with a lead-free tin
finish, where the component manufacturer has decided not to change the
part number. We are also trying to decide, where a components engineer
for a particular program has decided after a whisker risk analysis of a
component it wants to use that is only available with a lead-free tin
finish that it is willing to accept it with that finish, whether to
regard the acceptance as for that program only or for all programs. Were
it not for RoHS, that would be a non-issue.

We would like to be able to use certain ball grid arrays that are now
available only with lead-free solder balls. Without risking damage to
other components from an increased soldering temperature, we cannot
attach them to an assembly with tin-lead solder because the resulting
connections will be unable to withstand as many thermal cycles as are
needed. Replacing the balls with tin-lead solder balls is expensive, may
reduce the reliability over what it would be had tin-lead solder balls
been used in the first place, and voids the manufacturer's warranty. We
sent a manager to a national industry association meeting earlier this
year to discuss how to deal with that single issue. 

Given that situation, namely that my company has already spent a lot of
money because of RoHS despite not having its products covered by it, can
you paint a plausible picture of how our submitting a completed
questionnaire would influence decisions on relief from RoHS? If
permission were granted for tin plating on all component terminations,
and for BGA solder balls, to contain lead, that would be relief.
However, given the way that lead has been demonized it strains my
imagination to picture either of those eventualities. It might make very
good technical sense and still get vetoed because it is politically
unpalatable.

2.	You are seeking information on the sales volume and trends in
sales volume. My company makes such EEE products as military and
aerospace systems priced in the millions of dollars, but it doesn't make
a lot of them. Manufacturers of consumer products have much higher sales
volumes. In what way will sales volume information be used to influence
the analysis? It should be obvious before getting any questionnaires
back that the cost of compliance falls disproportionately on small and
medium-sized enterprises. So will be the cost of preparing answers to
your questionnaire. 

How will the quantification of that burden help your analysis? Do you
have any strategy to identify and draw attention to companies that have
already gone out of business as a result of WEEE and RoHS? Also, the
first time an enviro-cop seizes EEE for being non-conforming, the cost
of compliance for the offending company will go way up, even if the
company is eventually able to prevail in court. Have you any way of
estimating the cost of responding to a seizure?

There is no one at any company who will be able to answer all your
questionnaire's questions - it will have to be a team effort. What sort
of quality control do you have in place to verify the accuracy of the
answers you get? Your client will surely want to know the answer to this
question.

3.	You say, "I can only assure you that (from our experience) it is
the intention of the EC and of our study agency to quantify the
important impacts of the RoHS Directive on costs borne by stakeholders
(e.g. compliance verification) and relate them to (quantified)
benefits." I have no doubt of your intention and ability to quantify the
costs that people report to you. However, it's not cost that I am
concerned about.

I'm sure you are not planning to wait until you have accumulated all the
cost data before you start analyzing the benefits. My concern - just how
will you relate the costs to the "(quantified) benefits"? Benefits of
what? The RoHS directive? What benefit of any kind, even non-quantified,
does RoHS confer to society? 

What are the credentials of the persons tasked with performing the
analysis of benefits? Here are some questions to put to those people.
How many cases of poisoning have there been before the enactment of
RoHS, and how many will its enactment prevent? How do you think that the
prohibited substances get from EEE, in use or after being discarded,
into people? Do you know that agencies responsible for providing
drinking water report no increase in the lead content of their source
water over decades, and do you know how they control the lead content in
the water they deliver?

You say that many of the points I raised in my previous email you
already knew about, so I assume that you are aware that most engineers
involved with RoHS compliance believe that it has no benefit at all.
Perhaps you knew that is also the position that was taken eight years
ago by the board of directors of the IPC trade association. As I said
before, if the people doing the cost-benefit analysis recognized that
RoHS has no benefit, then detailed analysis of costs that you have been
commissioned to perform would be superfluous. 

Since I doubt that your client will allow you to say that RoHS is
without redeeming social value or to make recommendations based on that
premise, without my having some idea of what the people who will be
doing the cost-benefit analysis believe the benefit of RoHS is, I am
concerned that the many hours that it would take to prepare a cost
analysis - it has taken long enough to prepare this list of questions -
might very well be to no avail. 

4.	Up until very recently, the European Commission was quite
explicit that it did not care to hear about the cost of compliance with
WEEE and RoHS. I watched the political squabbling between the Commission
and the TAC on such matters as the use of cadmium for electrical
contacts and whether the TAC adequately kept the Commission informed of
its activity. I know that it has been very difficult to learn the names
of TAC members - perhaps because of the unpopularity of WEEE and RoHS
they seem to prefer anonymity. The fact that your company has been asked
to prepare the questionnaire and analyze the results indicates that
there has been some sort of change. 

But I hope that you will understand, given my many years of observation
of the Commission's attitude and behavior, why I remain suspicious that
the change is nothing more than a sham in response to pressure being
applied at the moment. The Commission's memorandum presenting the desire
to make changes to RoHS and WEEE makes it look as if it were a
mid-course correction that it had been planning all along to make. I
seriously doubt that, but I don't know the real reason. 

By now, it should be obvious even to the EC that RoHS has had unintended
consequences. Besides asking your company to conduct a cost-benefit
analysis for it, what gesture of good will is the Commission willing to
make now to overcome the deep-seated distrust it has engendered? Would
they be willing to add the WEEE military exclusion to RoHS, just to make
it official? They don't need a cost-benefit analysis for making de jure
what is already de facto. 

What sort of explicit acknowledgement that they have been too harsh and
unresponsive are they willing to make now? How transparent are they
willing to be in explaining the reason for their change of heart? Are
they willing to repudiate in any way the environmental activist
organizations that misinformed them and pushed them to enact such
crippling legislation? To put it quite bluntly, why should I trust the
Commission to pay anything more than lip service to whatever
recommendations your company makes? 

I assume that you wouldn't be willing to take on the task, no matter how
rewarding it might be financially, if you didn't truly believe that
meaningful relief was a real possibility. I'm sure you wouldn't want to
engage in a sham. So other than their seeing their willingness to retain
your company to perform this service, exactly what is this experience
you refer to that explains why you trust them to grant meaningful relief
- ever? 

You say you hope that you can convince me of the need to fill in the
questionnaire. I think I've explained why I need something more
substantive than just your stated assurance that I can trust the EC. If
you want to convince me that I should recommend preparing a cost
analysis, I would like to get answers to these questions. If you haven't
the time to answer them all, questions 3 and 4 are of the greatest
interest. 

To put it another way, I am faced with a cost-benefit analysis in
deciding what to do with your questionnaire. I have a rough idea of what
it would cost to complete it; I don't have any idea of the probability
that the completed questionnaire will have a discernible effect on
obtaining any relief from the impact of RoHS on my company. 

One last question. I participate in the IPC Leadfree forum, an email
listserv with roughly seven hundred subscribers. I posted to that forum
the email I sent to you, and I intend to post this one, too. I assume
that you have no objection to my quotation above of one sentence from
your reply; would you be agreeable to my posting more of what you wrote
me? Would you care to post to the Leadfree forum yourself, so you can
have an opportunity to convince others?