Robin Ingenthron,
I'm very curious where the statement "national support (for lead-free
legislation) seems to correlate in countries with older, more
depreciated, manufacturing lines, as opposed to countries which have
newer, less depreciated lines" comes from. Can you quantify this? Are
you saying that there is evidence that production lines in, say, the UK
or Poland or Italy are older than those in, say, the US or Mexico or
Singapore. This certainly is not my experience. In my experience I've
seen old and new manufacturing lines in the dozen or so countries I've
visited.
And it is naive to consider that the lead-free issue mostly correlates
to manufacturing equipment. Many manufacturers out there will be able
to continue using most of their current equipment even when they
implement lead-free.
Regards,
David Suraski
AIM
+1-401-463-5605 ext. 5210
www.aimsolder.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Ingenthron [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 9:38 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [LF] the tiny amount of lead in electronic assemblies is
irrelevant.
Mr. Santhakumar
As a professional environmentalist and recycler, I am increasingly in
agreement with Joe and Harvey about the lead-free legislation.
First, the release of metals is rarely most important at the point of
solid waste recycling or disposal. For example, more mercury is
produced by gold mining than is produced by mercury disposal and mercury
mining combined. Legislation which results in mercury-free products with
increased gold content would result in more kg. of mercury released into
the environment. (As a caveat, I have not had the time or found anyone
else putting time to research the amount of lead which may be released
by changes in tin mining and copper mining which will result. If it's
shown that mining and exploration will decrease as a result of lf then I
may change my vote).
Second, if the point of recycling (and secondarily, disposal) is the
narrow focus of the lead measurement, then it is true that we recyclers
will produce less lead as a by-product by shredding lead-free boards.
However, we are pretty unconvinced that there will be any measurable
change in our incoming stream over the course of the next 10 years as a
result of lead
free (since so much of the used material we receive is "historical").
For
the amount of money it will take to eliminate that portion of the lead,
we'd rather see it invested in recycling or increasing repairablity and
reuse, which are the main source of our income. (We'd be alarmed if the
lead-free boards were to be less repairable, though we've been told
that's not an issue in previous answers to our posts on this forum).
For me, the single most suspicious thing about lead-free legislation is
that its national support seems to correlate in countries with older,
more depreciated, manufacturing lines, as opposed to countries which
have newer, less depreciated lines. In other words if a country's OEM
is thinking about retooling anyway, it's less of a concern if
competitors with newer plants are forced to retool sooner.
If the environmental benefits are demonstrated (point 1 and 2 above), we
environmentalists are not opposed to this type of "raising the bar" by
executive fiat. But if it's absent, we see it as squandering the
opportunity to leverage a more meaningful environmental activity... Put
that energy into energy conservation or something.
Robin Ingenthron
802-382-8500
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------Leadfee Mail List provided as a service by IPC using LISTSERV
1.8d To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following
text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Leadfree To
temporarily stop delivery of Leadree for vacation breaks send: SET
Leadfree NOMAIL Search previous postings at:
http://listserv.ipc.org/archives Please visit IPC web site
http://www.ipc.org/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional
information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700
ext.5315
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Leadfee Mail List provided as a service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8d
To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in
the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Leadfree
To temporarily stop delivery of Leadree for vacation breaks send: SET Leadfree NOMAIL
Search previous postings at: http://listserv.ipc.org/archives
Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5315
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
