Gordon

Bravo! However, like Seth, I think we must separate the "lead-free" from
the "recycling" issues. On recycling, I agree with you partially. I
cannot see how the EU 75% of the weight of the PC assembly could ever be
recycled. Just another technocratic pipe dream. On the other hand, there
are components that can be recycled economically. Large wound
components, with a high metal content, are suitable for copper recovery
at little cost. Picture tube faceplates are slightly more marginal, but
is shown to be profitable in Germany. I maintain that solder is the
easiest component of all to recover up to 85-90% in a Hydrosqueegee
style machine (you're old enough to remember these!). I'll grant you
that the recovered solder may be OK for mechanical (as opposed to
electronics) applications, but, at extra cost similar to that of
purifying virgin solder, purification to electronics quality would be
possible. Beyond these specific recycling apps (of course, I'll add
thermoplastic casings), I agree there is little else worth the candle.
Even if only marginally economical, recycling the copper, lead and tin
in these cases has two great advantages. Every kg of metal which is
recycled is so much less ore mined and so much metal extraction
required, emitting vast quantities of CO2, probably causing climate
change. More important, every kg of metal recycled is approximately 2 kg
of sulfur less emitted into the atmosphere, mostly as SOx. This is why I
consider ***reasonable*** recycling necessary, but certainly not
extracting the last gram of extractable material at the price gold was
20 years ago.


Brian

"Davy, Gordon" wrote:
>
> Over two years ago, when IPC first announced its initiative to get the
> electronics industry to go leadfree, it acknowledged that there was no
> technical basis for it, but cited rather competitive (read Japan) and
> legislative (read EU) pressures, and asserted that since it could be done,
> it should be done. Shortly thereafter the Board of Directors issued a
> position statement (excerpt below) that stated this. Given major attention
> back then was a Japanese mini-disk player, which, it was claimed, solely on
> the basis of going lead-free (solder only, it turned out), increased its
> market share in Japan by a factor of three (from 4.8% to 15%, it turned
> out). No other example was produced, but apparently that was enough to make
> believers of the Board members.
>
> Since that time, as predicted we've seen a lot of activity in Europe with
> the proposed legislation that will make it illegal (starting in 2007) to
> sell many kinds of electronic products if they contain lead, and will
> restrict the freedom of consumers on how they dispose of their end-of-life
> electronic products. We have also seen lots of activity in Japan to bring
> lead-free electronic products to market. What we have not seen is much
> discussion about competitive pressures in Japan based on public demand. We
> have heard no more about the mini-disk player and its current market share,
> nor have we heard any more about the increase in market share of any other
> lead-free electronic product in Japan in support of this notion.
>
> Now we have some valuable new information. Bob Willis recently referred in a
> posting to the trip that the SMART Group took to Japan last spring. If you
> follow the link that he provided, you can get to an article on the trip that
> was published in Electronics Manufacture and Test. (I believe that he gave
> us this link once before; I don't recall its being discussed on the Leadfree
> forum at the time.) I have excerpted the parts of the article (see below)
> that show that the competitive pressure doesn't exist - there is no clamor.
>
> I strongly suspect that the incorrect belief about Japan's public demand for
> leadfree was no simple mistake. It was another modern-day or urban myth -
> propaganda - dished up to us to serve someone's agenda. We were deliberately
> deceived. (My thanks to the Group for telling the truth.) The article makes
> clear that the real reason that Japan is going lead-free is not public
> demand but electronic manufacturing companies there that have high-level
> executives who make that kind of decision without a commensurate
> responsibility for the bottom line. As Malcolm Warwick points out in the
> article, "it is all about belief in what they are doing." Regardless of how
> we might feel about people acting according to their beliefs instead of the
> budget, in this case, it isn't science and technology - the correct term is
> superstition.
>
> (It is worth noting that the economy of this country has been in a slump for
> over a decade, and its prospects for improvement don't appear too bright
> yet. Maybe there's a connection to the way companies in this country are
> run. I'll leave it to the economists to investigate the influence of
> superstition on profitability.)
>
> The information from the SMART Group's trip to Japan is important because it
> is repeatedly asserted, including in this forum, that the leadfree movement
> is unstoppable due to public demand - either through the marketplace or the
> legislature. It may be that by, say, 2010 leadfree will be a done deal (and
> certainly prudence demands preparing for this eventuality), but something
> else needs repeating: no one knows the future except God. That should now be
> obvious to all those people who were sure that the NASDAQ would continue its
> climb indefinitely, and that fiber optic networking was a great investment.
>
> So much for Japan; how about Europe? 2007 is still a long way off, and the
> EU and its currency aren't doing all that well, either. Lots of things can
> happen to make people rub their eyes and say, "What could we have been
> thinking? and "How could we have been so misled about lead?" Harvey Miller
> has been predicting this for a long time.
>
> (As an aside, for those who are tempted to liken leadfree electronics to
> leadfree paint or leadfree gasoline, consider this critical distinction:
> there was ample evidence in those cases that lead in those products was
> causing lead poisoning. Removal of lead from those products drastically
> reduced blood lead levels. No one has stepped forward to offer any evidence
> in the case of lead in electronics. It is just guilt by association,
> exploited by irresponsible environmental activists.)
>
> Just a couple of weeks ago  the European Commission adopted a 35-page White
> Paper on European Governance
> http://europa.eu.int/comm/governance/index_en.htm, which proposes changes in
> the EU policy-making process to incorporate more "openness, accountability,
> and responsibility." The first three paragraphs from the Executive Summary
> to that white paper appear below.
>
>         Today, political leaders throughout Europe are facing a real
> paradox. On the one hand, Europeans want them to find solutions to the major
> problems confronting our societies. On the other hand, people increasingly
> distrust institutions and politics or are simply not interested in them.
>         The problem is acknowledged by national parliaments and governments
> alike. It is particularly acute at the level of the European Union. Many
> people are losing confidence in a poorly understood and complex system to
> deliver the policies that they want. The Union is often seen as remote and
> at the same time too intrusive.
>         The Irish "no" highlights the impact of these problems on many
> people. This was reflected not only in the final outcome of the referendum,
> but also in the low turnout and quality of the debate which preceded it.
>
> It has been stated before that the average European citizen's level of
> interest in leadfree is quite low (a lot lower in some countries than in
> others). Certainly no one has asserted - let alone offered any data to
> suggest - that it is higher anywhere in Europe than in Japan. Suppose that
> the European public had been told the truth: that lead in electronic
> products is not a threat to anyone's health, that recycling electronic
> products doesn't benefit the environment, and that leadfree and recycling
> would increase the cost of electronic products. Suppose they then had the
> opportunity to vote on this instead of having the decision made for them by
> anonymous (closed, non-accountable, irresponsible, by the Commission's own
> admission) bureaucrats. (These bureaucrats even voted to make it illegal to
> tell the public  - whom they purportedly are serving - how much recycling
> was costing them. How's that for openness?) What would the outcome have
> been? The white paper acknowledges "serious problems of governance." The
> authors are hopeful in their recommendations, but there is no way to know
> what the EU in 2007 will be like, or for that matter, that it will even
> exist. (How many people foresaw the demise of the Soviet Union?) Certainly
> the above suggests cracks in the infrastructure, and the history of the
> region suggests that major disagreements could erupt that would render the
> EU leadfree and recycling directives totally irrelevant.
>
> As an example of not being able to know the future, I remember back in the
> late 1980s when bureaucrats in the US Navy, with its "Weapons Spec" WS-6536
> Rev E, introduced sweeping new restrictions on the way that soldering was to
> be done on any electronic product sold to it, purportedly to ensure high
> reliability. These restrictions then appeared in DOD-STD-2000, which applied
> to all "high-reliability" military electronic hardware. At the time,
> contractors were told "no tailoring: accept it as written or don't bid", and
> the prospects for relief looked very bleak. Yet a few years later, a much
> relaxed MIL-STD-2000 was issued, and of course today with US military
> acquisition reform even that is gone. What brought about the change? The
> military brass eventually found out the truth: field failure of solder
> connections was rare (most of those that did fail were due to design errors,
> not the soldering process). They concluded that such draconian measures were
> unwarranted, and reigned in the bureaucrats. Some of those who had been most
> prominent in throwing their weight around vanished.
>
> It would be hard for a person who did not live through those years to
> imagine how much anguish contractors went through to comply with
> requirements based on the intuitions of these officious souls. It should be
> recognized that like Japanese companies and the European Commission already
> mentioned, and as in bureaucracies everywhere, the Navy had appointed people
> who were charged with minimizing risk - to electronic hardware in this case
> - but with no responsibility for the cost to their employer - US taxpayers
> in this case - resulting from the rules they invented. Rules based on an
> urban myth prevailed for years, but not indefinitely.
>
> To me leadfree and recycling together are like a house of cards (although
> not yet showing any signs of collapse), because, as the IPC position
> statement makes clear, there is no technical justification for all this
> activity. What keeps this house erect is urban myths propagated by
> irresponsible environmental activists to frighten people into contributing
> to their organizations, and irresponsible bureaucrats in positions of power
> who have no motivation to challenge them, and many of whom no doubt believe
> them.
>
> If just one percent of the money now being spent by electronics
> manufacturers to figure out how to respond to these myths by producing
> leadfree products were spent on telling the public (particularly in Japan
> and Europe) the truth, as suggested above (that lead in electronics is not a
> threat to anyone's health, that recycling electronic products is a waste of
> money, and that they have been lied to by self-serving organizations
> masquerading as public-spirited groups concerned about the environment),
> that house just might collapse, and quickly. People usually aren't too happy
> to find out that those they trusted have lied to them.
>
> To my way of thinking, the potential benefits of this truth-telling outweigh
> the risk of failure. We don't know how it would work out because no one has
> tried. It is to be hoped that the decision makers at the companies that have
> agreed to pay to support the upcoming EIA-IPC life-cycle assessment study to
> find the truth about leadfree have not themselves been deceived by the
> propaganda and that they are responsible for the bottom line. If so, and if
> the assessment itself is conducted in a scientifically rigorous manner
> untainted by superstition and dogma, perhaps they will be willing to
> allocate some of those funds to telling the truth they find to the rest of
> the world, even if it turns out to be politically incorrect.
>
> In any case, the next time you read a claim made on this forum or elsewhere
> that the future of leadfree is a foregone conclusion, just remember how
> limited any of us is at knowing the future. Remember that leadfree and
> recycling are unsupported by truth, and ponder the long-term prospects for
> such a situation. It has lasted for over two years; can it last for ten?
>
> Gordon Davy
> Baltimore, MD
> [log in to unmask]
> 410-993-7399
>
> Excerpt from "Japan Progresses Down the Lead-free Path", Electronics
> Manufacture and Test, April 2001, pp. 25-30.
>         This was a SMART Group mission supported by the [Department of Trade
> and Industry]'s International Technology Service. Its purpose was to
> establish the status of leadfree soldering in Japan. An important step
> before embarking on the trip was to identify preconceptions about what the
> team would find. The principal one of these was that market forces were
> pushing along the move to lead-free manufacturing. A hunt round Tokyo's
> shops soon dispelled this theory. It became clear that vendors were unaware
> of the environmental benefits of individual products. More surprisingly,
> there was very little information on the product packaging. Many companies
> have environmental logo's based around a 'green leaf ' theme, but there is
> no universally accepted symbol. Moreover, these symbols only indicate that a
> product conforms to its manufacturers environmental code of practice. This
> may include the use of lead-free solders but only a small number conveyed
> this on the packaging. It was obvious from this that adoption of lead-free
> is not market driven. A new TV advert for a Panasonic mini-disc player is
> the first to mention lead-free as a selling point, even though a lead-free
> version of the product had been available for two years. Nick Jolly
> commented: "Most of the companies we looked at did mention lead-free in
> their brochures, and usually had separate brochures on their environmental
> policy and performance, but for whatever reason they did not decide that it
> was necessary or appropriate to market this to the consumers."
>         Nor has legislation played a significant role, not Japanese
> legislation anyway. It is true that the added impetus for the abolition of
> lead was driven by the first draft of the European WEEE directive back in
> 1998. The slipping back of a European lead ban from 2004 to 2008 [the date
> that was proposed at the time of writing], has not altered the roadmaps of
> the Japanese companies who planned to work well within the initial date.
> There is a limited amount of indirect pressure from Japanese legislation.
> Lead is only permitted in certain types of landfill site which carries a
> cost premium, and there is also new legislation concerning recycling that
> requires companies to take back products, although there is no specifics as
> to how much of them is recycled.
>         Instead the initiative has been taken up by the individual
> companies. 'Corporate Environmental Consciousness' was a term that recurred
> at many of the companies visited and it was this that left the most profound
> impression on the returning mission team. Philip White explained: "They have
> senior level directors who are responsible for the environmental programme,
> which includes lead-free, and having this at such a high level, it is then a
> case of it will be done and so just getting on with it. Lead-free is not a
> stand-alone issue, it just forms part of the overall environmental package."
> Malcolm Warwick took up the theme: "They have a completely different
> philosophy. In Europe we say 'How much is it going to cost you?' in Japan
> they decide they are going to do something and then decide the most
> efficient and profitable way of going about it. It is all about belief in
> what they are doing."
>
> Excerpt from the IPC Board of Directors Position Statement
>         The US electronic interconnection industry, represented by the IPC,
> uses less than 2% of the world's annual lead consumption. Furthermore, all
> available scientific evidence and US government reports indicate that the
> lead used in US printed wiring board (PWB) manufacturing and electronic
> assembly produces no significant environmental or health hazards.
> Nonetheless, in the opinion of IPC, the pressure to eliminate lead in
> electronic interconnections will continue in the future from both the
> legislative and competitive sides.
>
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