This is in response to what Mike Kirschner wrote last week on the
environmental benefit of RoHS: "the removal of PBBs and PBDEs are
probably the greatest positive environmental impact of RoHS, but there
is no impartial study I've seen yet that answers the question." Even
that doesn't count as a benefit of RoHS because those substances were
not being used anyway. 

Our industry, as far as I can determine, never did use them (it's been
TBBPA and deca-BDE), and today they aren't even commercially available.
So even without the impartial study we can safely conclude that the
environmental impact from prohibiting them is really zero. No one was
being poisoned before RoHS - by _any_ of the prohibited materials - and
no one is going to be poisoned after RoHS. 

But billions of dollars will have been diverted from socially beneficial
uses - squandered. As a result of the spending we engineers do know a
great deal more about subjects that we had no previous need to know
about, and apart from RoHS still wouldn't. 

 

Gordon Davy 

 


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