July 1st, 2006
Folks,
Well today is "The Day," RoHS starts, but the furor continues. I would like to review some points:
1. The EU and the world are choking on WEEE (Waste of Electrical and Electronic Equipment). The growth of WEEE in the EU is 3 times that of other waste and 90% is disposed of with no pre-treatment. With the advent of continuously new technology at lower costs this trend will continue and likely accelerate.
2. The WEEE directive is a recycling law aimed at attacking this crisis
3. RoHS is a directive whose first intent is to make recycling safer and easier by eliminating materials from products that make recycling more difficult (lead, mercury, cadmium, CrVI, and the flame retardants).
Notice that nothing in the above talks about protecting the environment from lead or the other materials. It all addresses the need to facilitate re-cycling. People continue to miss this point.
I have reviewed the EPA reports that are being used to support the claim that RoHS compliant assembly buts more burden on the environment. Let's say I agree with this argument. The people that support this position say, correctly I believe, that non RoHS compliant assembly does not put much burden on the environment e.g. the amount of lead introduced in to the environment by electronic assembly is <0.5% of total. So RoHS compliant assembly may be somewhat more environmentally burdensome, than non RoHS compliant assembly which is not very burdensome at all. But RoHS compliant assembly enables us to more easily and safely rid the world of millions of tons of E waste, likely a far more important concern.
Some of the estimated environmental burden of RoHS is increased silver use in solder. I think that this use may be overstated. So I don't completely by into the "increased environmental burden" of RoHS compliant assembly. My reason to question the issue? Since silver is a precious metal, people will want to reclaim it. My friends at Sea View Technologies, reclaim metal even from non RoHS compliant products. The allure of silver will increase this profitable recycle industry, likely reducing increased silver use.
On other RoHS items:
1. Note that Apple is pulling some products because of non RoHS compliance.
2. Even though I may disagree on some points with the folks at Operation Pushback, I think their website is great and very helpful. We all learn from open and friendly debate.
3. A small company (from Cypress I believe, I lost the link to this story, if any reader has it please post it) has announced that they are going out of business because they can't make the RoHS switch and they just found out about it a short time ago. Hello? I know this state of affairs is not uncommon, but is a company really connected to their industry if they have never heard of RoHS and they make electronic products? It would mean not reading SMT, Circuits Assembly, Global SMT and Packaging, etc or never attending an APEX or SMTAI meeting in the last 5 years. I try to be sympathetic, but it is about like a cardiologist who has never heard of Lipitor!
Cheers,
Dr. Ron
Dan Meringer:
This was sent to me from a colleague who is a Cyprus expat:
RoHS, WEEE Leave Casualties
By John F. Mason -- 6/22/2006
The purpose of the EU Commissionâs directives -- Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Waste from Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) was to make the environment safer for the planet and its inhabitants, and in time it will. Meanwhile, it has left a very unsafe business environment for some companies.
RoHS will go into effect within days on July 1. WEEE became a law last year. But adhering to the stringent rules -- eliminating the banned substances for more expensive metals and changing manufacturing procedures -- has been costly for all, hard going for some, and a total disaster for at least one.
The disaster we know about -- and there are undoubtedly more -- is Advanced Intelligent Automatic Systems Ltd. (AIAS) in Cyprus, a private company established in 1984 with operational headquarters in Nicosia. It specializes in the design, development and manufacture of electronic information and display systems. The companyâs R&D department, besides its hardware design capabilities, develops the operating system of its products as well as the application software that communicates with the machines. The company had a staff of 35 at peak periods.
AIASâs products and the products of its suppliers and associates were known for their quality, excellent modular design and for their reliability and durability. All its products followed international standards of excellence, such as CE mark, NTCIP, IP65, ISO9001, OSHAS18001, and various communication standards. All products were at least IP65 insulated. The company provided standard, as well as specialized total-system solutions.
Customers included the governments of Cyprus and Greece, all banks in Cyprus including the Central Bank of Cyprus, stock exchanges, airports, seaports, municipalities, the police, hotels, stadiums, schools, factories, shops, offices, exchange bureaus and generally, all types of enterprises.
AIAS, in its effort to provide better, more advanced, solutions made agreements with various associates that could help in system integration using the latest technologies. Such companies are the Advisor group, Algosystems, Graphotyp and Intellisys in Greece, Telecom Italia and Technovision in Italy, Hand Held products, and Sunnywell Corp. in the United States, Tradition Ltd. in Russia, and others.
Although described as a manufacturer of circuit boards, the company began to produce, and sell, microprocessor-based systems -- equipment that included LED displays for outdoor and indoor messages, for exchange rates, time and temperature, scoreboards graphics arrivals and departures and gas stations.
The company produced the ECO-LED to replace the fluorescent and neon light from outdoor night signs that provided 90 percent energy savings. The company chose high luminosity for all its LEDs so they would be visible, not only at night, but at any time of the day with the very bright natural luminosity of the area.
In a one-on-one exchange, Andreas Gabriel, the owner and managing director of the plant, as well as head system software engineer, spoke openly about his situation. âHad the company been more aggressive, the plant could have expanded enormously by reaching out to more neighbors,â he said. âBesides Greece and Turkey, it could have set up sales offices in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan -- all good markets for a variety of products, as it is for Cyprusâ much heralded âfour-seasonâ tourism industry.
âBut we more or less dedicated ourselves to cover the needs of Cyprus and Greece. More than 30 percent of the work was exported to Europe, mainly to Greece, with some to Africa, and Asia. Our best year ever with exports reached $1.5 million.
âThen the sky fell in,â Gabriel continued. âWe suddenly learned of the RoHS and WEEE directives. We didnât even know they existed since no one from the government had informed us. They were apparently not interested, which was particularly annoying for a government that invests a mere 0.3 percent of its GDP in R&D, leaving that endeavor up to the individual.
âThe necessary changes were overwhelming. For example, having to replace lead solder with silver alloys and the new lead-free materials, such as integrated circuits, forced us to replace all our equipment and to move from âorder manufacturingâ to mass production. The cost of setting up a new factory using CNC machines, automatic placement systems, laser soldering, without even considering purchasing the very best machinery, would have reached $1.3 million. To replace the stock we needed, $200,000 more, and if we wanted to produce the same products again we would have had to replace not only the printed circuit boards but change the operating system, as well. I figured all this would cost more than a million dollars. If we had wanted to expand, starting up new products for extended markets this figure would have jumped to $1.5 million, which we simply could not afford.â
Gabriel noted that because there is no mass production needed in Cyprus and the company did not have the necessary export contacts, possible solutions would have been to set up sales offices in the neighboring countries, merge with a foreign company, or sell product ideas. But without the finances to back that, nothing was done, he said, noting that the Cyprus government would have subsidized such a move by 30 percent and cut the tax on the foreign company joining AIAS to 10 percent.
âThe only bright aspect for me personally, as a software engineer who spent six years studying and many more designing operating systems, is that I believe our company helped Cyprus and its customers in general because we cared. All our products are still working. We are specialists and we like what we do. But thatâs all over.
âAll our products are still working. But when we go, who will look after the government projects when maintenance ends? We made 30 scoreboards, 97 percent of the Cyprus market. What will happen to them? We are specialists and excellent at our work and we care. But thatâs over.â
Gabriel continued to note that his partner and R&D director, Savvas Hadjixenofontos, is a âgeniusâ at producing a constant stream of innovative ideas. He asked the Ministry of Industry to work with him in developing high-tech incubators in Cyprus, and after four years of waiting has still not received a reply, according to Gabriel, who further noted that when Hadjixenofontos asked a French incubator company, they welcomed him and his idea.
âHad we known what the future held in store there were precautions we could have taken. We could have started laying off employees, making plans to pay our debts, which have reached $800,000. We could have stopped buying materials and production equipment to make non-RoHS-compliant products. But we werenât told,â Gabriel concluded. âUnless a miracle takes place, all our work and dreams are gone.â
© 2006, Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Jeff:
I know it seems that a company should have known about RoHS, but the company I work for didn't know until about May of 2005. We did not actually start working on RoHS compliance until October 2005 and still do not have responses from suppliers on over thirty percent of our purchased parts list. (We sent compliance questionnaires on November 10)
I just graduated college last year and did not start here until August 2005. I follow the electronics industry fairly regularly and I had never heard of RoHS.
Basically, no one at my company knew about RoHS before last year. Now, however, there are at least two or three people here keeping our "ears to the ground".