RoHS under fire

The July 1 deadline for RoHS compliance passed quietly. But the volume has been turned up on an engineering community debate that is deeply critical of the directive.

Those speaking out against RoHS claim that the European Union did not base the environmental directive on robust science. In particular, they refer to a number of scientific studies that show the conversion to lead-free solder runs contrary to the best interests of the environment.

Make no mistake: RoHS is not going to be repealed, sources agreed. And it looks like China and several states in the United States will go forward with their own legislation that might include the lead restrictions initiated by the EU. Future green laws are coming from Brussels and elsewhere that will impact the global electronics industry.

Fundamental issues raised by the RoHS opposition, however, go to the heart of environmental legislation and may prompt industry associations to take a closer look at the scientific validity of further directives.

The RoHS debate has also highlighted the noble — but, some say, outdated — concepts that underpin the EU directive. EU authorities started work on green legislation 10 years ago, according to Ab Stevels, an authority on environmental design who holds the chair for applied ecodesign at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Back then, insight into environmental issues was narrower than today, when the directives are coming into effect. "RoHS, WEEE, EuP and Reach were organized according to ideas from 1996," Stevels said.

Critics and questions
Discussions critical of RoHS have been going on for years in industry forums. But the debate took on a new dimension after John Burke, an engineer and environmental consultant based in Santa Clara, Calif., found a scientific study from August 2005 that was conducted by the University of Tennessee for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Titled "Solders in Electronics: A Life-Cycle Assessment," the nearly 500-page report gives evidence that lead-free solders have a worse environmental impact than tin/lead solder in a number of areas, such as nonrenewable-resource use, energy use, global warming, ozone layer depletion and water quality, Burke said.

Burke launched the RoHS Pushback initiative through the Web site www.rohsUSA.com, which he says gets upward of 8,000 hits per day from dozens of countries. His objection to RoHS is currently focused on the lead restriction, he said.

Burke also cited EPA reports from the 1990s with references to landfill studies that determine whether lead can actually leach out of solder in a landfill. Those studies, he claims, found it highly unlikely that lead would leach out of solder.

"The whole argument to remove lead is counterintuitive," Burke said. "The natural inclination is to say yes, lead came out of paint, out of gas, and it should come out of solder. But if you do due diligence, you find out it's not a good idea."

Moreover, EU-driven initiatives force major changes in the way companies around the globe run their businesses. Manufacturers worldwide must comply or get shut out of the EU market. Yet the EU unilaterally decided on RoHS, WEEE and other directives, ignoring that fact, Burke added.

"Anything that's going to impact a global environment should be implemented and decided on a global basis," he said.

If the EU did make a fundamental mistake in targeting leaded solders, the implications are huge. If China and the U.S. implement RoHS in line with Europe, as expected, they would amplify the error around the world, actually increasing harm to the environment, at a cost of billions of dollars to the global electronics industry.

"The most costly piece of RoHS to industry is the replacement of lead in solder," said Mike Kirschner, president of San Francisco-based Design Chain Associates LLC. "Whether there is a return on that in terms of health benefits is very unclear."

Why now?
Various industry sources have looked at RoHS critics skeptically. The RoHS directive was adopted and published in 2003; some question why the opposition chose to rumble at such a late stage.

Moreover, EPA studies could be politicized. Under the Bush administration, the EPA has seen weakened enforcement and has been criticized for putting business interests before the environment.

RoHS critics could also simply be resentful of the additional efforts and financial burden compliance involves. Estimates for global RoHS conversion costs and managing compliance vary widely but have been as high as $20 billion.

With the lead restriction alone, the cost of higher-temperature soldering processes required for lead-free replacements are potentially massive for some companies. Mark Shayler, managing director of U.K.-based environmental consultancy Eco3, said a U.S. mobile-phone repair company estimated lead-free soldering will push up its energy costs by $6 million annually.

Big OEMs have declined to comment on the RoHS debate. Shayler, who has heard support for the RoHS opposition from small companies in the United Kingdom, said some major OEMs agree with the RoHS opposition but wouldn't dare publicly question the directive, for fear of being seen as anti-environment.

Kirschner, who sees both sides of the argument, believes part of the problem is that the opposition does not fully understand that the EU operates under the "precautionary principle," which roughly translates as "Look before you leap."

Under that principle, if reasonable suspicion exists that lead in electronics, for example, will threaten human health or the environment over time, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. Moreover, it's up to industry to prove targeted substances are not harmful.

"If it looks like there'll be a problem, they're likely to ban it until industry can show it shouldn't be banned," Kirschner said.

Nonetheless, he believes a relevant question is whether RoHS is the right legislation for the electronics industry to ease the environmental impact of products. "The EU has done an extraordinarily poor job of describing why these six substances, in their mind, are the highest hitters on ecotoxicity," Kirschner said.

Heart of the debate
The core of the debate is explained by Stevels of Delft University. He said that the environmental field separates into three main categories: potential toxicity, emissions and resources.

If potential toxicity is the primary concern, then lead-free electronics are substantially better for the environment. If emissions are declared most important, the opposite is probably true because of the higher temperature and higher energy needed for lead-free solders.

Ranking resources first, the picture is mixed. Excessive demand for tin as a lead substitute has an impact on resources.

"Does the [lead-free] opposition have a valid argument? It depends on their perspective," Stevels said.

Stevels' point is echoed by the EPA itself. According to an EPA spokeswoman, the cited report from August 2005 does not conclude — as the RoHS critics claim — that lead-free solders are far more harmful to the environment than solders that incorporate lead.

"The report contains the life cycle assessment results for tin-lead and lead-free solders, in both bar and paste form, for 16 impact categories," she said. "In some of the categories, the lead-free solders are expected to have greater [environmental] impacts than the tin-lead solders, while for other categories the opposite is true."

In the "toxicity impact" categories, all of the lead-free solder alternatives had a better life cycle analysis score than the tin/lead solders, the spokeswoman said. By comparison, if "energy use" is the primary criterion, lead-free solders have more harmful environmental impact.

The study did not draw overall conclusions, "because that can only be done by weighing the different impact categories, in other words, determining which impact categories are of greatest importance to the person interpreting the study," she said.

The failure to balance categories goes directly to the heart of the RoHS debate. The European Commission did not set an importance ratio among potential toxicity, emissions and resources when drafting green laws, Stevels added.

"What they have done is, on an emotional basis, decided on RoHS," Stevels said. "In that sense, RoHS is missing an in-depth analysis."

Other green laws
RoHS is not the only directive facing a backlash.

The U.K.'s Association of Manufacturers of Domestic Electrical Appliances (AMDEA) is in a public row with the Department of Trade and Industry over aspects of WEEE. Implementing the directive is already nearly a year overdue. AMDEA's main issue is that it wants the amount of the recycling fee to be visible on new products, a provision to which the U.K. objects.

AMDEA chairman Uwe Hanneck, in a letter to the Financial Times, suggested that the U.K. has cozied up to a few large retailers that want the recycling cost hidden in the cost of the product. These large retailers seem to have "exercised disproportionate influence over the consultation process," the letter said.

Also chided is the forthcoming Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals (Reach) directive, which aims to collect environmental data on some 30,000 chemicals that have been on the world market, most without any significant toxicity testing. Authorities will evaluate substances and, depending on several factors, the chemical may be restricted, or its usage may require authorization.

STMicroelectronics NV and Infineon Technologies AG have publicly criticized the Reachdirective for several reasons, most notably because proprietary chemical mixtures used in R&D processes could be under threat.

"RoHS and Reach are the same story," Stevels added. "They should be about risk management and how to control the risk, rather than upfront restriction of the use of certain substances."

The Energy Using Products (EuP) directive becomes law next year, but most global manufacturers know little if anything about it.

Matthias Lang, a regulatory lawyer at Arqis Rechtsanwalte (Dusseldorf, Germany) who has worked with companies on RoHS compliance issues, noted that EuP is intended to be more workable than its predecessors because specific implementing measures are linked to actual energy usage requirements.

"The EuP has certain procedural safeguards that should allow for a better analysis of practical problems," Lang said. "It's anybody's guess whether this will actually work out."

At the end of the day, Stevels believes the momentum behind the RoHS opposition is not forceful enough to shape directives already in the pipeline. However, a review process will likely happen.

Stevels expects the RoHS directive will undergo something similar to the WEEE directive review that the EU has decided to conduct at the end of 2008 for possible modifications and simplification. The period up to 2008 will be considered preparatory, and enforcement will not be strict or strong.

"Authorities are now much more aware of the practicalities and cost you have when you want to implement — more so than many years ago, when they [mainly] wanted to do environmental good with RoHS," Stevels said.

Despite the difficulties with RoHS, the directive's major redeeming factor is that it forged closer cooperation between manufacturers and suppliers in locating potentially toxic substances in the supply chain and finding substitutes, he said.

"This has been a very useful action, irrespective of the legislation," Stevels said.

Drew Wilson can be reached at xdrewwilsonx@yahoo.com.

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