Environmental legislation should do one thing: improve the environment.

As I write, 284 letters have been sent to the EU in support of exemption request 15 under round 6 of stakeholder public consultation. That proposal dates to last May, when I requested all lead in solder for the purposes of electrical interconnection be exempted from RoHS because the “replacements” pose a much greater environmental burden.

Do I expect RoHS to change because of this? To be perfectly honest, not right away. I’ve set 2008 as my personal target. Do I expect that the continuing exemption requests we are seeing on RoHS will change the way REACH and other unilateral European environmental legislation is rolled out? Absolutely!

The point about environmental legislation is, fundamentally, it should improve the environment. If we have learned one thing from RoHS, it is legislation should be founded on facts. This means that (preferably) during the proposal stage the legislators or their consultants perform at least some research into the materials and the supposed harm they pose, or, if not at the outset, then as soon as reasonable objections are raised.

In this case, that dates to 2004, when Roland Sommer of New Zealand submitted the first exemption request for lead in solders on environmental grounds. That request was turned down at a committee meeting before public consultation took place with stakeholders. Let’s not hear any more whining about “too little, too late” on exemption requests; for RoHS, they were on the docket at an early stage. Due diligence was not.

The Technical Advisory Committee and the EU turned down that original exemption request out of hand without thorough investigation or looking at the environmental data presented, so at least we can say exemption request 15 is “out there” for public discussion, and I trust that this will be the ongoing case for anything forthcoming on REACH. I hope we have all learned from the lesson. This is one planet; we are all on it. This is serious business.

In my opinion, an objection to a lawmaking proposal such as the constituent parts of the RoHS legislation should not be reason to change one sentence of the proposal. Rather, the objections or exemption requests should act as a trigger for thorough evaluation of the issues with the proper resources, the legislators being presented with unbiased data concerning the objections by their consultative team to weigh the issues and pronounce accordingly.

Of course, changing something such as soldering that has been in place for many years will inevitably drive a number of differing reactions. Suppliers will scramble to get patent positions and develop new machinery to maintain market share and, in some cases, improve profits. Users will generally reject change, unless there is some obvious technological/reliability/monetary/environmental benefit. However, users will no doubt bow to well-founded environmental pressures concerning materials.

For example, take the banning of CFCs from electronics. In the late ’80s, CFCs were used almost exclusively for flux removal and board cleaning. I lived and worked through that transition and didn’t hear many complaints about how “unsound” the science was, and of course the reason was the British Antarctic Survey’s slam-dunk of scientific data on what CFC emissions were doing to the ozone layer.

It is interesting to note that in EE Times last year¹, the eight most-read stories were all RoHS related: exemptions progress, China RoHS, Korea RoHS and California RoHS. It goes to show the impact the laws have had and is a tip-of-the-iceberg indicator of the amount of bandwidth spent on these legislative initiatives, much of it (in the case of lead in solders) needlessly.

Having said that, the official European statement these days is that RoHS was put in place under WEEE to “make recycling easier.” Let’s pretend for a moment that it was actually enacted to protect the environment and presumably the health and continued well-being of the planet. What could Europe have done better than to ban substances in electronics under the RoHS legislation? Here are a few thoughts:

Ban the sale of alcohol in any European country. From the World Health Organization’s 2005 report: “Alcohol consumption produces effects that are often perceived as positive, but it has been estimated to cause 5.5% of all the deaths and 10.1% of all DALYs [Disability Adjusted Life Years] in the region, much higher than the global estimates of 3.2% of all deaths and 4.0% of all DALYs being attributable to alcohol.”²

Ban the sale of tobacco-based products in the region. Again from the WHO: “Tobacco use has become the single biggest preventable cause of death. Smoking is the second most important risk factor in the region (accounting for 12.3% of total DALYs) and continues to expand in poorer countries and disadvantaged socioeconomic groups.”2

Seen the photos of young kids in E-waste dumps in China? That is where legislation should be aimed. Enforce the original Basel Convention pact preventing waste transfer across boundaries, and suddenly there is good reason to treat E-waste in properly set-up and funded processing centers that are environmentally and socially responsible.

One thing the EU might do is insist potential members address infant mortality rates. You might be shocked to learn that Turkey has an infant mortality rate of around 4%, compared to EU rates of 0.3% to 0.7%

Furthermore, in the same 2005 WHO report, the following troubling data spring to light: “Overall, among children aged 0-4 years, outdoor air pollution accounted for 1.8-6.4% of deaths from all causes; acute lower respiratory tract infections attributable to indoor air pollution, for 4.6% of all deaths and 3.1% of DALYs; and mild mental retardation resulting from lead exposure, for 4.4% of DALYs.”2 While all this is worrisome, I have seen no evidence of leachate from electronics causing lead poisoning in the young or old. I have seen documented reports of jewelry trinkets with high lead content sold or given away causing health problems and in some cases death, notably the case of the child who swallowed a giveaway bauble from a well-known brand of running shoes.

Look at that last number in the paragraph above. Throughout Europe, mild mental retardation from lead exposure accounts for 4.4% of all DALYs. What, exactly, is the EU doing about the source of that problem, because it isn’t electronics. And how many of those 1.8% to 6.4% of deaths in children aged 0 to 4 were caused by air pollution?

Come on EU legislators! Get out of committee; get out from behind the desk; get with the WHO and ban something useful – like whatever is causing these problems. And in non-EU European countries, perhaps if they are that poor, you might want to look at breaking loose a few euros to ease the problem. It saddens me to think of all of the tens of billions of dollars that have gone into enforcing RoHS legislation, and yet we still have these issues, and in some parts of non-EU Europe, infant mortality rates at birth run well into double digits.

Even worse, in Africa (and elsewhere), for example, literally millions of lives are at risk everyday because of the quality of what the West takes for granted: clear, unpolluted drinking water. Can you imagine the difference several tens of billions of dollars would have made to the environment, if applied to areas such as these?

References

1. EE Times, Dec. 29, 2006.
   
   
2. World Health Organization, The European Health Report 2005, www.euro.who.int/document/e87325.pdf