8 Responses to “Electronics makers turning green and benefitting”

1. Robert J. Landman Says:
   January 8th, 2010 at 2:26 pm

   The use of consumer lead-free electronics in products whose life-cycle includes operation in and through harsh environments, poses technical risks that can lead to degraded reliability and reduced lifetimes. Quantification of these technical risks within valid statistical confidence bounds remains a significant gap. Further reliability data is needed on the performance of lead-free solders in order to unite the existing prediction methodologies, and provide acceptable modeling accuracy.

   The spectrum of gaps that exist in the current body of knowledge on Pb-free electronics is considerable, despite considerable research being done to find a replacement for lead in tin-lead solder. As an example, it is a proven fact that removal of lead from tin based solder (and all solders being used today are tin-based) allows the growth of tin whiskers which short electrical circuits. Without lead in the solders, the joints are more brittle, more subject to fracture when subjected to mechanical stress (vibration and shock). See http://nepp.nasa.gov/WHISKER/index.html Scientists do not yet understand why lead suppresses tin whisker growth so the search for an acceptable replacement remains elusive.

   Until a replacement is found, there remains unacceptable risks imposed by lead-free electronics in high reliability, high-performance applications, especially in extreme environments such as aircraft, submarines, and military weapon systems. Until the risks become fully articulated, quantified, and bounded by hard numbers to ensure viable product design, manufacturing, test, delivery and maintenance and longevity of such products at an affordable cost, the use of commercial off-the-shelf lead-free components (COTS) cannot occur.

   It is a goal the aerospace, defense and high performance/high reliability industries are working to achieve but it will take many more years of research to reach.

2. C.A. Waters Says:
   January 9th, 2010 at 12:47 pm

   Mr. Landman’s comments are right on target. Lead-free has been a great challenge to industry. Solder will remain important for making electronic interconnections for some time but there appear to also be other solutions to the problem on the horizon such as printed electronics where conductors and devices are printed onto substrates and something called the Occam Process which both suggest the elimination of solder completely.

3. Karl Schmidt Says:
   January 9th, 2010 at 1:06 pm

   Yes, the end result of this feel good movement can be measured in the loss of life due to electronics failure. The lead from land fills was coming from CRTs – not solder.

   We take lead ore (toxic) out of the ground – smelt it into lead (less toxic) – combine it with tin (even less toxic) then put it back in the ground when electronics are disposed… Idiot bureaucrats.

4. Steve Smith Says:
   January 9th, 2010 at 5:33 pm

   It is a lie that Lead-Free equates to Green.

   Lead-free solder joints are much more brittle. That means you accidentally drop your cellphone a few times and it is likely to stop working. There’s another piece of E-waste to recycle, and you buy another one, but you lost your address-book. Drop one of those expensive smart-phones a few times, and you are likely to not only be out a few hundred dollars and an address-book, but you will have to buy and download a new set of Apps all over again.

   There are many microprocessors in cars, perhaps a hundred or more. There’s one in each door. Slam it a few times and a solder joint cracks, the window-control mechanism or the electronic lock stops working, and after the first year it is you, the consumer, who has the privilege of paying $1500.00 for a new control unit. The moral there is lease, don’t buy.

   The fine-pitch integrated circuits in your flat-screen television now have spacings between leads of a hundredth of an inch or less…about 200 microns. Tin whiskers may grow a few tens of microns in a few months…sometimes much faster. The specification for “no whiskers” on a pure-tin-finished component (written by the component-manufacturers themselves, about equal to letting the fox guard the hens) is less than fifty microns in six months. If the whisker growth is less than fifty microns, the manufacturers can say there is “no” whisker growth. The fine print in the specification says it does not mean very much, but fine print is rarely read.

   What that means to you, the consumer, is that your brand-new television has a good chance of failing in three to six years from a tin whisker shorting out somewhere. The moral there is buy the extended warranty. Then, when it fails, the manufacturer will give you a new one of equal quality, and take your dead television to the E-waste recycling pile. The manufacturing labor and energy to produce something that should last ten years or more, now is expended three times as fast. How Green is this?

   It’s not only low-risk things that can be killed by tin whiskers.

   Remember about ten years ago when all the pagers in the country went dead? A single tin whisker killed the satellite that handled the pager traffic for the country. Other satellites have died, and there have been many “incidents” at nuclear reactors…..

   Remember about three years ago when the Millstone nuclear reactor in Millstone, Connecticut suddenly slammed FULL-OFF? A single tin whisker killed the reactor, by sending a false logic signal. How safe do you feel living downwind of a nuclear power plant with Green lead-free control electronics?

   It is not Green to do something foolish and high-risk, because ill-informed environmentalists convince politicians to create legislation that requires civilization do unwise and scientifically wrong things, much less to do it in the name of “Green”.

   One of the definitions of the word Propaganda is “The redefining of words to suit one’s own ends”.

   Manufacturing lead-free electronic components is not Green, if Green means minimizing solid waste and minimizing environmental pollution and minimizing energy waste.

5. Michael Kirschner Says:
   January 10th, 2010 at 12:59 pm

   The premise of the article seems to be that it’s not US regulation driving this, it’s the manufacturers doing it driven by their own sense of “greenness”. Not so. The drivers are two-fold: international (particularly European Union) regulations that the US has no national counterparts for, and pressure from environmental NGOs. Frost & Sullivan, reading the blurb about this report on their website, clearly doesn’t really understand what’s going on in the electronics industry. I suspect the report is ultimately useless and full of things we in the business already know (and know a lot more about than Frost & Sullivan). And by the way, this march towards the perception of “greenness” is NOT true for the electronics industry as a whole, but only for a part of it: the consumer electronics industry; let’s be very clear about that. While the consumer electronics world now seems to be producing products that are at least incrementally better overall in terms of environmental performance than they were a decade ago, we still lack the fundamental capability to accurately and repeatably measure and prove that. So all it can be is “perception”. There are efforts to produce the base standards for much of this but more are needed.

   All of the comments above are essentially saying that the “non-greenness” of the switchover from tin-lead to tin-silver-copper solder is the increase in the waste stream due to failure (on top of other non-environment-related issues; oh, and BTW the majority of lead in landfills comes from auto batteries, not CRT glass). They’re all quite correct, but those aren’t really direct environmental arguments.

   The truly sad environmental fact is that, after spending billions and billions of dollars on replacing tin-lead solder, there is no effective difference in environmental performance across the entire chemical substance lifecycles between tin-lead and tin-silver-copper. While the actual impacts may differ due to the different substances, regardless of how these impacts are weighted the two alloys come out essentially equivalent. The US EPA did a study with the electronics industry that was published in 2005. Dr. Julie Schoenung of University of California at Davis took that report and did a monte carlo weighting analysis of the various toxicity endpoints and came out with this result. She shows it very effectively in a presentation entitled “Green Electronics: Life Cycle Assessment” she gave at the CA Department of Toxic Substance Control’s 2008 RoHS conference, available on the web. The actual reference for the paper behind it is here:

   Xiaoying Zhou and Julie M. Schoenung, “An integrated impact assessment and weighting methodology: evaluation of the environmental consequences of lead-free solder alternatives,” Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Electronics & the Environment, San Francisco, CA, USA, May 2008. doi: 10.1109/ISEE.2008.4562924.

   Bottom line: tin-silver-copper is environmentally no better overall than tin-lead in solder applications.

   As far as the other two items,

   # halogen-free flame retardants, and
   # products that are easier to recycle.

   Halogen-free flame retardants – there is an LCA going on at EPA on printed circuit board flame retardants to compare the current halogenated material with alternative non-halogenated material. Otherwise the debates continue to rage between the chemical industry, the electronics industry, and NGOs as to whether halogen-free flame retardants are better or worse environmentally, as well as whether we even need flame retardants in certain applications at all (not using them where not necessary would obviously be the preferred environmental performance situation). We do need them in printed circuit boards, but there’s no evidence that they are needed or perform a useful function in most plastic enclosure applications.

   Regarding products that are easier to recycle, that is only a tiny part of – and a relatively undesirable focus for – a “green” product, and I’m really not sure where the idea that the entire industry is driving towards it is coming from. Recycling is a good idea, but a better one is to design products to be useful through several functional/performance generations and be readily and easily upgradeable to support that. I.e., keep the things OUT of the recycling stream in the first place.

6. Robert J. Landman Says:
   January 10th, 2010 at 2:35 pm

   Regarding landfill lead levels and the supposed contribution from CRTs. There has never been a verified lead level (even in parts per million) detected in a landfill. An article discusses the EPA test: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1247531/ and concludes:

   “Townsend’s report, RCRA Toxicity Characterization of Computer CPUs and Other Discarded Electronic Devices, expanded on his earlier research on cathode ray tubes (CRTs) used in computer monitors and televisions. CRTs contain an average of about four pounds of lead. There are smaller quantities in the solder used in other electronic devices.”

   “Townsend performed an EPA test known as the toxicity characteristic leaching procedure (TCLP) on a variety of electronic items including computer CPUs (central processing units), televisions, videocassette recorders, printers, cellular phones, remote controls, computer mice and keyboards, and smoke alarms. The TCLP test determines the mobility of analytes present in waste. Following the protocol, the devices were ground up, mixed with an acetic acid–based simulated leachate fluid, and rotated in a drum container for 18 hours, after which the leachate was tested for metal concentrations. In the TCLP, lead concentrations above 5 milligrams per liter are considered hazardous. All the devices Townsend tested leached lead over this threshold under some conditions.”

   “But is the lead that is actually in landfills a health threat? “It has never been shown that lead is actually leaching out of landfills,” says Fern Abrams, director of environmental policy at IPC–Association Connecting Electronics Industries, an industry group based in Northbrook, Illinois. And although lead is known to be present in landfills, some of it may come from other constituents. “Electronics in general are one percent of the waste that goes into a landfill,” says Jan Whitworth, a policy analyst with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. So if lead were to be found in leachate, it would be very hard to say for sure whether it had come from electronics.”

   Several reputable scientific articles have debated the wisdom of the process. One such paper concludes:

   http://www.hlinstruments.com//RoHS_articles/Leaching%20of%20Lead%20and%20Other%20Elements%20from%20Portable%20Electronics,%20Part%20II%20S09-01_Bev%20Christian.pdf

   “there are several materials that could slow down if not stop the escape of heavy metals from a landfill. Any sulfur containing material will either have free sulfide or produce it during decomposition, resulting in one of the most potent precipitators of lead. Since landfills contain an abundance of paper, even with recycling, it is not likely lead will be escaping from any landfills soon.”

   “Even if it does escape from a landfill, the analytical work completed shows that any heavy metals that leach into topsoil is not going anywhere, as the topsoil is extremely effective in sequestering lead and other metals. However, sand and gravel, which are more likely to be found lower down in the ground surrounding a landfill, are less able to hold the heavy metals. But looking at lead only, one sees that for a DI water leach, which is reasonably aggressive because of the chemical driving force, that sand will still only release 0.06% of a 500 mg/5ml solution of lead. Gravel will release about 25%. It is highly unlikely that there would be a plume of 100 ppm dissolved lead leaving a landfill. The possibility of any significant amounts of lead leaving a modern landfill in the geologically near future is quite remote.”

   If anyone has evidence of verified lead levels in a real landfill, not a simulation, I and my colleagues would very much like to know about it.

7. Pete Houwen Says:
   January 11th, 2010 at 10:26 am

   I hope Frost and Sullivan are reading the above responses, and the weath of technical information that they didn’t bother researching prior ro publishing their results.

   But even more obvious fallacies exist:

   “they cut operating costs because eliminating reliance on hazardous materials eliminates the costly regulatory liabilities associated with their use.”

   No, they have only changed the regulatory liabilities. The new materials still require regulation. And the cost of documenting and ensuring RoHS compliance is actually higher, as it requires control of every part of a product, not just the process material storage and waste. Not to mention the many billions of dollars spent just developing the technologies required to reach initial compliance.

   “These changes all contribute to reduce a company’s energy consumption”

   And those new technologies require quite a bit MORE energy consumption.

8. Lead-Free Zone Blog » Blog Archive » Lead-free still not ready for hi/rel Says:
   January 19th, 2010 at 10:52 am

   [...] thoughtful comments were posted in response to an article in GreenerWorking.com entitled, “Electronic makers turning green and benefiting.” The article drew knowledgeable comments from a number of executives in the electronics [...]