Environmental Issues and European Legislation - Pb-free, RoHS and WEEE

Impending environmental legislation from around the globe is causing a total rethink of product design and manufacturing processes in a range of industrial sectors, including electronics, consumer products and road transport.

Traditionally, the manufacture of a product is a linear process, starting with manufacture and ending with disposal of the product when its useful life has expired.

This approach is resource intensive, and leaves the problem of the disposal of the product at the end of its life. Many such products are currently buried in landfill sites, but this activity will be strongly discouraged in the future by impending legislation. 'Take-back' legislation requires that products are repossessed by the companies which manufactured them so that they can be recycled or disposed of appropriately.

The implication is that products in future will need to be designed with maintenance, refurbishment, re-use and recycling in mind. This is one aspect of a movement called 'sustainable development'. One possible view of future product manufacture and life cycle management is shown in Fig.1.

Fig.1. A value curve for a typical consumer product showing the contribution of disassembly and recycling technology

The new technology indicated on the graph will include the means to disassemble some or all of the components, and the means to add value to the components by sorting, testing, reusing, refurbishing and, if necessary, recycling the materials used to make components.

The latest news on and drafts of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and the Restriction of Hazardous Substances can be found on the DTI's sustainability web site http://164.36.253.20/sustainability/weee/index.htm

TWI with its extensive knowledge of materials, assembly technology and environmental conditions/requirements has found itself ideally placed to assist companies in assessing the impact of environmental legislation on current product lines and the design of the next generation of products. It is also in the process of developing certain joining and disassembly techniques in readiness for the perceived need and a few examples of these are given below:

Lead free solder for circuit boards
Biodegradable circuit boards
Thermal methods for polymer assembly and disassembly
Friction extrusion - an emerging recycling technology

Related Knowledge Summaries

TWI Published papers and reports related to the Environmental Issues area

Wise R and McCarthy B: 'Lasagne and Chips', Connect, Sept/Oct 1999 p 3
Wise R and Stockham N R: 'Disassembly and recycling - technology to meet the manufacturing revolution', TWI Bulletin, Jan/Feb 2000