EU lead-free directive

Hello Luhan,

It's here:

ROFL!

Regards, Joerg

In the US maybe, but this thread is about the EU (or so it says)

tim

Hello Luhan,

Look on the bright side: At least it hasn't degenerated into a political shoot-out. Even though the recent voting results on the EU constitution, ... uhm, let's not go there...

Regards, Joerg

Hello Graham,

Except when a competitor is desperately looking for a chance to blow your company out of the water.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Luhan,

But it did cause a spike in the price of tea for a while because the whole shipment floated around in the Boston waters.

Regards, Joerg

If the investigators do their job properly, there should only be the one person in the dock, the one who decided that best practice could be ignored, beit the engineer himself for deciding his work didn't need to be checked (on this occasion), the person who skimped on the checking that he should have done, or the manager who decided that his depatrmet needn't bother with best practice.

Having more than one of these in the dock will make it virtually impossible to get a conviction, as each will blame the other and there will not be enough convincing evidence for a criminal conviction.

I know that we all know that it is usually a management decision that skimps on the checks, but there are some rogue engineers who think that they know better.

tim

It's stupid legislation that will merely increase the price of goods to no real beneficial effect and possibly put a number od small firms out of business. Funny ( ha ha - not ) since one of the leading ( lol ) principles was that it should have *no* effect on cost.

That's Brussels for you. Getting kind of sick of the Commission telling us what we can and can't do. They aren't elected either.

Graham

No-one's going to be checking anyway !

Graham

Hello Keith,

Well, I try to stay out of political dicussions on Usenet. At the local pub that's a different matter (but I'll listen to the other side).

Regards, Joerg

So your point is:

a) Lead batteries should be highly regulated

b) Since lead batteries are the worst lead offenders by an order of magnitude, all other lead regulation is pointless

c) Something else

Note, I'm not supporting or denigrating any point.

Or if you want to sell into (what was to have been) the EU, maybe this is topical.

Well, I make that one more reason to vote "NO" on the European constitution today... Thanks for pointing that out.

Rob

John Popelish schrieb:

All exceptions are potentially limited in time. They are for products or materials for which /currently/ no realistic substitutes are available. Another example: Cadmium in NiCd cells of electric hand tools. As soon as technologically possible, these exceptions will probably be dropped from the list.

Let's see, say a battery weighs 10kg, that 4% not recycled is 400g. Assume 10 million are dumped each year in Europe. That's 4000000 tonnes of dumped lead per annum.

I reckon the solder in a typical PCB is about 5g max. So my annual use of lead is about 5kg max. There's room for 800 million small businesses like mine before we equal the car battery. That should solve Europe's unemployment problem!

Paul Burke

Yes, a deposit on them, say $400. You pay it once, and redeem it by handing in the old battery. Like we used to do with bottles in the 60s.

Not pointless, just less cost effective, and as people keep pointing out, damaging to an already fragile industry.

Shouldn't be too difficult to extract the lead from PCBs, if the political will is there (roast them at 300 degrees in a centrifuge?) We need to encourage recovery and re-use over dumping anyway.

Paul Burke

list.

That certainly seems to apply to the more inexplicable exceptions (lead is allowed in servers, storage devices, and network infrastructure devices).

It also seems, as far as I can see, that exceptions are granted where there is scientific or technical reasons not to use the substitute, or where the substitute is more harmful to the environment and/or people.

There is also a mention of spare parts and repairs - does this mean suppliers can continue to produce and supply lead-containing electronics as spare parts?

Sorry, that was an interesting interpretation, was tried and caused sqeals of protest from the EU tech committes.

It was 0.1% of ANY homogenous material, not the total weight. Homogenous was defined as any material that canot be mechanically divided.

Maybe the French saying "stick your constitution where the sun don't shine" will give them something else to think about, instead of crazy lead-free rules and dictates.

Barry Lennox

That wasn't a bribe, just some casual compensation. You didn't pay him to do anything unlawful. Of course I'm not a lawyer and that's not legal advise (:

It isn't because "they" are bureaucrats (they are, of course). Just think about how politics work (or watch a few episodes of "West Wing"). Funny stuff like this everywhere, but in the long run it'll hopefully change things for the better.

robert