lead in rohs parts

Lead is not prohibited, it is limited to some specific level. Sounds to me like it would be pretty minimal if only as a thin coating on bond wires.

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Rick

Boot to the head.

It's a palladium coated copper Pd......not Pb.

RL

Then there is that...

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Rick

I find it interesting that RoHS still allows 4% lead in brass alloys, and 0.35% in leaded free-machining steel, and 0.4% in aluminium. Also more lead is permitted in plumbing fittings for drinking water than in electronic components. An electronic device in a steel case that weighs

10kg could contain 34.999 grams of lead and be perfectly compliant, but if it contains one pre-2006-manufactured 0402 resistor tinned with 0.11% leaded solder then it is not ok. When the PCBs have been taken for gold harvesting and the case ends up dumped in a ditch (the steel is hardly worth collecting due to its low scrap value), presumably the 10kg of steel converts to rust, and the lead will go somewhere.

I wonder if the reason why mechanical parts are not subject to the same regulation as electronic parts, is that electronics engineers are less assertive and intimidating than people working in some other fields.

And of course there are billions of *lead acid batteries*! (And NiCd was allowed last time I looked).

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John Devereux

Lead acid batteries seldom make it into landfills. Most are smart enough to follow the law and dispose of them properly.

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Rick

So what? Metallic lead isn't water soluble and landfills are sealed, in any case. Most car batteries are recycled (except for the tens of thousands buried in junkyards across the country) but I doubt any decent percentage of other batteries, particularly NiCds, which are

*way* worse.

Even just a few percent getting though is a lot of lead compared to that in electronics.

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John Devereux

Sure, but the point is there *is* a law about it, at least where I live. It is illegal to rob banks, but that doesn't mean it don't happen!

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Rick

Yes looks like there is here too. It just seems peculiar, that we are supposed to take extreme measures to stop a few micrograms of lead on a stray 0402. Where is the big international drive to phase out lead-acid batteries.

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John Devereux

Your phrasing seems to ignore the fact that electronics used to use a

*huge* amount of lead. There may be some question about the toxicity of that lead, but the amount used was not "micrograms". That lead could be eliminated and has all but.

Batteries also use a lot and it is supposed to be recycled. That lead is not easy to replace and so is still permitted.

I talked to a riverkeeper once who told me about a law suit they had to file to get the state of Md to enforce their pollution laws. Seems a gun club was polluting Seneca creek by shooting lead into it. They eventually had to stop and a cleanup effort recovered tons of lead from the creek.

Yeah, lead is a problem and we don't deal with every aspect of it. Sorry.

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Rick

Really? then next time I'll ask them nicely for some money instead of demanding it!

Jamie

I recall reading that electronics used to consume 0.5% of lead production. Whilst eliminating most of that 0.5% is a nice aim, it might not have been beneficial to require the industry to discard all of the already-manufactured pre-RoHS components and make new ones, consuming fresh resources in the process. There are probably other industries that continue to consume (and pollute with) much more lead than electronics ever did, yet electronics got regulated and many of those other industries didn't yet. Personally I have seen several car batteries in ditches or in dumpsters headed for landfill, but on those occasions I was not able to carry them away for recycling.

There is also the lead used in fishing tackle... Goes right into the lakes and streams. And there is a gun club a few miles up the road from me. I've always wondered about the lead leaching out of their shooting range.

George H.

Reduced heavy metals don't go anywhere much in soil. It's like an ion exchange column except miles long.

The Oklo natural reactor in Gabon produced a bunch of easily-traced fission products that have been sitting in groundwater for a billion years. They've gone about a kilometer, iirc.

Lead pellets ingested by birds (they use pebbles as part of their digestion) seems to be more of a problem.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Hmm well a quick web search found mostly cautions about indoor shooting ranges. There was some about outdoor lead getting into lakes and stuff.

We get a lot of rain, and have nice hills. The gun club has a nice stream flowing through it. I'm not going to drink the water. :^)

George H.

I posted yesterday about a gun club that has ceased operations because of the lead pollution of Seneca creek. Seems they measured lead levels in the water that were off the chart.

I don't know how bad a problem lead pellets really are in most settings. But it just doesn't seem like a good idea to wait until we can measure the lead in our bodies before doing something about it. What happened to the idea of erring on the side of caution? I kayak in Seneca creek. I hate to think I need to not swallow any of that water.

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Rick

Oh, the irony! Landfills are sealed, but that's not always effective. We have a neighborhood here that got torn down when a nearby landfill generated so much methane that the seepage became a fire hazard. From Love Canal to the Hanford WA cleanup site, a LOT of issues have arisen from disposal that maybe DID follow the law and was considered proper. Years later, we often reconsider.

Landfills can be "green" energy. I sat next to a guy on a plane, who installs small scale* AC generators at landfills, running on the "natural" gas. He told me most landfills just burn it off.. though this was years ago.

George H.