Solutions—and complications—emerge for RoHS directive
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 4/1/2005 12:00:00 AM MST
It's taken a while, but by now many American manufacturers are aware of Europe's latest environmental legislation. What's less clear is how best to comply: the spirit might be willing, but the systems are weak.
The Restriction on the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances (RoHS) in Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive—i.e., Directive 2002/95/EC of the European Parliament—comes into effect July 1, 2006. It requires manufacturers to ensure products for the European market don't contain more than minute concentrations of six banned substances (see box below).
Trouble is, these substances are widely used in electronics industries—lead, in particular, is an important constituent of solder. Printed circuit boards and integrated circuits can contain a host of now-banned substances. How does a manufacturer find out how much of each substance is in its products?
Solutions are emerging. Melville, N.Y.-based Arrow Electronics, the U.S.'s largest distributor of electronic components, is populating its 29-million part database with RoHS compliance data, and making the results available to customers on a subscription basis. So far, says Arrow, RoHS data exists for around four million parts.
What makes the process complicated, says Leonie Tipton, an Arrow VP with responsibility for environmental compliance, is that while some component suppliers are introducing RoHS-compliant products, not all of them are issuing new part numbers for those products. Some just change the product, leaving compliant and noncompliant versions in circulation with the same part number. Subscribers to Arrow's services then have to work back through other database items such as the lot code and date of manufacture of the first compliant batch to determine if a product is compliant.
Total Parts Plus, a vendor of managed-obsolescence solutions, offers a similar service, but one intended for new design.
"We present the chemical makeup of a component: the epoxy, the coating, the ink—everything," says VP Todd Montgomery. Users upload bills of material into Total Parts Plus' Web-based service, which then reports on compliance, and, if necessary, makes recommendations for compliant alternatives.
"Going direct to integrated circuit manufacturers is difficult because they are bombarded with requests from thousands of customers," says David Milke, senior component engineer at communications products manufacturer Artesyn Technologies, Madison, Wis. "We were using Total Parts Plus for obsolescence information, so it made sense to use them for RoHS compliance. We need component content data, and we need to include it in our Oracle ERP and Agile [product life-cycle management] systems. We upload information about our suppliers and part numbers for a particular product, and Total Parts Plus provides the compliance data—at the moment, in a spreadsheet format, because that is what is most convenient for us."
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