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Lead-Free Lesson...Definitely Not Free
July 7, 2008 | Joe Fjelstad, Verdant ElectronicsEstimated reading time: 6 minutes
As the electronics industry struggles though its second year of RoHS and the lead-free mandate, it is clear that definitive answers to many of the more significant challenges of lead-free are not yet here. In fact, targets continue to move as newer problems make their presence known.
If Internet mutual assistance forums and electronic industry trade magazine articles are any indication, the assembly industry remains stymied by lead-free in its inability to find suitable answers for many of the most vexing concerns relative to lead-free soldering and its reliability.
Thirty-eight billion dollars. That's the price tag so far and the meter continues to run.
Granted, that $38 billion price tag pales alongside the staggering cost of the Iraq war, but they share one thing in common: They both sought to eliminate a threat that was not there and both will continue to run up costs well into the foreseeable future.
It makes one wonder: How might all that money have been better spent? Consider the fact that it only cost 25 billion for the entire Apollo project. Granted those were 1960s dollars, but the spin off benefits of the program were immense and we enjoy many of those benefits today. It is highly unlikely that lead-free will ever pay such dividends.
Those who are exempt from the lead-free, such as the military and others tasked with supplying electronics of the highest reliability, are nevertheless frustrated by current circumstances.
For example, the finish on component leads are largely being converted to lead-free, but the part numbers are not being changed to reflect that important fact. This situation is creating countless headaches and sleepless nights for many military electronic product suppliers.
One must try to find a bright side and it is a fact that there has been some new job creation due to lead-free. Many more inspectors, for example, are now looking at products to assure that no offending materials are included and many new administrative jobs now exist to make certain that paper work is filled out properly.
Unfortunately, while these activities keep companies out of trouble with the lead-free police, they do not create any real value. At the same time, countless talented engineers have been sidetracked into trying to make lead-free work some way and somehow.
All is not darkness, however, the EU's WEEE legislation was actually on the right track. Recycling actually recovers value and some revisionists in the lead-free camp now suggest that the real reason for lead-free solder was to make electronics recycling safer for those people in developing nations seeking opportunity to make a living by recycling electronics. Unfortunately, too much of this recycling has been happening in an unrestricted, uncontrolled and unsanitary environments.
One must have sympathy for those making a living by recycling and their current situation, but the argument that lead-free solder makes for safer electronics recycling is a hollow one, as traditional solder was a minuscule contributor and has never been scientifically shown to be a real threat.
The revisionist argument seems more a washing of the hands and turning away from addressing the real problem, which is the lack of controls in waste management and recycling, coupled, perhaps, with a measure of unprincipled greed on the part of some less than ethical participants who are always present.
Actually, when it comes to recycling solder, the question to be asked is: What is simpler and more cost effective to recycle a binary alloy or one containing three or more metals? My seven-year-old grandson can answer that question.
Those who argued for several years against the ban on lead in electronic solders are being proven right by the passage of time. Unfortunately, little solace is gained knowing that the many losses that the industry, the environment and the consumer have sustained and will continue to endure.
Sadly, the scent of money, it seems, was too strong for the marketing types to ignore and there was a rush to cash in on the green machine. Some real winners did emerge in the lead-free gold rush, if you will excuse somewhat of a mixed metaphor.
Without question, the tin industry is a big winner. The price of tin today is roughly four times what is was in 2000. Demand is high, as evidenced by the price and mining for tin going strong in many areas. Unfortunately, much alluvial tin is found in rain forests, but it is uncertain who exactly in the tin industry truly cares about that matter.
Another point of fact somewhat related and beneficial for the lead-free effort is that product life cycles are getting shorter--some are now as short as 12 months. As a result, concern over long-term reliability of lead-free could be waning in some marketing departments. It may well be that reduced reliability could actually be welcome news, as it means that consumers might actually be buying more products sooner before failures appear. Excuse the cynicism, but if failure happens, it might be considered okay by some product developers.
Actually, Aldus Huxley foresaw some aspects of this attitude in his chilling, and somewhat prophetic, tale of the future, Brave New World. In the book, Huxley wrote of a future where hypnopedic messages, such as "Ending is better than mending" and "Less stitches means more riches," were drummed into the minds of the population over loud speakers.
Watching commercial TV today, it seems that Madison Avenue's message makers may well have picked up on the concept and are now employing such ideas on the viewing public.
Huxley's inclusion and indictment, of this type of messaging activity may have been a counter point to a contemporary book titled, Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence, by Bernard London. London explored the concept and potential of planned obsolescence as a way of putting the economy back on track by getting industry to produce products having limited life.
Since economics are predicated on the basis of the consumer's wants exceeding their needs, the idea made some sense for the time, but does it still make sense today?
Since the publication of Brave New World, other writers have picked up on Huxley's concern over wasteful and excessive consumption. The Waste Makers, for example, published in 1960 by Vance Packard, exposed what Packard called "the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals." Look around and ask yourself if this is not the case today.
More recently, the book Made to Break by Giles Slade examines the history and consequences of marketing's fueling and driving consumer obsession with the next new thing.
Having said all this, it must be pointed out that we do not need to turn off manufacturing. On the contrary, we must continue to invent and improve our products and processes to make them even more cost effective.
More than half of the world's people are disenfranchised and lacking most of the things we in developed nations take for granted. Businesses can still make products, but for new and emerging markets. And we must make those products ever more reliable so that they can have a longer life.
Unfortunately, from all the information out there coming in from the experts, it looks like lead-free is not going to deliver that promise. In response, a growing interest exists in the idea of solderless or solder-free technologies--a fact we will revisit in a future edition.
In closing, one can only hope that we can change some of our thinking about what we are doing and how. We will certainly not want to find ourselves fulfilling Macbeth's lament that we are fools lighting our way to dusty death by our inattentiveness to those things that truly matter. To that end, I would like to close with the words of Mahatma Ghandi who extolled us to, "live simply so that others can simply live."