Eco landfill.

[sandall]

Part of the concern is that, in theory, toxins from electronic material in landfills can leach into groundwater. This was apparently the issue behind the directive for lead-free solder. This has created a mountain of landfill itself, as items prematurely fail (it's telling that medical and aerospace applications got an exemption).

I'm not suggesting that lead is good for you (though I'm not over-concerned that for the last 40 years my drinking water has come via about 25m of 1930s lead pipe under my garden) but the EU ban on lead solder resulted from landfill measurements not in the EU but in Canada. Unfortunately someone got their decimal point in the wrong place & what they had actually measured was less than the background atmospheric level !! I remember haranguing my local MEP at the time about blindly voting for whatever the Commissioners came up with. I have an idea that the ban on mercury in batteries was also related to some dodgy maths.

 

Landfill - yes it can lead to problems (it has also led to a lot of beautifully landscaped nature reserves), but the regulations came in not because we were running out of sites (we weren't), but because the Dutch (with a good chunk of their land-mass below sea-level) were, in a big way.

[bigclive]

A particular niggle about the lead free solder is that modern products use a much smaller amount of solder anyway due to the use of surface mount components. I sometimes wonder how reliable modern products would be if they used lead to make the solder malleable again. Would Ball Grid Arrays be more reliable? Would USB connectors stop cracking off?

 

During the transition from lead based to lead free the electronic suppliers suddenly needed to double their inventory to keep the remaining stock separate from the lead free. It put some of them close to the edge. And because people HAD to use the new lead free components they cost more.

 

Hmm. Dark memories of the empowered militant office workers when they got their packs of over-sensitive lead-detecting chemical swabs that would detect even the slightest whiff of lead like from a contaminated iron or older tinned PCB.