2004 International Conference on WEEE and RoHS, Guangzhou, China, 10 and 11 June

Circuit World

ISSN: 0305-6120

Article publication date: 1 March 2005

88

Keywords

Citation

Goosey, M. (2005), "2004 International Conference on WEEE and RoHS, Guangzhou, China, 10 and 11 June", Circuit World, Vol. 31 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/cw.2005.21731aac.003

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2005, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


2004 International Conference on WEEE and RoHS, Guangzhou, China, 10 and 11 June

2004 International Conference on WEEE and RoHS, Guangzhou, China, 10 and 11 June

Keywords: Conferences, Electronics industry, Recycling

On 10 and 11 June 2004, the City of Guangzhou, in the Guandong province of China, played host to the 2004 International Conference on the WEEE and RoHS Directives and the Third International Conference on WEEE Recycling. The conference had been organised by the Guangzhou Electric Apparatus Research Institute (GEARI) and the China National Appliance Productivity Centre (CNAPC), following two earlier successful conferences held in 2000 and 2002. The conference was attended by approximately 150 people from various sectors of Chinese industry and invited experts from America, England, Germany, Japan and China gave a wide range of presentations on the two directives, their implications and how to deal with them (Plate 8)

Plate 8 Speakers, organisers and government officials at the 2004 WEEE & RoHS Conference

The conference began with a substantial opening ceremony that included the reception of invited guests and participants and speeches from Chinese government officials and the leader of GEARI. The first presentation of the conference was then given by Mr Wu Guoping the Vice Director of GEARI and in this presentation he covered current progress and the strategy of the Chinese household appliance industry in dealing with the WEEE and RoHS Directives. He highlighted concerns about how Chinese exports to Europe were increasing rapidly year on year and that over 70 percent of manufactured products exported could be impacted by the WEEE and RoHS Directives in some way. Many companies had started to take action but many more were still just watching and waiting to see how the situation developed. In the early part of the electronics supply chain it was estimated that only 10 percent of companies had started to work towards compliance, yet many other companies were simply waiting for their suppliers to help them. There was a concern that there was only 14 months to go before industry would feel the first impacts of the legislation. China had a very strong manufacturing base for large volume production and many foreign companies were now supplying components. Mr Wu acknowledged that China also lacked a strong environmental policy and people were not yet environmentally oriented in their way of thinking. China also lacked qualified and competent people in this area. Although there were concerns that exports of Chinese goods could be reduced because of the inability of some to comply with the directives, they were generally seen as a good opportunity for Chinese manufacturers to make their products equal to the best in the world. Mr Wu also highlighted the concerns shared by many companies about the exact definitions of when a product is RoHS compliant, the permitted levels of materials and the standardisation of test methods. He also highlighted the importance of Eco-design and the opportunity to produce more efficient and RoHS compliant designs.

Mr Klaus Hieronymi, the General Manager of Hewlett Packard's Environmental Business Management Activities, then gave the second paper of the morning and in this presentation Klaus detailed a study of the EU WEEE and RoHS Directives and the measures to be taken. He also highlighted the fact that polybrominated biphenyls and two types of polybrominated diphenyl ethers would be banned in August 2004. Examples were given of Hewlett Packard's work and the HP Deskjet 870 printer was used to highlight some of the issues with recycling. This printer was 50 percent by weight plastic which could not be recycled and thus had to be incinerated. There was also an increasing use of plastic components to replace steel parts and this would exacerbate the recycling problems. HP was working in a number of areas to enhance the recyclability of its products. With laptop computers improvements such as providing easier access to the back up battery, a mercury-free backlight, and replacing screws with clips had been found to have an additional cost of only 1 euro per unit. These simple enhancements would enable the dismantling time for a laptop to be reduced from an average 7.1 to 0.5 min, which equated to an up to 4 euro saving (depending on labour costs). Klaus stated that WEEE compliance would cost HP between 20 and 50 M euro/year in Europe.

The first presentation of the afternoon was by Mr Kato Hirokazu, the director of the Technical Department of the National Company and in it he covered “the relative strategy of WEEE and RoHS directives”. A paper followed this from Professor Liu Zhifeng, of the Hefei Industry University, who detailed a green technology system addressing WEEE issues. The final paper of the first day was given by Andreas Middendorf, a scientist in the department of environmental engineering at the Fraunhofer IZM Institute in Berlin, Germany. In his presentation Andreas detailed European legislation, and the importance, experiences and perspectives of Eco-design and Life Cycle Assessment. He also reviewed the provisions of the forthcoming EuP Directive Framework. Details of the mechanical recycling processes for electronic scrap were given and a concept called the recycling potential indicator (RPI) was introduced. The RPI used both economical and technical information to determine the scale of fitness for the use of a particular recycling pathway. Andreas then went on to outline the large number of eco-design and environmental assessment tools that were currently available such as the Motorola's Green Design Adviser and the Fraunhofer Institute's own EE toolbox, both of which are designed specifically for electronics.

Dr Martin Goosey, of Rohm and Haas Electronic Materials Europe Ltd, opened the first session of the second day with a paper entitled “Technologies for the treatment of end-of-life printed circuit boards”. In this presentation Martin gave details of work carried out in a scoping study project partly funded by the UK Government's Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to investigate the current status and opportunities for a sustainable approach to the recycling and recovery of materials from end-of-life circuit boards. Most end-of-life circuit boards in Europe were consigned to landfill and this represented an expensive waste for valuable resources. Martin reviewed the current and emerging technologies that could be used for recovering valuable materials from both populated and unpopulated circuit boards but highlighted that, for most boards, they were currently uneconomic. A hierarchical approach embracing selective component recovery was needed, in which selected individual components of value could be removed from boards for testing and reuse. The presentation concluded with an overview of a new project called “SEES” that Rohm and Haas was involved in that aimed to develop new methods for the recovery of more value from end-of-life vehicle electronics. The project involved partners from throughout Europe and Rohm and Haas wes developing new chemical methods for selective materials recovery.

There then followed a presentation entitled “The EU WEEE Directive – an opportunity for plastics containing brominated flame-retardants”. This was given by Mr John Sun, the Managing Director of Albemarle Corporation, China and he give details of the volumes of plastics waste occurring in Europe and how much contained brominated flame retardants. In the year 2000, Western Europe produced 777,000 tonnes of plastic waste and 34 percent of this came from the IT and telecommunications sector. Thirty percent of plastics from end-of-life electronics applications contained flame retardants of which 41 percent were of the bromine containing types. It was estimated that 96 percent of plastics from WEEE was sent to landfill, whilst 3 percent was mechanically recycled and 1 percent used for energy recovery. John stated that new collection, recovery and recycling targets would be set on 31 December 2008. He also then described a wide range of technical solutions for plastics from end-of-life electronics and these included, apart from landfill, use in metal smelting and in cement kilns as a fuel replacement. The UK was said to have 67 recycling plants and in the whole of Europe there were 1,083. Techniques for the separation of brominated flame retardants have been developed and companies such as Ricoh, Fuji and Xerox used methods incorporating techniques such as X-ray florescence and infrared spectroscopy. Brominated flame retardants from some applications could be recycled as both physical and flame retardant properties of the polymer could be maintained. However, due to the forthcoming ban on PBBs and two types of PBDPEs EBFRIP was not advocating the mechanical recycling of historic plastic waste containing brominated flame retardants. A useful Web site for more information was www.bsef.org. The presentation concluded with a discussion of new techniques for recovering bromine from plastics before the residue was sent to a smelter.

The final paper of the morning was by Heico Mass, the head of the recycling department of Germany Life Cycle Engineering Consulting Ltd. In this presentation Heico gave details of a piece of software called ProdTect which was a tool for product architects. He gave a detailed account of work carried out on the disassembly and recycling of various electronic products, with particular reference to calculations of time and cost of the specific disassembly technique and how these could be used to improve the recycling potential. Data were given for real life recycling tests carried out on a washing machine and shredding had revealed the material composition of the machine. This was found to be ~40 percent metal, ~26 percent plastic and ~32 percent other materials such as concrete. The circuit board was approximately 0.3 percent by weight.

The final session of the conference was dedicated to the RoHS Directive and two of the papers focused on lead-free electronics reliability, while the third paper gave details of testing for RoHS proscribed materials. Professor Michael Pecht of the Calce Electronic Products and Systems Centre, at the University of Maryland in the USA, gave a detailed account of work undertaken to assess the reliability of various lead-free electronics assembly processes. Calce has been participating in a lead-free industry consortium and they had developed a lead-free road map. Michael highlighted the issues around the move to lead-free and the influence of what was often a complex supply chain. He stated that Airbus had made a commitment to go lead-free with its new aeroplanes even though avionics is currently exempt from the legislation. He described the significant progress in recent years in the development of lead-free solders and this was reflected in the rapidly increasing number of patents filed. Calce had developed some special software to help guide researchers through the complex issues around the 300 or so lead-free patents currently in existence. Some reliability issues associated with the cropping of lead-frames during dam removal were discussed and the topic of tin whiskering was also covered. Michael highlighted that although companies were working to supply whisker-free component finishes, there was as yet no agreed standard test. PCB finishes were also discussed and their role in intermetallic formation and subsequent influence on the fatigue properties of an assembly were explained. Work at Calce had evaluated lead-free solder properties both physically and by modelling and they had also investigated the impact of lead contamination on solder joint reliability. Significant differences had been found in reliability between lead containing and lead-free solder depending on the specific application. The tin-silver-copper alloy (SAC) was generally better than tin-lead solder for quad flat pack (QFP) and ball grid array (BGA) devices but tin-lead solder was better than SAC alloy with ceramic leaded chip carriers (CLCC) and chip capacitors. It had also been found that the different acceleration factors applied to different solders and that the current models were not always correct. Calce had also confirmed reports by many other companies that high temperature soldering increased the incidence of capacitor cracking. Software had been developed to address this issue. Professor Pecht also reported data on the aging of lead-free contacts under exposure to conditions such as dry heat, mixed flowing gas and steam aging. Not surprisingly, it was found that aging had a significant effect on contact resistance; tin-rich layers had a thicker oxide causing increased resistance and requiring greater force to penetrate them. Further information was available at: www.calce.umd.edu/lead-free/.

Professor Ricky Lee, the Director of the Electronics Packaging Laboratory at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, then gave a comparison of board level reliability between the lead-tin and lead-free solder joints of plastic ball grid array (PBGA) assemblies under temperature cycling testing conditions. Professor Lee described an experimental study that had been carried out to characterise the thermal fatigue life of PBGA solder joints under repeated 1 h temperature cycling between ~40 and 125°C. The Weibull characteristics were obtained from the test data and both tin-lead and tin-silver-copper alloys were studied. A comparison of experimental and computational results showed good agreement. It was found that the thermal fatigue life of Sn-Ag-Cu solder joints was longer than that of eutectic tin-lead solder joints under the conditions investigated. Also, it was confirmed that the board level solder joint reliability of smaller plastic ball grid array packages was better than that of larger packages.

The final paper of the conference was entitled Testing of RoHS-limited Hazardous substances and was presented by Mr Peng Jian, the Vice Director of the Machinery Industry Environmental Technology Research Centre.

Overall this was an excellent conference which had been structured to have relatively few, but long and detailed, presentations interspersed with lots of time for questions, audience participation and dialogue. There is a clear need for Chinese industry to be able to comply with the WEEE and RoHS Legislation and this was amply demonstrated by both the size of the audience and the level of interest during the conference.

Martin Goosey

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