$32bn bill for a talking point
14 July 2008
A couple of items of correspondence this week have caused me to think further on subjects discussed in the past – the omnipresent lead-free and the luxury car.
I have spent a long weekend updating our ShortList. It’s the sort of job that I promise myself I will do every time something new crops up, rather than leave it all to one large chunk that represents hours and hours of work. Little and often is the way forward. I promise myself this every time that I do one of those huge chunks of work, like this weekend, and then do nothing about it.
This particular update was precipitated by the annual publication of ShortList in the UK, due out next month. Unlike the ShortList on EMTWorldWide it panders to the regional variations in the UK - like limited choice and the extensive use of distributors. While I was going through the section on Soldering Materials, Mike Fenner of Indium pointed out that in this section along with several others I still included lead-free categories. He commented that unless a supplier of materials or equipment was not lead-free compatible then they would no longer be in business, which is a fair point. I really have only left it in to ensure continuity.
But our correspondence led on to a rather frivolous discussion about the joy of lead-free and all associated RoHS and WEEE legislation. We credited these subjects with having given us something to talk about, some new engineering challenges, and, most importantly, a unifying issue for the whole industry to moan about. However, Mike came up with what I thought was an astonishing fact (garnered from the website pcdandf.com) that the direct cost to the industry world wide was in the region of $32,000,000,000. On the other hand we have taken lead out of electronics, which saves somewhere in the region of 0.5 – 1% of the known lead usage in the world. This percentage is in fact smaller than the accuracy with which lead usage can be estimated, so you could argue that there has been no measurable difference in lead use at a cost to the electronics industry of $32bn!
On another matter, I have to apologise for a mistake last week in my comment, Necessary – but not necessarily fun!), when I incorrectly described Freeview – you can’t see what I described it as because I have now changed it following a note from Rod Dalitz, who said: “Freeview is digital terrestrial, and allows a wider range of stations than analogue transmitters, and all Freeview stations may be available from satellite, but otherwise Freeview has nothing to do with satellites.”
Rod also took up the theme of the article - what is essential in life and what is a luxury - with regard to transport, as the report my comment was based on thought a bicycle was essential to modern life and a car a luxury. Rod wrote: “As for me, I am happy to regard a bicycle as more necessary than a car, in that if I could have only the one that is what I would choose. As it is, in my household there are two cars (well a car and camper), one motorcycle, and ten bicycles. Certainly it is a difficult definition - some form of transport is a necessity, but as I see it, once certain people acquire a car they appear to take on a mindset which requires to use it for everything. We shall see how the fuel prices affect that!”
I thought Rod’s comment about the mindset of car drivers was an interesting one. It is a bit like the criticism of children who argue that any information in a book can be watched on television or sourced through the internet, so therefore books are redundant. While there are those of us who still love books, there are definitely those who never read them. Similarly my wife has a bike and a car and only ever uses the latter (often when walking is a viable option as well!)
Maybe we are becoming victims of our own ingenuity. Or maybe we are just getting lazy!
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