Then and only then, when he returns to this country and talks about recycling junk electronics, might I consider that he knows whereof he speaks.

For decades (not enough) folks have had on their car bumpers, stickers that say, “Question Authority”. If more people had taken that advice, we would not be in the thirty-plus-billion-dollar hole we are, with satellites and nuclear reactors hiccuping and dying.

The entire “lead in electronics is awful” movement was a foolish idea in the beginning, born of no science whatsoever. The exact origin of the RoHS campaign would surely be an interesting story, but here we are today, in the middle of another fine mess. Millions of people agreed with a foolish idea, because someone told them to agree.

Just because millions of people do a foolish thing, does not mean that it is not a foolish thing.

There is NO, repeat, NO reliable substitute for lead in solder yet - if there was I’d be using it and so would all aerospace and medical device makers. And the EU would not have exemptions for the use of tin-lead solder for high reliability products, would they? Of course not.

Lasky is using a false straw man analogy when he states that “millions of products are compliant and have been for years. If some of these doom and gloom predictions were true, we’d know by now.”

No, we would not. The cost of analysis is very high (as much as $3000 per failure) to do the analysis. When your PC fails, what do you do with it? You can toss it (excuse me, recycle it) or you can take it to a repair center like BestBuy. And what do you think they do with it? If there’s a board problem, they replace the board. Period. All lead free products need do is to get past the 1 year warranty period and they are home free. Any no-lead manufactured product has a very high probability of doing just that, millions do (as Lasky says). Getting past 3 years is another matter. Do you want to buy a new HDTV in 3 years? How about a new car? What do you do when 3 years from now you are driving along and suddenly the car stops (30% of automobiles today is electronics and fortunately thus far the auto industry is still (at least that’s what BMW claims) using tin-lead solder. Even if they do, can they continue to get parts that are not pure tin plated? How do they know they receive parts that are tin-lead plated? NASA knows that 3-5% of the parts they get have no lead in them. They have to do lot inspection using XRF (X Ray fluorescence).

Also, it depends on the temperature and humidity and a lot of other factors as to how fast tin whiskers grow. Just go to the NASA whiskers website and read the facts for yourself. I’m not making this stuff up; I’m reporting the facts. I remain very concerned about this problem.

Lasky wrings his hands with great worry about third world recyclers - that’s why he wants the lead out of solder. I worry about friends and relatives who have implanted pacemakers that end up being recalled. Medtronic had such a FDA recall.

How is it sensible to make electronics less reliable, so there will be many times more electronics failing sooner, to recycle? This will create a larger and larger third-world recycling industry, many more people recycling discarded electronics, and even if the statistic of “accidents and injuries per ton of electronics recycled” stays flat, we will have increasing accidents [what does “safety” mean in the context of recycling, anyway?

Do the third-world recyclers eat a percentage of what they disassemble? we should make our electronics taste bad, to discourage accidental ingestion…] and these increasing accidents will then be attributed to…what? The percentage of silver in the electronics? Something else with no scientific basis? Union labor?

The real solution is to reduce the amount of electronics to be recycled, and that will make it safer.

Thus, we should make more reliable electronics. Lead in solder has been proven to reduce mechanical-shock-failures of BGA solder joints by one to two orders of magnitude, as well as prevent whiskering.

The third-world people are not going to change HOW they recycle our junk electronics, so reducing how much junk we send them reduces the number of people employed in that electronics-recycling industry, and accidents go down, even if accidents for accidental ingestion of electronics.

Further, disassembly of electronics containing pure tin will inevitably result in inhalation of tin whiskers freed from the electronics assemblies during disassembly under third-world conditions; thus, lead-free electronics actually pose a new health-and-safety risk to third-world disassemblers that was not there in the pre-ROHS days.

I urge Lasky (and others so worried about recycling) to take a stand in eliminating this health risk to electronics disassemblers by advocating the use of tin/lead-plated electronics components which will not grow these hazardous tin whiskers.

This is not a simple issue, but Dr. Lansky of Indium reports that reliability has improved for Motorola after the transition and the lead-free formulations allow them to use tighter spacing making their smaller phones a reality.

http://www.indium.com/drlasky

As for Swatch and other “tin-whisker” issues, many result from using pure tin plating — not the new RoHS formulations. Pure tin plating has been known to be an issue long before RoHS.

Millions of products are compliant and have been for years. If some of these doom and gloom predictions were true, we’d know by now.

Difficult question: can you estimate what the per model failure rates are due to lead free solder? E.g., iBook G4 family?

It’s a bit depressing that there seems to be no media interest in this issue. Possibly because it’s not politically correct to question “green regulations”?