Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
The European Union’s (EU) Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals (REACH) regulation is moving through European Union legislation bodies toward law, even as business and chemical industry groups fight to quash it. REACH has been called “RoHS on steroids” because of its potential to force the electronics industry to revamp components to avoid the inclusion of toxic chemicals not addressed by RoHS.
REACH looks at the overall use of chemicals in consumer products, so it is not aimed specifically at the electronics industry. However, REACH is expected to identify chemicals that are currently used in electronic components, so it will have an impact on the components industry.
“While REACH is still on the back burner for most OEMs, it will have impact on the electronics industry,” said Dries D’Hooghe, director of product strategy marketing at Agile Software, a California-based product lifecycle management company. “With REACH, companies will bear the responsibility for the chemicals in their products and will have to know what the impact of those chemicals, whether they’re cancerous or otherwise toxic.”
The details of REACH have not been set in stone, as the legislation is still moving through EU parliament. REACH will come before the EU Parliament Environment Committee in October. Then it will move on to the Parliament Plenary where it may receive final approval. Even if it doesn’t receive final approval in October, most industry watchers believe it will be approved in a manner of weeks or months after the October reading. At any rate, REACH is expected to become law by early next year.
REACH will have a much wider application than RoHS, which exclusively targeted toxic chemicals in electronic products. There has been a concerted lobbying effort to get the EU to soften or eliminate REACH altogether. In June, representatives from 13 nations, including some of the EU’s largest trading partners, issued a joint statement asking the EU to revisit the REACH draft. Signatories include Australia, Brazil, Chile, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand and the United States. Chemical industry groups have also pushed the EU to quash REACH or limit its impact on the chemical industry.
What is still is mystery is the impact it will have on the electronics industry. “It will have some impact, but I think that RoHS has already made the greatest impact,” said Mark Myles, services director at The Goodbye Chain Group, a Concord, Mass.-based consulting company that help clients with environmental compliance issues. “There will be some lingering materials not covered by RoHS, for instance, PVC [used in some cable sheaths], Gallium Arsenide [used in some high frequency devices] and even small amounts of radioactive substances [used in some smoke detectors].”
Myles believes the REACH legislation will become just one in a set of emerging legal initiatives that will cumulatively change how business is conducted and products are designed in the electronics industry. “The biggest impact is not REACH or any one directive per say, but rather the cumulative impact of all of the extended producer responsibility laws that are pressuring many industries into a mindset to incorporate environmental factors into the design, manufacture and even marketing of products,” he said. “This includes RoHS, WEEE and REACH, as well as other less-discussed directives like the EU Directive on Energy Using Products, the EU Integrated Product Policy and Japan’s Framework for a Recycling Oriented Society.”
Electronic News is a sister publication of Electronics Weekly
