Lead free solder - exposed in a UK national newspaper

[msg]

Arfa Daily wrote:

<snip>

It has actually reached the point where I am now
sick to death of hearing the words "green" and "eco" and "carbon footprint"
and "geenhouse gas" and "cimate change" and "global warming" every single
time I turn on the radio or TV. So here's a new word.

Ecobollocks. Covers what a lot of this bull actually is ...

Sentiment seconded.

Message sorted headers by date from my nntp provider:

Re: Lead free solder - exposed in a UK national newspaper Arfa Daily
Lead Generation Computer Systems liukaiyuan
....

I expected to see an advert for cpus soldered with 63/36 or 60/40

Michael

 

[James Beck]

In article <WpidnUlI36dOhWvanZ2dnUVZ_rGhnZ2d@comcast.com>,
grizzledgeezer@comcast.net says...

Like any sensible person, I don't want to deliberately pollute
the planet for those who come after me, but in recent years,
many badly informed decicisions on this sort of thing, have
been made by departments "jumping on the banwagon" to
justify their own existence.

Instead of banning polluting substances, we should be regulating the
pollution they create.

In other words, it doesn't matter how much of a harmful substance you use in
manufacturing a product, but how much of it gets into the environment. It's
the latter we should be worried about, not the former.



I think you have hit on something here.

 

[James Beck]

In article <47f58171$0$8439$9a6e19ea@unlimited.newshosting.com>,
UseWebsiteToReply@example.com says...

Allodoxaphobia wrote:
Arfa Daily wrote:

At 30th tonnes, the potential environmental impact of the lead in
solder, even if you *did* dump it all in the ground, is minuscule.

And, where do these pin-heads think the lead came from, in the first
place?

It came from deep within the ground, in the form of lead ore,
which I think is much less of a health hazard than metallic lead
decomposing in a landfill and seeping into the water supply.
Mettalic lead has been shown to have very little impact on the

environment. Especially after it has built up an oxide layer.

In Europe, there are places where the Romans smelted lead 2000
years ago, and 8" or so below the topsoil, the dirt is still so
toxic that health officials (in Britain at least) don't allow
people to dig there, even wearing protective gear.
Ah, but we aren't talking about running a smelting operation, are we?

BTW, I'm not a pinhead, just someone who cares about my health,
that of others and a quality environment for us to all live in.
I don't know.

Comparing burying metallic lead VS a smelting operation, that borders on
pinheadiness.

I tried lead-free solder, and gave up on it, at least for prototyping.
I was feeling a little bad about returning to traditional solder,
until the OP posted the article. Thanks - I feel vindicated. I hope
that someday there is a better alternative to lead-based solder,
but evidently it hasn't happened yet.

Jay Ts

Until they come up with better alternatives, I'll stick with good old
lead/tin. When I left my last job, I had a full physical including a
lead test, and even though I had been "exposed" to lead solder almost
daily for 13 years, my blood lead levels were almost not measurable and
that puts me below the national average for people that don't work with
solder at all. Why would that be if lead/tin solder were so dangerous?

Jim

 

[N_Cook]

William Sommerwerck <grizzledgeezer@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:V-GdnbYGe_UbimvanZ2dnUVZ_tKinZ2d@comcast.com...

Is a lead-free item that fails and ends up in the landfill
after 2 years better than a lead-containing device that
lasts a decade?

And is then properly recycled?

Recycling is the issue. The only current economical way to do it is to
ship
the equipment to third-world countries where poverty-stricken can
dismantle
it.

"recycling" as pictured here

http://www.sophiegerrard.com/
and from a now corrupted file
http://www.plusnone.com/wp-content/uploads/chrisjordan.jpg


--
Diverse Devices, Southampton, England
electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on
http://home.graffiti.net/diverse:graffiti.net/

 

[Jay Ts]

William Sommerwerck wrote:

Is a lead-free item that fails and ends up in the landfill after 2
years better than a lead-containing device that lasts a decade?

And is then properly recycled?

Recycling is the issue. The only current economical way to do it is to
ship the equipment to third-world countries where poverty-stricken can
dismantle it.

I've read "news" stories on that, that said that in some (many?)
cases, they just take the money and dump the equipment in
their own landfills, so the materials are never recycled.

I don't know how true that is (if at all) but it brings up
the issue of verifying that recycling is actually done, and
done _properly_. Things that are simple in theory can get
really complicated in actual practice, so it's hard to say
whether we're better off (not just right now, but long term)
dealing with the recycling issue or just doing away with
lead and being left with the tin whiskers.

Again, I hope in the future there will be solutions that
aren't actually just compromises.

Jay Ts
--
To contact me, use this web page:
http://www.jayts.com/contact.php

 

[Jay Ts]

Phil Allison wrote:

Jay Ts wrote:

Another source of lead is CRTs, many of which are still in use. They
contain about 5 pounds of lead each for radiation protection, quite a
bit more than is contained in the solder in the PC boards.

** Silly comparison.

Glass does not break down in the environment.

So how would any of that lead get out ??

...... Phil

My apologies, it seems I had been misinformed on that
and trusted someone who thought he understood the
situation, but didn't.

Jay Ts
--
To contact me, use this web page:
http://www.jayts.com/contact.php

 

[William Sommerwerck]

Like any sensible person, I don't want to deliberately pollute
the planet for those who come after me, but in recent years,
many badly informed decicisions on this sort of thing, have
been made by departments "jumping on the banwagon" to
justify their own existence.

Instead of banning polluting substances, we should be regulating the
pollution they create.

In other words, it doesn't matter how much of a harmful substance you use in
manufacturing a product, but how much of it gets into the environment. It's
the latter we should be worried about, not the former.

 

[William Sommerwerck]

Is a lead-free item that fails and ends up in the landfill
after 2 years better than a lead-containing device that
lasts a decade?

And is then properly recycled?

Recycling is the issue. The only current economical way to do it is to ship
the equipment to third-world countries where poverty-stricken can dismantle
it.

 

[clifto]

stratus46@yahoo.com wrote:

You mean the fumes from the flux. You don't believe you're breathing
solder vapors, do you? In the 40+ years I've been using solder, I
doubt I've used 5 lbs and I do quite a bit of soldering.

Ditto. I have half a pound right here that I bought at a hamfest in the
eighties. Used it to put together a Wersi Delta years back, used it for
other kits and copious repairs. Even waste a ridiculous amount tinning
my soldering tips (the current one is from the seventies and helped with
the Delta).

--
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080331/D8VOMVT02.html
Chelsea Clinton Criticizes Bush in N.C.

Talk about "dog bites man"...

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

Arfa Daily wrote:

"exray" <radioexray@geemail.com> wrote in message
news:47f59170$0$26120$88260bb3@free.teranews.com...

I've never turned on my shop spectrometer to determine if it was the flux
or solder. I just know that the new stuff doesn't smell as friendly to my
human nose.

40+ years, 5 pounds, yadda,yadda...how much 'new' solder have you used? I
suspect you're just trying to pick a fight. I'm not playing. See ya.

I don't think that he's trying to pick a fight at all ... Depending on
whether or not he's talking 'professional' use, that might be a bit of an
underestimate, but not huge. I hand solder just about every day of my
working life. I use predominantly 0.7mm solder wire, which I buy in 500g
reels. I reckon that each reel lasts me probably 3 years, so in 35 years of
professional use, I have used perhaps 6kg or 13 pounds.

Don't bother trying to educate 'Exray'. He knows everything about
everything and listens to no one. Hundreds of companies run annual
tests for lead in the blood, and rarely ever turn up anything. Those
that do are usually traced to other sources. Some employees at
Microdyne soldered every day, all day for over 20 years and still came
up clean every year. No one there had ever failed the lead tests.


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[Michael A. Terrell]

Jay Ts wrote:

It came from deep within the ground, in the form of lead ore,
which I think is much less of a health hazard than metallic lead
decomposing in a landfill and seeping into the water supply.

In Europe, there are places where the Romans smelted lead 2000
years ago, and 8" or so below the topsoil, the dirt is still so
toxic that health officials (in Britain at least) don't allow
people to dig there, even wearing protective gear.

The slag they skimmed of wile refining the lead is what is toxic, not
the lead. Those compounds already existed. They were just mixed up in
the ore.


--
aioe.org is home to cowards and terrorists

Add this line to your news proxy nfilter.dat file
* drop Path:*aioe.org!not-for-mail to drop all aioe.org traffic.

http://improve-usenet.org/index.html

 

[N_Cook]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/03/research.engineering

Within a whisker of failure

Removing lead from solder may seem a smart idea environmentally, but the
resulting microscopic growths called tin whiskers could be just as
problematic

* Kurt Jacobsen
* The Guardian,
* Thursday April 3 2008
* Article history

This article appeared in the Guardian on Thursday April 03 2008 on p1 of the
Technology news & features section. It was last updated at 00:05 on April 03
2008.
Tin whiskers

On April 17 2005, the Millstone nuclear generating plant in Connecticut shut
down when a circuit board monitoring a steam pressure line short-circuited.
In 2006, a huge batch of Swatch watches, made by the eponymous Swiss
company, were recalled at an estimated cost of $1bn (Ł500m). In both cases,
"tin whiskers" - microscopic growths of the metal from soldering points on a
circuit board - were blamed for causing the problems.

It's not the first time these mysterious growths have been blamed for
electronics failures. In 1998 the Galaxy IV communications satellite
sputtered out after just five years; engineers diagnosed its failure as due
to "whiskers".

The US military blamed them for malfunctioning F-15 radar systems and
misguided Phoenix and Patriot missiles. In 1986, the US Food and Drug
Administration recalled a number of pacemakers because of these same
whiskers. In fact, they've been known about since the 1940s, and happen with
cadmium and zinc, too: during the second world war, similar whiskers would
short the cadmium tuning capacitors in aircraft radios. A decade later,
tin-based relays in AT&T telephone switching centres were found to cause
shorts.


The solution to "whiskering"? Mix lead into the solder, as was done from the
1950s. Colin Hughes, a physicist who worked on the first British nuclear
bomb, told me that the whiskering problem never came up during his career.

But now the lead is gone, by legal mandate, and whiskers are back - causing
potential problems for us all.

Since 2006, lead has been banned from solder in the European Union under the
2003 Reduction of Hazardous Substance (RoHS) directive, which gave
manufacturers three years to phase out lead.

The logic seemed reasonable. Removing lead from petrol (where it was used to
prevent engine mistiming) brought clear environmental and health benefits,
taking a harmful chemical that can affect intelligence out of the
atmosphere. Removing lead from solder, the 37% lead, 63% tin alloy used to
join metal objects in everything from plumbing to circuit boards, was an
obvious next step to prevent it leaching into ground water from dumped items
in landfills.

Meanwhile, the US and Japan have also been moving to lead-free solders. It's
a huge shift; the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that
80m kilograms of lead solder was used worldwide in 2002. Environmental
groups have applauded the move. "In the US we've been surviving without lead
solder for many years," says Rick Hind, legislative director of Greenpeace's
toxics campaign. "With less exposure to lead we will all benefit by being
smarter and making safer and more durable products." (The US has not made
lead-free solder obligatory, but does offer tax benefits for doing so.)

But without lead to tame it, tin behaves oddly on circuit boards. Left
alone, tin plating, like cadmium and zinc, spontaneously generates
microscopic shreds of metal - about one to five microns in diameter, or less
than one-tenth as wide as a human hair - which push up from the base. If
they grow far enough to touch another current-carrying location, they'll
cause a short that can wreck the equipment while leaving barely any trace.

The cause is becoming clearer. "I believe the mechanism of whisker formation
is now understood: it is due to compressive stress - caused by, say,
diffusion of copper into the tin - being built up in the tin layer which
breaks through the tin oxide barrier layer [to the air]," says Steve Jones
of Circatex, in South Shields. Critics cite reports that solder
substitutes - pure tin, tin-zinc, tin-silver-copper - simply cannot match
the lead mixture for reliability, coverage ("wetting" terminals), and cost
(silver is especially pricey). Therefore, the US military, Nasa and medical
and high-level research equipment are exempt from what authorities view as
untrustworthy commercial components.

"I still use lead-tin solder - it works better," says John Ketterson, a
solid state physicist at Northwestern University in Illinois. He notes the
tradeoffs of "cost, materials, strength of the solder and all that" during
this mandated changeover, and that manufacturers "have to get an experience
base" with new processes.

{ snipped as lengthy }

Tin whiskers: coming to a PC near you?

ˇ They can grow at ambient temperature and humidity, or in vacuum

ˇ They can grow in steady or varying temperatures (though the latter may
encourage growth)

ˇ Whiskers' tips are atom-sharp. They will push through any coating, given
time

ˇ They are a prevalent cause, only now being identified, of many past
equipment failures

ˇ One whisker can carry about 30mA - more than enough to cause havoc in
digital circuits

ˇ Silver-tin-copper ("SAC") solder slows but doesn't stop whisker growth

ˇ SAC solder has more environmental impact than the lead-tin version

ˇ Older 37%-63% lead-tin solder mix merely deforms, reducing stress and
hence minimising whiskering

ˇ Whiskers can grow indefinitely

Source: Howard Johnson, Signal Consulting

--
Diverse Devices, Southampton, England
electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on
http://home.graffiti.net/diverse:graffiti.net/

 

[Arfa Daily]

The logic seemed reasonable. Removing lead from petrol (where it was used
to
prevent engine mistiming) brought clear environmental and health benefits,
taking a harmful chemical that can affect intelligence out of the
atmosphere. Removing lead from solder, the 37% lead, 63% tin alloy used to
join metal objects in everything from plumbing to circuit boards, was an
obvious next step to prevent it leaching into ground water from dumped
items
in landfills.

Meanwhile, the US and Japan have also been moving to lead-free solders.
It's
a huge shift; the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that
80m kilograms of lead solder was used worldwide in 2002.

Isn't it funny how figures can be 'distorted' to make facts suit the
context. By saying "80m kilos", the EPA make it sound like a HUGE amount,
but put that into a more 'recognisable' form, and it becomes 80 thousand
tonnes, which is not nearly so contentious. Then further, take that only 37%
of that was actually lead, and you are down to 29.6 thousand tonnes. Now
compare that to the world's lead-acid battery usage, where recycling of the
end-of-life product to recover the lead, has been sucessfully in place for
years. At 30th tonnes, the potential environmental impact of the lead in
solder, even if you *did* dump it all in the ground, is minuscule.

As I've said before, I'm glad that the avionics industry refuse to use the
stuff. The day they do is the day I stop flying ...

Arfa

 

[Eeyore]

N_Cook wrote:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/03/research.engineering

Within a whisker of failure

About time too.

Never mind the reduced reliability (see the ERA study) caused by lead-free
solder when equipment is exposed to vibration.

Graham

 

[TheM]

"Eeyore" <rabbitsfriendsandrelations@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:47F4B8A8.ADD69B04@hotmail.com...

N_Cook wrote:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/03/research.engineering

Within a whisker of failure

About time too.

Never mind the reduced reliability (see the ERA study) caused by lead-free
solder when equipment is exposed to vibration.

Graham

Its good for the way economy works nowadays. Buy, buy, buy the crap
that dies or obsoletes every 2-3 years.

Mark

 

[N_Cook]

Eeyore <rabbitsfriendsandrelations@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:47F4B8A8.ADD69B04@hotmail.com...

N_Cook wrote:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/03/research.engineering

Within a whisker of failure

About time too.

Never mind the reduced reliability (see the ERA study) caused by lead-free
solder when equipment is exposed to vibration.

Graham

Before I waste time downloading an irrelevant pdf

would this be what you be referring to :

Review of Directive 2002/95/EC (RoHS) Categories 8 and 9 - Final

http://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/pdf/era_study_final_report.pdf

Results of vibration testing lead-free solder from different researchers ...


--
Diverse Devices, Southampton, England
electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on
http://home.graffiti.net/diverse:graffiti.net/

 

[Eeyore]

N_Cook wrote:

Eeyore <rabbitsfriendsandrelations@hotmail.com> wrote
N_Cook wrote:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/03/research.engineering

Within a whisker of failure

About time too.

Never mind the reduced reliability (see the ERA study) caused by lead-free
solder when equipment is exposed to vibration.


Before I waste time downloading an irrelevant pdf

would this be what you be referring to :

Review of Directive 2002/95/EC (RoHS) Categories 8 and 9 - Final

http://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/pdf/era_study_final_report.pdf

Results of vibration testing lead-free solder from different researchers ...

Not sure if that's the one I had to be honest but looks interesting.

Graham

 

[Jay Ts]

Allodoxaphobia wrote:

Arfa Daily wrote:

At 30th tonnes, the potential environmental impact of the lead in
solder, even if you *did* dump it all in the ground, is minuscule.

And, where do these pin-heads think the lead came from, in the first
place?

It came from deep within the ground, in the form of lead ore,
which I think is much less of a health hazard than metallic lead
decomposing in a landfill and seeping into the water supply.

In Europe, there are places where the Romans smelted lead 2000
years ago, and 8" or so below the topsoil, the dirt is still so
toxic that health officials (in Britain at least) don't allow
people to dig there, even wearing protective gear.

BTW, I'm not a pinhead, just someone who cares about my health,
that of others and a quality environment for us to all live in.

I tried lead-free solder, and gave up on it, at least for prototyping.
I was feeling a little bad about returning to traditional solder,
until the OP posted the article. Thanks - I feel vindicated. I hope
that someday there is a better alternative to lead-based solder,
but evidently it hasn't happened yet.

Jay Ts
--
To contact me, use this web page:
http://www.jayts.com/contact.php

 

[William Sommerwerck]

As I've said before... It isn't a matter of whether electronic equipment has
lead in it, but what happens to that equipment when it's disposed of. It's
the latter that should be considered.

 

[James Sweet]

"William Sommerwerck" <grizzledgeezer@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:ruednS26lvW_GGjanZ2dnUVZ_oWdnZ2d@comcast.com...

As I've said before... It isn't a matter of whether electronic equipment
has
lead in it, but what happens to that equipment when it's disposed of. It's
the latter that should be considered.

And lead isn't the only toxic substance used in electronic equipment and the
process used to manufacture it.

Is a lead-free item that fails and ends up in the landfill after 2 years
better than a lead-containing device that lasts a decade?