Current Issue The International Reference for Chip-Scale Electronics, Flip-Chip Technology, Optoelectronic Interconnection and Wafer-Level Packaging July 2002 Email the editor

Harvey S. Miller Contributing Editor-at-Large

Let's begin our discourse this time with a brief, but significant, chronology:

• April 1, 2001: Harvey Miller takes his 20-year-old office refrigerator to the Palo Alto landfill for recycling, pays $20. He is told that TVs, CRTs, and other electronics (e-scrap) are routinely dumped in landfill. (As of Dec. 31, 2001, Palo Alto had stopped accepting CRTs.)

• February 25, 2002: Basel Action Network (BAN) releases a report, Exporting Harm: The High Tech Trashing of Asia, which documents the contamination of a Chinese village and the poisoning of its people by e-waste exported from the U.S. (Paradoxically, China is a signatory to the Basel Convention!)

• April 1, 2002: Ron Iscoff, editor of Chip Scale Review, rents a dumpster for spring cleaning. The waste management people that deliver the container strongly caution him against trying to fill it with so much as an old computer circuit board.

Blowing in the Wind

The straws cited above show which way the wind is blowing. They betoken rising consciousness of the increasing mountains of e-waste and its perceived hazards.

A new industry is growing in our midst, (and there are not many of those, these days). As in all new movements, there is the potential for good, but also for excess. That's why facts are so critical. Here are a few:

• In 1997, the North Carolina environmental agency found that electronics accounted for less than 3 percent of municipal solid waste (MSW), compared to 40 percent for paper. Note that e-waste then was universally accepted. (Reliable reports, including one from the EIA's Heather Bowman, claims e-waste is only 1 percent of MSW.)

• Modern landfills are encased in polyethylene sheeting that almost eliminates leaching into the environment.

• Cited hazards list lead, but lead oxide, the most common form, as used in CRT leaded glass x-ray shielding, is extremely insoluble in water. Other hazards, i.e., copper, silver and tin, are more serious.

• If lead-free solder were ever widely implemented, a host of other toxic metals, such as indium and bismuth, would potentially enter the environment.

Two common threads run through the above statements: 1) The threat of imminent hazards from e-waste is exaggerated; 2) Nevertheless, there must be a better, more economically sustainable way than dumping e-waste.

The Case for Recycling

In 1998, over 112 million pounds of material were recovered from electronics, including steel, glass and plastics, according to the EPA. A PC today is typically 40 percent steel, 30-40 percent plastic and 10 percent aluminum.

If electronic equipment were designed and manufactured with disassembly and recycling in mind, the materials used might be mined economically from electronic waste.

Primary metal mining and petroleum extraction would be displaced, providing savings in energy and sparing the environment the destructive effects of these activities. Recycling can be a safe activity, done correctly, whether in the U.S. or China.

In its Feb. 21, 2002, edition, the Financial Times reports on a new process to recycle PC boards, developed at the U.K.'s Cambridge University. The process employs a chemical leaching agent to enable reusable metals and ICs to be recovered from shredded circuit boards.

The 2002 IEEE International Sympos-ium on Electronics and the Environment, May 6-9 in San Francisco, included 60 papers related to e-waste issues, including Design for End-of-Life, Design for the Environment, Regulatory Issues and Supply Chain Management.

There were also exhibits by recyclers and other participants in this new growth industry. The exhibits were organized by the International Association of Electronics Recyclers [isee2002.org].