Compliance with European RoHS and WEEE Directives

9 Compliance with European RoHS and WEEE Directives 

In the UK, GAMBICA, the trade association for instrumentation, control, automation and laboratory technology, has launched a not-for-profit company to operate the business to business compliance scheme under WEEE regulations. GAMBICA has also assembled a WEEE/RoHS Task Force involving over 30 member companies. This assists members to influence or monitor the development of 

UK government recycling policy has been criticised because its targets are based on collected tonnages thus encouraging local councils to shun plastics in favour of paper and green waste collection, thus, plastic bottle and container collection facilities are less frequently found. There is a market in the UK for recycled plastics but the recyclate is frequently sourced from mainland Europe. Plastics materials recovered in the UK may not always be used in the UK. 

There are also potential problems relating to the July 2006 implementation of the European RoHS 2002/95/EC directive with many OEM and CEM believed to be holding non-compliant inventory of components which will be virtually impossible to use legally after the implementation date. The cost of writing off such inventory could lead to the demise of those companies struggling to survive in an extremely competitive market. 

There are no cheap, easy ways to confirm compliance with the RoHS directive but one relatively simple test for suspect products is to use X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy which disrupts the electrons in the shell of the elements present in the sample. However, this technique can only detect surface or near surface material. It works by detecting the response of each element which generates X-rays at a unique set of energies, this permits the concentrations of the various elements to be measured. 

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