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Electronic equipment gets a second life

August 27, 2004

As of next year, electronics manufacturers in Europe will be required to take back and partially recycle old equipment. Beginning in 2006, electronics must be completely lead-free. An industry conference in Berlin sheds light on how companies can meet these regulations.

They say success has its price. In the case of electronic equipment, industrial nations around the world are paying heavily in the form of electronic scrap. In the year 2000 alone, six million tons worth. In the EU, electronic refuse is growing three times as fast as household waste, prompting the EU to implement regulations to stem this growing tide. Beginning next year, manufacturers will be required to take back and recycle old equipment, although no one as yet knows how the relevant processes should be organized.

An additional challenge facing the industry is the requirement to eliminate the use of lead in electronic equipment as of 2006. At the world's largest international conference devoted to environmental protection in the electronics industry - "Electronic goes Green 2004" in Berlin, September 6-8 - representatives from leading companies will be discussing their experiences in the use of lead-free soldering, as well as strategies for the ecological and economically viable management of electronic waste.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM in Berlin are working hard to develop and test the reliability and environmental impact of lead-free systems. This includes conventional interconnection technologies such as surface mounted devices (SMD) and state-of-the-art techniques, including wafer level bumping and flip chip packaging.

The classic approach to the disposal of old electronic equipment is shredding, recovering the copper and precious metals and converting the plastic into energy, in most cases through incineration. A more economical alternative is re-using entire components in new products, simply to meet the demand for spare parts. Together with colleagues from the Technical University Berlin, the IZM researchers developed an automated repair and disassembly line, targeting the automobile electronics industry as a potential user.

Cars average twelve years on the road. Over time, the spare parts needed to maintain the vehicle are often no longer produced. Scrap vehicles are a valuable source of these sought-after components. In order to ensure their quality, data recorders and malfunction indicators are integrated into the corresponding electronic device. These react to any unusual event, such as extreme acceleration during accidents, dangerously high temperatures or pressures. For those who know how to interpret the data stored in its memory, the component will later reveal the "crises" that have occurred in the component's life thus far.

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft