I just bought a new Samsung DVD burner – an optical drive that is completely lead free. As far as I know, lead is used in as the soldering material when manufacturing printed circuit boards. There are so many poisonous substances in consumer electronics, but at least the first steps have been taken towards making computers for sustainable living.
Printed circuit boards are the basic building blocks of virtually every single electronic appliance that you will find in your home. PCBs contain all sorts of various materials that are difficult to separate out. Resultantly, recycling a PCB is a complete nightmare – and in the past many of them have ended up in landfill sites. Once it has been buried in the ground the lead can contaminate the water supply, making it unfit for drinking. Western countries are rumoured to be exporting astonishing quantities of landfill to China where around 800,000 people die every year because of the polluted air and water.
Although lead has been eliminated in my DVD burner, there is still along way to go before it could be considered as a green product. The constituent materials of PCBs need to be much more easily separated if they are they are going to be recycled. I don’t know if any research is being carried out, but surely the components could be fitted together with friction or perhaps they could snap together.
The shear minuteness of the electronic components attached to a PCB could be the reason why solder and adhesives are the primary methods of holding them together. I suspect that making PCBs could be accomplished using other means, but would push the manufacturing cost unacceptably high. The electronics has heavily in technologies that inherently make the parts of a PCB virtually inseparable for the purposes of recycling. The manufacturing processes are not going to be changed overnight so the dream of PCBS that can are easy to totally dismantle may be decades away.
Such modular electronics would not just be good for the environment. My old DVD burner that broke was 95% working – it’s just the 5% that wasn’t working that made me have to replace it. If I could have had that 5% replaced it would have probably saved a fair bit of cash.
Zach Hope is the author of Speed-Up-Windows-XP.com, a site that can teach anybody to
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