Supply chain collaboration to achieve toxics use reduction

The use of lead poses significant hazardous occupational exposure to workers in the electronics industry, and also causes environmental challenges at the end of product life. For the past decade, there has been a global effort in the electronics industry to initiate a move towards using lead-free materials for the production of printed circuit boards. However, there are technical and economic challenges, such as long term reliability and rework capability, that remain to hinder the universal implementation of lead-free materials. As a result, many electronics products are still currently manufactured and assembled using materials containing lead.The costs for investigating and evaluating the various lead-free electronics materials and manufacturing processes can be cost prohibitive for an individual company to undertake alone. Consequently, the New England Lead-free Electronics Consortium was formed as a collaborative effort of New England companies spanning the electronics supply chain to help move the industry towards lead-free electronics. The Consortium is a working collaboration of industry, government, and academia. For the past several years, the Consortium has conducted research and testing for using various lead-free materials for the manufacture of printed circuit boards. The Consortium has been successful in identifying lead-free materials and processes to address the challenges of assembly and rework. The Consortium is currently conducting research to address the long-term reliability challenge of lead-free electronics.