China's version of the RoHS - Restriction of use of Certain Hazardous Substances - Directive differs widely from the European legislation, and complete definitions of products that are in scope do not yet exist.

The warning comes in a blog post China RoHS - an overview from Gary Nevison, legislation expert from Farnell InOne.

While plenty of information is on the Internet, Nevison said, "while the internet is an obvious source of information, some of the older documents are now out of date, and certain details have changed, so beware".

China RoHS comes into force in March, although the restrictions on substances comes later in the year.

"Stage one, from March, is fundamentally about labelling products (from a comprehensive, but not exhaustive, list of Electronic Information Products or EIPs) correctly based on whether or not they contain any restricted substances," explained Nevison.

"Stage two is when it really "kicks off" as a catalogue will list products that do have substance restrictions, and these are not necessarily limited to the six substances that form the basis of EU RoHS."

To read the complete blog post, please go to China RoHS - an overview.

Gary Nevison will be posting articles on legislation affecting the electronics industry on a regular basis at his blog Directive Decoder.