The slowpokes are slowing down the entire shift to compliance with the upcoming environmental regulations for the electronics industry.

There is some good news in all of this. Vendors say the level of awareness of the approaching deadline for the European Union’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances - and its international counterparts in China and a handful of states within the United States - is finally reaching an acceptable level. Almost everyone has heard of the regulations, and most are taking steps to comply.

The bad news is that for the changes to work, the entire supply chain has to move to environmental compliance synchronously - or at least nearly at the same time. Otherwise, manufacturing processes and the logistics of moving parts don’t mesh and end products don’t make it out the door either in full compliance or working order.

That has forced some OEMs and board manufacturers to ask component suppliers to slow down the progression to RoHS compliance, at least for the time being. The delay puts a drag on the entire process, in some cases delaying compliance for suppliers and in other cases forcing them to develop and manage dual product lines of compliant and non-compliant parts.

“It’s up to our customers when we can move,” said Stephen Marlow, executive v-p at Toshiba America Electronic Components. “We announced in September that we would convert all of our manufacturing to RoHS-compliant by the end of the year, but some of our customers are not ready.”

Marlow said the memory market has made great strides in hitting the deadline, but the discrete business is being held up by customers that cannot manage thousands of parts at different levels of compliance. Companies, and entire business segments, are scrambling to obtain exemptions to the rules. Among the business segments that already have obtained exemptions are the medical, industrial control, automotive, telecommunications, aerospace and defence industries.

How this plays out with regulators, and with issues such as liability, is the cause of much speculation. But if entire segments miss the deadline, industry insiders say it’s almost certain to create a legal mess that will take years to sort out. The first taste of that was when Sony shipped Playstations into Europe with non-compliant power supplies a couple years ago. An entire shipment never made it into the European market, affecting everyone within Sony’s supply chain. Executives say that RoHS will multiply that type of effect by several orders of magnitude.

Getting the entire supply chain to catch up and move in tandem appears next to impossible. Toshiba is far from alone in its experience in this regard. Across the electronics industry, components suppliers in all arenas report similar experiences.

SMSC has experienced similar problems with its vendors, from automotive infotainment to consumer electronics to mobile and desktop computing, said Herbie Hetzel, general manager of the company’s automotive infotainment group in Germany. SMSC provides a wide variety of system controllers and microcontrollers, as well as environmental monitoring.

In many cases, companies are being forced to produce both compliant and non-compliant parts for their customer base - particularly those companies with huge numbers of customers. That has effectively doubled the number of parts in the supply chain, creating a high level of anxiety among distributors, who complain that they now have to stock and track twice as many parts as before, and to keep track of which batches are compliant when vendors don’t re-number their parts.

The non-compliance of some parts and not others - and some vendors and not others - is also creating an electronic mountain of data that must be sorted through. In cases where data is exactly the same, computers can search through the information with relative ease, no matter how large the volume of information. The problem with RoHS is that none of the data is consistent.

“If you get it wrong in even 10 per cent of the cases, the effect will be enormous,” said Marlow.

See also: Electronics Weekly's RoHS Directive and UK RoHS regulation, a roundup of content related to the RoHS Directive.