Legislation impacts many products (Directive Decoder)

Legislation impacts many products

I was thinking about the number of products that are touched by the various directives.
Here are a few examples that might be supplied by your electronic component distributor.

RoHS
External hard drives, memory cards, bluetooth adapters, digital cameras, keyboards, IT cables, mouse, printers, Ethernet switches, routers. PCI cards, calculators, clocks, laser pointer, spinning levitation globe (electrical toy), telephones, headphones, 2-way radios, modem adaptors, electric grinders, electric drills, soldering irons, vacuum cleaners, battery chargers (may be regarded as tools), torch, etc.

WEEE
All of above (covered by RoHS) plus:
Line tester, PAT tester, digital voltmeter, cable detector, laboratory power supplies (some RoHS authorities may regard these as tools and so in scope of RoHS but this is unclear), oscilloscopes, multimeters, temperature meters and thermocouples.

EuP
Any mains powered product that has a standby mode – e.g. printers, scanners, etc.
Any mains powered product that does not have an off-switch that disconnects the mains power.
Lighting equipment – office, domestic and street (ballasts, bulbs, etc)
Electric motors 1 – 150 KW
Some external power supplies and battery chargers
Air compressors
Vacuum cleaners

REACH
Chemicals and preparations include: Oil, grease and other lubricants, adhesives, cutting fluids, cleaning solvents, paints, flux, thinners, liquid soaps, hand wash, disinfectants, furniture polish, brasso, persil, coatings, varnish, conformal and corrosion protective,
Metals and alloys are also covered (registration needed if >1 tonne imported into EU).
Articles as containers for preparations, aerosol cans, marker pens, ink cartridges, brillo soap pads, alcohol wipes, etc.
Articles with releasable chemicals – potentially anything if lead and other materials recovered by recycling are included, bar soap – fragrance that is released, etc.

Batteries
All batteries
Any equipment sold with a fitted battery – multimeters, telephones, clocks, portable thermometers, torch, wireless mouse, etc. (note that some modules have small batteries attached to their PCBs)

Directive Decoder

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Posted by Gary on October 29, 2007 1:38 PM | Permalink|

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on October 29, 2007 1:38 PM.

The previous post in this blog was Don't ignore the REACH Policy Reform.

The next post in this blog is ERA to help industry.

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About the author

Gary Nevison is Farnell's spokesperson and customer interface on legislation that affects the electronics industry, such as the RoHS and WEEE Directives. As part of this, Gary has spoken extensively at RoHS seminars throughout Europe, North America and Australia. He has recently turned his attention to the developments, and impact, of China RoHS.
With over 30 years service at Farnell, he has widespread experience in the electronic components industry, Gary is an active figure in the market place, sitting on the AFDEC (Association of Franchised Distributors of Electronic Components) Council and acting as the elected chairperson for its dedicated RoHS development team.
During 2005, Gary was also chairman of the European organisation DMASS (Distributors and Manufacturers Association of Semiconductor Specialists) and today sits on the board of Electronics Yorkshire, helping local businesses.

Directive Decoder

Expert analysis of european legislation in the electronics market from Gary Nevison of Farnell InOne