CIRCUITRY
Consider, if you will, our old friend solder. Solid, reliable, boring - there's nothing sexy about the alloy that serves as the glue for microchips, circuit boards, and other electronic bits.
But solder contains lead, a toxic pollutant, and environmentalists are pushing electronics makers to adopt a lead-free substitute. The European Union has said it will ban lead from electronic equipment by 2008, and Japan hopes its industries will comply with a similar edict by 2003. The smoldering issue tops the agenda at September's annual meeting of the IPC, a trade group for the printed wiring board industry.
But there's a hitch: Lead-free solder doesn't work as well as the leaded stuff. The melting point of unleaded is nearly 40 degrees Celsius higher than lead solder's, which spells trouble when the components being connected can't take the extra heat. Switching to lead-free solder could cost US businesses as much as $900 million a year in retooling costs, according to a study by the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences. Many in the electronics industry contend that the get-the-lead-out movement is driven more by politics than by science, noting that solder accounts for less than 1 percent of the global environment's lead pollution. "There is no good scientific reason to ban lead from electronics, unless we feed electronics to our kids," says Joseph Fjelstad of Pacific Consultants in Mountain View, California.
Down the road, though, lead in solder may pose more esoteric concerns. Lead is in a continual state of radioactive decay, emitting alpha particles that can disrupt chip-circuitry processes. It's possible that circuits could one day be so small that alpha emissions from solder could fry them. One novel proposal to head off the problem: Recycle lead scavenged from shipwrecks and thousand-year-old cathedrals, which has decayed enough to be relatively harmless. Though it might be cool to have a piece of Florence's Duomo in your MP3 player, lead-free solder is likely to become the industry standard relatively soon.
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