PCIF Environmental Working Group Update

Citation

Goosey, M. (2002), "PCIF Environmental Working Group Update", Circuit World, Vol. 28 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/cw.2002.21728dab.004

PCIF Environmental Working Group Update

Martin Goosey,Shipley Europe Ltd, Coventry, UK

Keywords: PCIF, Environment

Although the UK PCB industry is currently confronting many difficult challenges and indeed changes, the activities of the PCIF's Environmental Working Group have continued apace. This is largely because the need to implement environmental best practice is now more important than ever; the industry is facing increasing regulation and legislation and yet the competitive pressures are greater than ever. If the UK industry is to remain completive it must develop a proactive approach to environmental issues and it is this need that continues to drive the activities of the PCIF's Environmental Working Group.

Over the last year a number of key projects have been completed and these include the publication by Envirowise of several guide booklets covering such topics as water consumption benchmarking, treatment of copper waste and the challenges of moving to lead-free assembly. In addition, the working group also issued the PCB Industry Legislation Database as a CD-ROM. This was made available free of charge to UK industry through the generous provision of funding by the DTI. The CD-ROM also contains the working group's Environmental Best Practice Guide, the PCB Industry Sustainable Technology Scoping Study and numerous other useful guides from Envirowise. All of the above are still available and copies can be obtained from the PCIF or Envirowise. In collaboration with Envirowise, the working group recently held a very successful seminar entitled "Saving Money and the Environment in the PCB Industry''. This took place on March 5^th at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham and gave the group a chance to present the results of its recent projects to the industry.

As well as completing several key projects last year, members of the working group were also busy developing plans for future activities. The environmental working group has been in operation for almost six years and as experience has grown it has become clear that a more strategic approach to project work has been beneficial. To this end the group has worked with the DTI in a scoping study to characterise the key sustainable technology opportunities that the UK PCB industry should be pursuing. The results of this study, which is also available from the PCIF, have been used to help determine the key directions in which the working group should focus its resources.

In particular, the sustainable technology scoping study has enabled the group to submit five proposals into various government agencies for support funding in the knowledge that they will address key issues already identified and prioritised as important to the PCB industry. At the time of writing, three of these projects were already underway and current activities are addressing the diverse but nevertheless important topics of advanced effluent treatment, disposal of 25 litre plastic drums and the recycling of end of life circuit boards.

Also planned for the future are two more ambitious projects aimed at helping the PCB industry. The first of these involves the design and launch of a Website that will host all the information contained in the PCB Industry Legislation Database and Best Practice Guides. By putting these onto a website it will be possible to keep the information both pertinent and up to date. It will also enable a degree of interactivity between users that is currently not possible.

The second project, which we hope may begin later this year, is even more ambitious and perhaps the most challenging one the working group will have undertaken. Entitled 'Towards Zero Discharge', this project will aim to achieve exactly what the title states and develop PCB processing equipment which is designed from the outset to incorporate optimised recovery and treatment technology on each individual stage of the line. Plans include the development of two prototype demonstrator lines that will be installed in UK PCB manufacturing plants so that detailed performance evaluations can be undertaken. Access to the equipment and details of the designs will also be made available to UK manufacturers in order to enable widespread adoption and implementation of the technology developed.

More details of these proposed projects will be issued later but in the remainder of this article I want to draw your attention to the 25 litre plastic drum recycling project that is now well underway. While 25 litre plastic drums may appear to have very little to do with Printed Circuit Board fabrication, they are the vessels that convey both process chemicals to board manufacturers and raw materials to the chemistry suppliers. It is believed that almost 19 million of these drums are purchased each year in the UK and their disposal is causing increasing concern both from environmental and waste minimisation perspectives. From our own preliminary investigations it appears that the majority of used drums are consigned to landfill and thus there is a need to determine whether or not there are viable recycling opportunities. Even if it transpires that there are only limited opportunities for reusing 25 litre drums, there are plenty of other potential options that can be explored before they need to be consigned to landfill. The problem for the UK PCB industry is that there has been no detailed study of all the possibilities. With an industry such as ours, there is little resource available to carry out such an analysis and individual companies have instead found their own solutions. Over the last few years the PCIF's environmental working group has carried out some preliminary investigations of the situation in the UK and has offered basic best practice advice to UK board makers, but again there has been limited resource available to make a more detailed analysis of the possibilities from a broader industry perspective.

Fortunately, this should all change in the near future as the PCIF has now secured support to investigate the issues and opportunities associated with the reuse and the recycling of 25 litre drums. The project started in February and companies that can take contaminated, granulated HDPE and convert it into useful products have already been identified. There is a very real need for granulated recyclate and some companies are currently importing used HDPE containers from the rest of Europe. Both economically and from an environmental perspective, this is clearly undesirable and we are hoping that it will be possible, at least in part, to substitute UK sourced material for some of these imports. The project runs until the summer and we will be exploring all possibilities for avoiding the consignment of 25 litre drums to landfill.

As can be seen, much good work has been completed by the PCIF's Environmental Working Group and more is underway, but there is even more to be done. New members are always welcome, please contact the PCIF or myself for more details. (mgoosey@shipley.com).

Martin GooseyChairman PCIF Environmental Working GroupShipley Europe Ltd