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Old 8th Mar 2018, 6:33 pm   #14
Craig Sawyers
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Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Oxford, UK.
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Default Re: Availability of Leaded Solder?

Quote:
Originally Posted by MrBungle View Post
To be fair, they are right. It's pretty nasty stuff. If you breathe it in or ingest it in any way that is. The issue is however with the production, disposal and recycling. Historically stuff, including discarded electronics, were buried in landfill as part of general waste and made it into the water table eventually. This has quite devastating health effects for potentially hundreds of years and has been proven to cause developmental issues[1]. Mishandling it can be quite bad too [2].

Fundamentally the only way to prevent it appearing in landfill and general waste is to stop it being used in the first place. Batteries and roofing materials already have specialist handling facilities separate from general waste.

Stuff we build is likely to end up in the WEEE bins for disposal these days in the distant future but a lot of people just chuck any old crap in the bin and don't care what it is or where it's going.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1257652/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2897224/
Several things. First, there is no evidence from Europe, USA or Canada that the lead in solder is leachable from landfill, and therefore does not find its way into drinking water. Witness the number of tin/lead solder joints in your domestic plumbing.

The thing that *did* leach in landfill was the low melting temperature high lead frit that was used to bond a shadow mask front of a colour TV tube to the rest of the structure.

And the two references quoted were (a) a study that looked at children's IQ as a function of the amount of lead in their system (no argument about that), and the second (b) was an extreme example of a backstreet industry in Dakar (Senegal) where lead/acid car batteries were broken apart on sandy soil, and the workers brought sacks of reclaimed lead and lead dust and contaminated sand home.

And the two-faced way we send thousands of tons of plastic to China for recycling (because we can't be a**ed), and we sent thousands of tons of scrap electronics to India to backstreet outfits who strip components off and recycle them, including of course the gold and silver. Go UK! Green Europe - send our garbage elsewhere!

Just read Al's post about this sort of shenanigans. To get around the problem of contamination from recycling many materials in the first world, and legal cases in the USA with the EPA (who interestingly have the right to bear arms in their duty), I suspect we now just ship it to jurisdictions who don't have regulatory oversight.

Last edited by Craig Sawyers; 8th Mar 2018 at 6:41 pm.
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