[tinwhiskers] Re: Environmentally friendly electronics training course
- From: "Gordon Davy" <gordondavy@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <tinwhiskers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2008 11:22:35 -0400
John,
I know that this forum is to discuss tin whiskers, but I can't ignore your
stated intention to donate to an environmental activist organization. There was
a time when such organizations did more good than harm. The result was that
they pretty much worked themselves out of a job. Few organizations choose to
dissolve themselves, so instead they began having to create issues that would
keep the contributions flowing in. It was good for them to promote removal of
lead from gasoline and paint. It was not good for them to promote removal of
lead and the other prohibited elements from electronic products.
In doing so they did not follow their own precautionary principle (requiring
proving that a proposed substitute is safer than what is now being used), and
they did not conduct any kind of environmental impact analysis. They did no
epidemiology to show that their chosen bogeymen were causing any kind of health
problem attributable to their use in electronic products. Had they bothered to
do so, they would not have found any cases of poisoning due to this cause.
Their continued attempt to force removal of brominated flame retardants from
electronic products (despite the proven safety of deca-BDE and TBBPA) would, if
successful, result in deaths by fire.
There is one thing that environmental activist organizations are very good at -
publicity. Sadly, they are not good at being honest in their claims.
Environmental activist organizations love to talk about corporate social
responsibility, but by crying "wolf" where there is no wolf they have behaved
quite irresponsibly. They love to talk about the greed of corporations, but by
deliberately misrepresentating risk to promote their own cash flow from people
who believe them they have behaved very greedily. Don't miss the point - the EU
legislators enacted RoHS because they too were misled by these organizations,
or because they were frightened of being labeled "anti-environment" by them.
Think "demagoguery."
It appears that these organizations have misled you into believing that - apart
from Pb - the use of the prohibited substances in electronics is not a good
idea. Please, in your course, emphasize that what you are teaching is solely a
result of legislation and not because following what you teach is going to make
the world healthier. Before you make any such claim, investigate for yourself.
Please don't just depend on organizations who have a financial stake in what
they tell you. Their "pointless exercise" of elemental analysis of a laptop
indicates that they just don't get it. And now they want to ban the use of
petrolatum, which in the US is sold in drug stores as "Vaseline."
The organizations also favor getting governments to force people to pay for
regulated recycling of electronic products, despite lack of evidence that such
recycling will save even one life, or that it will improve the standard of
living enough to offset the reduction in the standard of living caused by
having to pay the tribute they demand.
Over the years I have published on the IPC Leadfree forum roughly two hundred
essays discussing these topics. You might want to go to the archives to review
"Misleaders, misled, and victims, and how to deal with them," posted on August
14, 2001.
As for decrying third-world unregulated practices in recycling electronic
products, their efforts have been and will continue to be ineffectual. Here
also they have done no environmental impact analysis. Yes, it's obvious that
their practices pollute the immediate environment, but those practices do give
a living to some very indigent people. In any case, in spite of all the
publicity that has been given to the problem, the solutions offered by
environmental activist groups have not been effective. It's unlikely that
giving them more money to lobby for more recycling controls will improve
things. The third world is a very big place, and resources spent in looking for
smugglers and polluters are resources not spent in dealing with other much more
pressing problems - like providing safe drinking water.
Since you want to improve the health of the planet, why not consider an
organization that is trying to eradicate malaria? There are many orders of
magnitude more people dying of malaria (due to environmental activist
organizations working to prevent the use of DDT) than are having health
problems due to unregulated recycling of electronic products. Paul Driessen,
author of Green Power - Black Death estimates that fifty million people have
died because of rules (put in place as a result of activist efforts) that made
DDT unavailable to them. Reading that book will make you quite unlikely to want
to donate money to any environmental activist organization.
Gordon Davy
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