"Rod Speed" wrote in message
...
Arfa Daily wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Ian Field wrote
tm wrote
William Sommerwerck wrote

The ROHS rationale was to protect the health of folks doing
recycling.

That's only part of it. It's supposedly true that rain (and other
solvents)
leech lead from electronic equipment, and it winds up in drinking
water.

Therein lies an example of why we have the RoHS BS.

But lead was mined out of the ground in the first place!

But not much of the drinking water comes from where its mined.

Not that I think it makes any sense at all to ban lead in solder.

Much drinking water in the UK was, and continues to be, supplied via lead
pipes, and not all areas have 'hard' water supplies that coat the inside
of those pipes with a 'protective' limescale layer.

Yebbut, some have blamed the decline of the
roman empire on their use of lead plumbing pipes.


I think the theory was more to do with them using lead acetate (sugar of
lead) to sweeten their wine than of lead pipes to deliver water. It's a nice
theory, but that's all it is. Empires decline for many reasons. I think
about the only certainty is that they always do. Lead acetate may have
played some small contributory part in the process, but the decline of the
Roman Empire is pretty well documented, and there were far more significant
reasons for it.



Maybe that's what happened to the british empire too ?

The British Empire declined for various 'modern' reasons, not the least of
which were countries figuring that they could manage their affairs and
positions on the world stage, better than was being done for them by us.
This made them lobby for regaining their independence, and for the most
part, we willingly gave them it back. As I'm sure that anyone with an
interest in world affairs will attest to, the results for some of those
countries, have been less than inspiring.

As to whether lead water pipes caused a problem here, I come from a
generation that grew up in post-war council houses fed with lead pipes, and
I can assure you that the overall intelligence level in kids back then, was
a great deal higher than it is now ...



There has certainly been a move to lead free pewter for a reason.


This is true, but the reason generally cited for this is that 'traditional'
pewter tankards tend to be used for drinking beer, which is quite acidic at
a pH of around 4.5. The story is that over time, this will react with the
lead in the pewter, causing it to be ingested. This is altogether different
from running pH neutral water through pure lead pipes.



The whole 'lead in the environment' argument makes little sense, apart
from in a few special cases like lead in gasoline and paint.

No argument there.

Certainly, lead in solder posed no threat at all,

Particularly when it makes more sense to just not dump
it in normal rubbish dumps than it ever does to ban it.

and removing it has, in my opinion, been a disastrous retrograde step for
the 'green' movement in general, and the electronics construction and
servicing industries in particular.

Yeah, particularly when it produces a lower lifed electronic device.

Using the stuff leads to increased production costs and energy budgets,
and often shorter product lives than would otherwise have been the case
when the mature and reliable technology of leaded solder was used.

Yeah, completely and utterly barking mad.

The most that might make some sense is to keep
dead electronics out of normal rubbish dumps instead.


And so they are now, and have been for some time under the EU WEEE
directive, paid for by the equipment manufacturers. Which, as you say, makes
the whole thing barking mad ...

Arfa