Furthermore the health of my employees is very important to me and my company therefore I will not subject them to the increased toxicity of RoHS solder.

Not to mention that consumers don’t open these things and go lick and suck on the boards and components like they were popsicles, much less repair them themselves. And anyone with enough intelligence and common sense will wash their hands after doing any repairs, etc.

I remember the time when RRoD and YLOD was majorly caused NOT by hardware failure, but because the LEAD-FREE solder balls cracked and fractured under constant heating and cooling cycles, not to mention whiskers. And they had the audacity to charge $100 or more to fix the problem (if warranty expired)

tl,dr corporate greed, not corporate green, as well as lack of research, is the root of the problems that cause this. Oh, don’t forget to add average consumer ignorance, lack of or mis-information.

Add that damned SOPA bill to the mix and we get a crapstorm of epic proportions that will, ironically, make the world a WORSE place to live in. (For the average-income Joes, at least.)

PS: I sell stuff too but claim its RoHS for EU buyers. Not to worried about the UN coming after me.

My main problem is I can’t seem to clean the damn no clean flux residue. NC is fine for paste, but for hand soldering there’s residue and I need to get rid of it.

I’m selling stuff, so of course I need to use LF.

Once you get used to LF, it’s not really much different. It absolutely sucked the first day, yes… but after figuring it out it’s no big deal.

In fact, having to use flux more often on QFPs, etc actually improved my technique and speed at doing them.

Look, I’ve soldered electronics and larger joints on hobby 10 gauge Antennas, and it works great, especially in the moisture, and it does not water drip away as fast as lead.

This stuff is the cat’s meow, and no wiskers; I believe they solved that problem years ago by doping the tin with other elements they use today whether it is Copper/Bismuth/Silver or Copper/Selenium or Antimony, but I wouldn’t use the Antimony type because it may be a carcenigen.

The fears of lead users are understandable, will lead free solder work, will it cause problems. In fact the main artical itself just echos very old problems that no longer exist in leadless solder. However, all these concerns are really baseless. Try it yourselves for a bit instead of just voicing your concerns and then you will be converted as I am. This stuff is great, and it is functionally better in certain ways.

Durh, Let’s save the environment by not using a metal that’s already present in nature. Instead, let’s use something less manageable and less reliable, resulting in more failures and more electronics being thrown away.

Injestion.

If you’re stupid enough to suck solder wire you deserve all you get, injestion due to skin contact is minimal and easily combated by common sense measures such as washing your hands.

Inhilation.

With normal soldering lead does not reach a high enough temperature to form a vapour. You may be breathing in flux fumes but you are breathing in very little (if any)lead.

Environmental.

Lead in electronics solder is a TINY persentage of the amount of lead that either enters the environment or is there already!

The cost of Lead free alternatives (both in physical money and enviromental costs due to increased energy useage) is worse IMO than sticking with lead based solder.

Never been a problem. It just floats away…

I’m joking, of course. But only a little bit:

I once accidentally spilled about two gallons of used transmission fluid next to my house. I “cleaned it up” (Exxon Valdez/Deep Water Horizon style) with some dish soap and water.

A year later, I planted a vegetable garden in that spot. It produced some of the loveliest peppers I’ve ever seen, and I still haven’t grown a third testicle after having eaten almost all of them myself. So much for ruining the land.

And that’s a contextually irrelevant anecdote, at best, but seriously: The contribution of lead into the environment by hobbyists is easily dwarfed by consumers throwing out their old/broken stuff, let alone the shadetree mechanic who bins the occasional old lead-acid battery. Hell, I bet it’s dwarfed by wheel weights just falling off randomly as the steel holding them on rots away.

So toss the old sponge. Just forget about it. You’ll do better worrying about where the water you use to wash up after soldering goes…

And then get a brass tip cleaner — Hakko makes a good one. It’s cheap, and it works great with no water required. The bottom of the housing slowly fills with little balls of solder, which can be gathered up and recycled at your local scrap yard. And when the cleaner wears out completely, just recycle the whole thing (including the housing) as brass. (Machinable brass often has a bit of lead added to it anyway to prevent galling, so it’s not exactly like you’re poisoning the mix with your paltry solder content…)

Lead solder can probably be recycled similarly at any decent scrap yard, especially if you’re not interested in getting paid for it.

Old electronics can be recycled almost everywhere, these days. I live in a small town in Ohio, and while we don’t have a particularly convenient method for getting rid of old boards, the local solid waste district does have an “event” once a year where such stuff can be dropped off for free.

Meanwhile, you can have my 63/37 (or my old roll of acid flux 60/40 plumbing solder) when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

I’ve got a 7-year-old Dell Inspiron laptop that has seen daily use since it was new, in all kinds of weather, which still works fine….except for the hard drive, which was the only RoHS-compliant part on the machine (and also the only part to have died).

Anecdotes, anecdotes, but lead solder FTW.

What about bits of circuitry with solder on them?

What about the wet sponge one uses to wipe off the soldering iron tip?

What is the safe, responsible way for dealing with this lead waste?

Thanks

This post demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of radioactive elements and health. The half-life represents how long in time it takes to reduce the radioactive element by 1/2. As it decays, it changes from one compound to another. For example, uranium decays into lead.

There are three forms of radiation … two are harmless to humans unless the element is embedded in your body (ie eating it). The third (gamma) is dangerous as it penetrates the body, possibly causing a call mutation in the path (which goes right through you and continues on).

If an object has a half-life of a day, that means it’s emitting a lot of gamma radiation … 1/2 of all it’s capable of, in a day.

If an object has a half life of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years (1e22) then it will take that many years to emit 1/2 of it’s radioactive potential.

In other words, it’s essentially NOT radioactive; this is millions of times less radioactivity than common items that are known safe (being outside in the sun, LCD displays, smoke detectors, sleeping next to an any mammal which emits radiation stored in bone tissue, etc).

Get a grip, son. One single ray of beta radiation every ten years is not going to kill anything.

My company sells devices that are exposed to both shock and moisture, and we’ve had no quality issues yet.