Ensuring environmental compliance
For some companies, staying within environmental compliance regulations is as simple as ensuring that the rubbish goes out on the right day. However, some find it much more complicated. The regulations that apply to companies dealing with a wide variety of listed substances can be complex. Following them is often far from straightforward. In addition to ensuring that your company isn’t polluting the waterways or the air, precise and exhaustive records must be kept to make sure this is the case every single day. We can deliver complete and fully contained environmental compliance solutions. These are just one part of a total enterprise data management package, but we’re happy to address specific concerns as well. Whether you are involved in the chemical industry, in manufacturing, or just handle the occasional substance of environmental concern, we can help with all stages of the process. With one of our environmental compliance management systems in place it will be easy for your staff to make sure the company stays within the letter of the law at all times. It should be clear what staff need to do at all stages, from receipt or raw materials to storage to waste disposal. This way you not only make sure all regulations are adhered to, but also allow your workers to get on with their jobs without wasting precious hours trying to understand and negotiate compliance issues. Your company can save money through increased efficiency, and be ensured of compliance along the way.
Environmental compliance and RoHS regulations
The European Union laws governing environmental compliance management are complex, and how heavily your company needs to be concerned with them depends on what you do and how you do it. Even across the engineering sector, materials in use and processes at work vary widely, as will the need to ensure compliance with environmental and industrial regulations. A company producing custom software packages will be subject to far fewer regulations than one producing hazardous chemicals, or using them in a manufacturing process. The regulations fall into a number of categories. One of the most important for manufacturers of electronic equipment or components is the Restriction of Hazardous Substances or RoHS directive. It covers a small number of particular materials that are dangerous or toxic in various ways. That includes mercury, lead, cadmium, and a number of other substances that are required by law to be kept safely stored and to be handled with appropriate precautions in place. RoHS compliance regulations also cover disposal of hazardous materials or anything that contains them. In addition to making sure due diligence is observed whenever a hazardous substance is handled, stored, used, or removed from your premises for disposal or sale is just part of the process of environmental compliance. To be stay fully in line with RoHS all relevant companies also need to keep precise data on all their hazardous materials and make sure their records are kept up to date in case of an environmental audit – or in case an accident or a spill does occur.
What is the REACH directive?
The REACH directive is a piece of environmental compliance regulation. At first glance REACH is a lot like the RoHS directive in that it governs the safe use of chemical substances. The difference is that REACH is far broader in its scope, dealing with a different set of substances that need to be handled in different ways. It’s an evolving piece of legislation with new substances due to be added over time. The expectations on companies operating within REACH’s remit will also change over time. Like most environmental compliance management legislation, REACH goes much further than telling companies and individuals how they can use and handle substances of environmental concern, or those which might have health implications. It also states that comprehensive records need to be kept, covering more or less every movement or usage of any quantity of those hazardous chemicals. Sound complicated? It doesn’t have to be. We can sort out all your compliance issues for you and help put in place a simple system for your staff, both to keep them safe and to make sure your company stays well within the letter of the law. Doing so yourself can be both expensive and time consuming. It takes research to fully understand REACH and RoHS and where they do and don’t apply to any particular company and any given situation, and consulting an expert is the perfect shortcut. Our tailored software will ensure that you lose a minimum of working time to compliance issues. If staff need training, that’s no problem. At Enventure, we have the knowledge and the ability to pass it on to your workers.
WEEE compliance
The WEEE directive compliance legislation is something almost any company that lists a computer or a piece of electronics in their assets will need to deal with eventually. For those engaged in manufacturing or selling anything with electronic or electrical components, this is one of the key components of environmental compliance management. WEEE stands for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment. An old computer isn’t just a heavy piece of rubbish when it reaches the end of its life. While its exterior may consist of glass, metal, and plastic, what’s inside can be quite hazardous. Older batteries are especially problematic, and if waste electronics go straight to landfill, chemicals like lead and mercury can leach out and end up polluting the soil and the water table. Private individuals can sometimes send their broken and dead laptops and computers back to the manufacturer for safe disposal, but for the manufacturers themselves WEEE compliance can be a headache. Of course, they’ll also have to stay within other directives as well – many of the raw materials used to make electronic components include mercury and other chemicals covered by the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive for example. Specialists like us can make sure your manufacturing company comes into environmental compliance of all kinds and stays that way. We understand WEEE, RoHS, REACH and others. With a software solution and the right staff training compliance is easy. We can also make sure it happens as efficiently as possible, so your workers can continue to add value to your business.
The changing demands on manufacturing
Complying with new EU environmental and safety regulations has posed challenges for manufacturing, and they aren’t all focused on how waste is dealt with, and ensuring health and safety at all stages of production. The nature of the products has had to change in the items produced, along with the raw materials that can be used in their construction. Mechanical engineering has found ways to not only make the production process safer for the people directly involved, but also build things that are better and safer. Batteries are a good example. Not so long ago the batteries used in laptops contained dangerous chemicals. They weren’t very effective, nor were they easy to dispose of. The WEEE directive was introduced to combat the latter problem, and now batteries are lighter, more compact, much safer to use and dispose of. The battery manufacturing process also now uses fewer hazardous substances than it once did. The ELV directive fills the same niche for the automotive industry as WEEE does for electronics. ELV or End of Life Vehicles generate a good deal of waste. Some of this is hazardous, but much of which can be reused and recycled into new cars or other items. The regulations set targets for those two factors as well as controls on the less savoury components that can be used in the manufacture of new cars – another challenge for mechanical engineering. At Enventure, our environmental compliance solutions can help your company meet these challenges. Not only will you stay within regulations, but also manufacture better products in the long run.
Experts in Environmental Compliance
Enventure technologies are undisputed experts in all areas of environmental compliance. By engaging our outstanding professional services, you can ensure that your products meet environmental compliance statutes such as RoHS, WEEE and REACH in the markets of the European Union and requirements such as China RoHS, Korea RoHS and Japan J-MOSS, which are the equivalent industrial standards in the Asian marketplaces. Whether you are involved in PCB design or any other area, Enventure Environmental compliance management systems will ensure that your finished product meets all relevant certifications, compliances and legal requirements for any worldwide market. Compliance is a very stringent and potentially complex process, as each and every component used in the manufacture of any particular products must be properly assessed in order to ascertain whether it meets the particular environmental compliance requirements for each relevant product market. Thus, evidence on the material composition of each component must be meticulously collected, collated, and consolidated for each manufacturer and for each and every product. This may seem like a daunting task, but Enventure can organise each step of the process in order to make sure that you can declare your product environmentally compliant with supreme confidence. We will guarantee that you achieve compliant status with no associated stress, significantly reduce the cost of achieving total environmental compliance, ensure global compliance for all products, achieve comprehensive coverage of all parts, including custom and mechanical, seamlessly and smoothly integrate with any compliance management system, gain access to reporting services in industry compliance standards and use our bespoke three way information collection techniques throughout the entire process, which combine internet resources, active sourcing and in-house expertise, thus ensuring secure, legitimate and expert guidance at every step of the process.
Understanding the ELV Directive 2000/53/EC
We seem to spend a lot of time talking about EU directives as they apply to environmental compliance and mechanical engineering. Whilst we realize that these are not the most exciting of topics we do hope our short summary articles are useful and at least raise awareness of these important issues. Today we are looking at the ELV directive and ELV compliance. These fit roughly into the scope of the RoHS directive and WEEE compliance directives but they cover End-of-Life Vehicles. Basically the wording says that the End of Life Vehicles (ELV) Directive 2000/53/EC requires that certain automotive products and parts be free (except for possible trace impurities) of mercury, cadmium and lead as of the 1st of July, 2003. There is an exception in that Lead can still be used as an alloying additive in copper, steel and aluminum and in solders. The ELV directive also sets recovery targets for the recycling of vehicles and components within the vehicles and strongly encourages designers, mechanical engineers and manufacturers to design their products with the ideas of later reuse or recycling in mind. They also ask that you provide dismantling and treatment instructions to people who may be involved in the dismantling and recycling operations to help them. If you think that you may be designing or building products that will be covered by the ELV directive then it is vital that you consult an expert on this issue who will be able to advise you about your actual duty of care in testing, and all of the paperwork and documentation that you will require to be properly ELV compliant.
What is RoHS All About?
RoHS Compliance, or more accurately EU Directive 2002/95 covering the Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment Regulations 2008 (the “RoHS Regulations”) is hard enough to pronounce (people tend to spell it out or opt for Ross, Roz or even sometimes, Rose) let alone to understand, so we thought we would try and sum up why it exists and why you should take notice of it in a couple of short paragraphs. Basically, what happens with EU directives is that they are passed for Europe as a whole and each member state has to implement the directive within its own laws. This law went live in July 2006 and anything made after this time must follow these environmental compliance laws. The topics covered in this directive are quite wide-ranging, for example, six hazardous substances have to be removed from all electrical and electronic equipment. These are Cadmium (Cd), hexavalent Chromium (CR VI), Lead (Pb), Mercury (Hg), polybrominated biphenyls (PBB) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE). The directives also enforce recycling and safe disposal of old equipment that you have sold, these take-back schemes enforcing a duty of care upon the manufacturer and sometimes the distributor to either dispose of the item or to re-use parts. In Europe this comes under the WEEE Compliance Scheme which we cover elsewhere. Many other countries (such as the US, and China) are implementing their own version of RoHS and WEEE ,so even if you manufacture and ship outside the EU it would be well to at least learn the guidelines and stick with them as much as possible not only for the sake of the environment but also for your future ability to market products just about anywhere in the world.
Do You Need to Worry about WEEE Compliance?
In this entry, we thought we would look briefly at the European Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (or conveniently WEEE compliance) and why this environmental compliance directive may apply to you. WEEE is there to try and encourage the collection, recycling and recovery of all or parts of waste electronic or electrical apparatus. This is an EU directive which is implemented slightly differently by the various member nations, but in general if you are dealing in large or small household appliances, IT and telecoms equipment, consumer equipment, lighting equipment, electrical (and electronic) tools, electrical toys, leisure or sport equipment, medical devices, monitoring and control instruments and automatic dispensing machines then this recycling directive will apply to you. There are exceptions for things like implanted (or infected) equipment, large scale industrial tools that don’t ever move, military products, automotive and aerospace or aircraft products or the oddly described “surface transportation products”. If your company does manufacture anything that comes into the list of covered products then you need to register as a WEEE producer and you need to provide people who buy your products a means of returning the old items to you for recycling. You also need to make sure you are very open about how you are doing this recycling and cover all the costs associated with this. One of the easiest ways of doing this, and for most companies this would be the most convenient is to employ an external company who specialize in all the things associated with WEEE Compliance. They will also be able to advise you on your responsibilities and liabilities so it is worth chatting to one at the very least.