The impact of the hottest EU ROHS directive on the

The impact of EU ROHS directive on the carton industry

with the rapid development of modern science and technology, electronic information products and electrical products have brought great convenience to people's life and work. At the same time, their negative effects are also increasingly apparent, and a large number of discarded electronic and electrical products have also brought serious damage to people's living environment. In the European Union, about 60 tons of waste electronic and electrical products are produced every year, including 0 tons of waste electronic and electrical products such as automotive functional parts, printers, money detectors, electronic pallets, textile machine shuttles, etc. these waste electronic and electrical products contain a large amount of toxic and harmful substances such as lead, cadmium, hexavalent chromium and mercury. Improper disposal of these toxic and harmful substances will bring great damage to the environment. For this reason, after more than 10 years of research and debate, the European Union approved the 2002/95/EC and 2002/96/EC Directives on January 23 and 27, 2003, respectively, and published them in its official journal on February 13, 2003, which will take effect immediately

2002/95/EC Directive is "directive on the restriction of the use of certain hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment", referred to as RoHS directive. RoHS directive stipulates that since July 1st, 2006, electronic and electrical products containing lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls and polybrominated diphenyl ethers that exceed the specified limit levels (with partial exemption) are prohibited from entering the EU market. The 2002/96/EC Directive is "directive on waste from electronic equipment", referred to as WEEE Directive. According to the WEEE Directive, since August 13, 2005, manufacturers of electronic and electrical equipment circulating in the EU market must bear the legal responsibility of paying their own recycling costs of scrapped products. EU member states are obliged to formulate their own recycling plans for electronic and electrical products, and 176million yuan will be used for the construction project of polypropylene new functional material production line for automobile lightweight, and relevant supporting recycling facilities will be established to facilitate the end-users of electronic and electrical products to conveniently and freely dispose of scrap equipment. It also requires that electronic and electrical products put on the market after August 13, 2005 be affixed with recycling labels

from the promulgation of this decree to its formal implementation, electronic and electrical enterprises exporting to the EU have stepped up the inspection of hazardous substances on their raw material suppliers. Some large multinational companies also require the inspection of their corrugated box suppliers for harmful substances. For example, JVC completed the inspection of its carton supplier Donglian paper (Fuzhou) Co., Ltd. as early as the end of last year. Sony in Japan also requires suppliers to provide a guarantee that they do not contain prohibited substances, and ensure that the packaging products provided cannot contain or fall within the scope of the standard requirements. The author's company also has several customers asking for SGS test reports of cartons this year. All these indicate that electronic and electrical products exported to the EU, including packaging, should comply with the requirements of RoHS directive

the European Union RoHS directive defines the maximum concentration values (MCV) of six hazardous substances, that is, the maximum content of lead, mercury, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls (PBB) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE) in homogeneous materials is 1000 ppm, and the maximum content of cadmium is 100 ppm. An ordinary electronic device may contain thousands of homogeneous materials, and each homogeneous material must meet this limit requirement before the device can be considered to comply with the RoHS directive. The EU packaging directive (94/62/EC) also has similar restrictions on harmful substances, specifically that the sum of the above four heavy metal harmful substances in the smallest part of the packaging cannot exceed 100ppm, as shown in Table 1

for parts or components, they are usually a collection of a series of materials. If parts are used as the object of restriction, the original intention and effect of restricting the use of hazardous substances will often not be achieved. As a result, a large number of materials and components containing hazardous substances can be widely used, which is one of the reasons why the packaging directive will greatly reduce the concentration of restrictions when the components are directly restricted. Therefore, no matter from the EU packaging directive or ROHS directive, the packaging of EU products should be subject to hazardous substances restrictions. The former refers to the packaging of all products exported to the EU, while the latter refers to electronic and electrical products exported to the EU. As the outer packaging carton products for the supply of electronic and electrical products, whether the carton materials contain harmful substances needs to be controlled on the raw materials and processing process. Table 2 shows the test results of hazardous substances in corrugated box samples of a company

it can be seen from the results in Table 2 that the content of harmful substances in China's cartons is in line with the EU ROHS limit standard, which shows that China's carton industry is qualified in this regard. The lowest detected amount is hexavalent chromium, the largest detected amount is lead, followed by cadmium and mercury, and polybrominated biphenyls and polybrominated diphenyl ethers are not detected. According to expert analysis, this is because there are heavy metals in the printing ink and multilayer paper in the adhesive used in the compounding process, which requires our carton industry to strengthen the control of hazardous substance reduction (HSF) when selecting ink and preparing adhesive, so as to ensure that the use of these materials will not affect the quality and reliability of the final product

iecq-hspm hazardous substance process management system certification is the identification and evaluation of management system methods based on EU directives, which helps and promotes enterprises to carry out comprehensive hazardous substance control to reduce risks. The iecq-hspm system is based on the IECQ management system standard - IECQ QC080000 "standards and requirements for the reduction of hazardous substances in electronic and electrical components and products", while the IECQ QC080000 standard is based on ISO 9001:2000 rather than ISO14001 standard, because the system requires EU regulations and customer requirements to be defined as the quality related characteristic requirements of products, Based on ISO 9001:2000, we can better ensure the compliance of EU regulations from the perspective of process management and system. Enterprises that have implemented ISO 9001:2000 can establish hazardous substance process management system based on IECQ QC080000 on the basis of ISO 9001:2000, solve the diversity of different enterprises, different products and different ways to meet the requirements of the European Union through process management mode, and obtain the certification with IECQ mark

at present, there are no reports of paper packaging enterprises carrying out iecq-hspm certification in China, and not many even implement more than three management systems (ISO9001/ISO14001/OHSAS18001). If the customer does not require to obtain certification, the output results of the experiment results can be set arbitrarily: the maximum force value and elongation can save costs. The enterprise can establish corresponding management systems according to the mode of iecq-hspm according to the needs of the customer, and certification is not necessary. However, once the organization's process is certified in accordance with IECQ QC080000 standard, its products will be outstanding in the industry and become the best choice for customers after passing iecq-hsf product certification

source: China Packaging News