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In the US, government activities at state level RoHS is less prevalent, said Krista Botsford from 5-Trees, Burlington, MAUSA. “California is currently the only state with RoHS legislation that started Jan 1 this year. The legislation focused on four heavy metals (Pb, Hg, Cd, Cr6) from the CEDs in the related e- waste legislation.” “The difference from the EU legislation is that implementation is based on the date of manufacture. However, California currently working on incorporating all ten EU categories and a proposal was passed from committee as of April 2007,” she added. Meanwhile, the IPC 175x is undergoing a revision due to the need to support more regulations and the desire to supportdifferent types of declarations. “IPC 175x is originally designed to be a flexible form and allow for declaration of any type of data needed in the manufacturing process. The original version includes basic information such as company and contact information (IPC 1751) and material declaration (IPC 1752).” “Version 1.0 of 1752 uses a XML schema to define the data structure and data types for a 1752 material declaration. Version 2.0 will be more general in the regulation section, more modular with manufacturing information section (IPC 1756), multiple parts and multi-level reporting,” said Botsford. “It will not include any implementation and will focus on the XML schema instead. It will also move away from form due to support needed to maintain form format.” There is also the IPC RoHS Lead-Free Capabilities Certification Program. It consists of a two-phased certification that comes with a pre-auditquestionnaire. Some 301 items are broken into 15 sections corresponding to different areas of the electronics assemblyoperations and on-site audit. “The certification can only cover the procedures and processes in place at the time of the audit. However, it cannot ensure or be used to represent that the facility’s products will be RoHS lead-free compliant as it is designed to validate a RoHS leadfree electronics assembly processes’ capabilities to customers and suppliers,” said Botsford. Going forward, Botsford says the US attitudes and activities on environmental compliance are far from uniform. However, California will likely be the leader and other states will follow andexpand from California’s lead. “Standardization of the reporting format for materials declaration will assist industry significantly,” she said. While the next step is on green manufacturing, Botsford says there are various definitions on green manufacturing and there is no common definition to the term. Krista Botsford | 
