Sustainability

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What is sustainability?
RoHS
Conclusion
Further reading

What is sustainability?

If you ask 50 persons to define this relatively new word, you will probably receive at least 45 different answers!

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives the following:

sustainable, adjective.
...
3. Able to be maintained at a certain rate or level. M20.
...
b. spec. Of economic activity, development, agriculture, etc.: not leading to depletion of resources or degradation of the environment. L20.
...
• sustaina"bility noun L20.

In this context, it is clear that definition 3b is the one that counts. Unfortunately, it is not complete. For an action or a process to be deemed sustainable, it is necessary to examine the whole impact on the environment and resources and not just the immediate part. This is called the "cradle-to-grave" or holistic approach and it also involves risk assessment. There is also an economic aspect to the question; an action is not sustainable if it is either too cheap or too expensive.

If the costs are too low, it will become so popular that the resources will become depleted; this is the situation with oil supply. An illustration of this is amply shown in the North Sea oil and gas fields, which have become exploited to exhaustion in a relatively short term, encouraged by a spendthrift governmental fiscal policy. The result is that, as fuel prices are now much higher on the world markets, the UK is having to pay more than it ever earned from this manna from heaven to provide energy.

If the costs of exploitation are too high with respect to the world market supply, then sales will be insufficient to obtain economy of scale. This is the situation with photovoltaic panels for solar power. The cost of electricity produced is many times higher than that produced from fossil fuels, simply because it is impossible to amortise them in a shorter time than their lifetime. For this reason, some governments, including Cyprus, are offering attractive fiscal packages to allow more rapid amortisation. It is thus hoped that they will exit the Catch-22 situation that they are too expensive because the production rate is low, because the demand is low, because they are too expensive. Currently, solar panels are therefore non-sustainable. If subsidies do render them attractive, it is the tax-payer who bears the cost. As an aside, one wonders whether government-subsidised electricity is permissible as a cost of industrial production under EU and WTO rules!

Another aspect of sustainability is recycling (see the essay on Waste). Perhaps the most common product that is recycled is paper, and that is fairly familiar to us. The greater the quantity of recycled material that is used in the production of any material or product, so the amount of virgin resources required is diminished. Again, there is an economic factor. In many cases, virgin materials are cheaper than recycled ones. There is, perhaps, a case to be made for virgin materials to be taxed so that the cost to consumers is the same (or more) as for recycled ones of equivalent quality.

Unfortunately, externalised costs are rarely included in calculating the sustainability of a process, whether they be financial or environmental. To take a hypothetical example, if a new coal mine is exploited or a new power plant is built, it may require a lot of arable land to make room for the bing and the buildings. This seizure of land may mean that a farmer and his hands are deprived of their livelihood and are forced to seek unemployment benefits at the cost of the community. Equally, run-off may be polluted from the exploitation, causing damage to local biotopes, requiring later costly remediation. The case of the 2 million inhabitants displaced because of the construction of the Three Gorges dam in China is a case in point. A lot of valuable farm land, partially in the Yangtze flood plain, has been lost for ever and the peasants displaced to a poorer soil and ruder climate higher up, where it is almost impossible to scratch a living with different crops, for which they have no experience. The cost of their losses has not been included in the project costs.

Precautionary measures to avoid pollution are often not considered when discussing sustainability. To take a simple case: many thousands of industrial chemicals are supplied to the end users in 200 litre or similar drums, amounting to millions per year. These are subjected to transport and handling, especially in the end-users' factories. Accidents with these drums are a daily occurrence, due to storage in the open causing them to rust through, being mishandled by machinery such as fork-lift trucks, bungs being left open, taps not closing properly etc. In many countries, it is theoretically mandatory to make sure that, in the event of an accident, no matter where it occurs, no harm can result from the leaked chemicals. This usually involves resistant retention measures, able to contain all the products stored or being used in an area. Unfortunately, these rules are more often ignored than observed, even in advanced places. Of course, these measures do not apply uniquely to drums but to any kind of container, including equipment the chemicals are used in.

Finally, many regulations, laws, directives and other forms of rule-making are contrary to the sensible application of sustainability. I could quote a number of examples, but I'll take just one.

RoHS

As my example, I'll just cite one section of the EU Restriction of the use of Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment, RoHS, Directive, which comes into force on 1 July 2006. Put bluntly, it forbids the use of lead in solder for electronics assemblies, with a few minor exemptions (both "home-grown" and imported electronics are regulated). The thinking behind this is that end-of-life assemblies may be landfilled and it is possible that the lead may be leached out by liquids, driven by rain, and enter into ground water. This seems a noble aim and should earn our support. However, even a superficial study shows that no risk assessment was carried out, which makes this regulation one of the most stupid that has ever been promulgated by the European Union and will actually cause much more harm than good. In other words, it is not sustainable. Let me explain in detail...

It is chemically unlikely that lead would be leached out of solder under practical conditions. Even if it were, any lead salts would be fixed by an ion exchange mechanism in the soil, in the top 2 - 3 cm, so it would be impossible for lead to reach ground water. In any case, EU regulations insist that landfills be divided into lined cells, which would even prevent leachate from reaching the soil. The basic premiss is therefore wrong.
The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE) states that 75% of electrical and electronics waste must be recycled. The solder is, by far, the easiest component on electronic assemblies to recycle. If the solder is recycled, there will be no lead in the landfill, will there? The regulation is therefore contradictory to another regulation, which was simultaneously promulgated, and reinforces the falsity of the premiss.
There are no recorded cases of lead being found hazardous in the electronics assembly industry, with over 70 years of continuous use of lead-bearing solders. There is therefore no health and safety issue in the industry.
The traditional solders used in the industry are usually alloys of 60 to 63 per cent tin, the rest being lead and sometimes small amounts of other metals. These alloys melt between 180° and 185°C. Various lead-free alloys have been proposed as substitutes, mostly in the range of 92 to 97 per cent tin, the rest being copper and/or silver. These generally have melting points between 210° and 220°C. Soldering, which is an energy-intensive process, will have to be done at a higher temperature, requiring more energy and therefore more pollution if the electricity is generated from fossil fuels. This contradicts the stated EU target of reduced energy consumption and lower carbon dioxide emissions.
The higher soldering temperature will mechanically and thermally stress the electronic components more, potentially reducing their reliability. Furthermore, solder with lead is more ductile than lead-free solder, which is comparatively brittle. This means that the solder joints themselves are more prone to fracture due to vibration or with changes of temperature (maybe this is why the electronics for aircraft have been exempted from the regulation, for fear that they will fall out of the sky). In addition, because of the higher soldering temperatures, post-soldering residues will be more difficult to clean off; these residues are a frequent cause of failures in high-reliability equipment. Reduced reliability will mean a shorter lifetime for electronics assemblies and therefore more waste and costlier appliances.
Ready-to-use lead-free solder is about 30 to 40 per cent more costly than traditional solder, because it contains about 50 per cent more tin. Additionally, it is no coincidence that one of the main lobby groups in favour of the regulation is a subsidiary of an association of international tin producers. The cost of appliances will inevitably rise.
Because the lead-free solder contains about 50 per cent more tin, the demand for tin will rise. Most tin ore comes from alluvial deposits in Malaysian, Indonesian and Brazilian tropical rain forests, which are permanently destroyed by the mining activities. Vast areas in these countries have been devastated by the demand for tin and this demand will rise, solder being amongst the main tin consumers in the world. On the other hand, the lead used in traditional solder is less than 0.45 percent of total lead production, so the difference here will be very small. Reports have shown that the proportion of the earth's surface covered by tropical rain forest has already dwindled from 15 per cent in 1951 to 6 per cent today (mostly because of timber and non-sustainable agriculture). Can we afford to see the very lungs of the earth destroyed by the increased demand for tin? This regulation will therefore directly cause more environmental damage to a dwindling and very fragile eco-system which is essential to support life on earth.

It can therefore be seen that these seven reasons, which are not even exhaustive, make the RoHS Directive contradictory to the notion of sustainability, because there are no advantages to be gained (except for the metal producers). Coming back to the dictionary definition, Of economic activity, development, agriculture, etc.: not leading to depletion of resources or degradation of the environment, we can see that it will lead to both increased depletion of resources and increased degradation of the environment. How can this have happened? Simply that an EU Commission did not evaluate the science or the "cradle-to-grave" impact before proposing the legislation, nor did they conduct a risk assessment as EU regulations stipulate, "because funds were not available". In other words, this harmful legislation was bulldozed through on the grounds that lead is a politically dirty word, aided and abetted by some vested interests. My view is that this is scandalous and I hope that every EMP who voted in favour of this Directive (actually a parliamentary formality) would hang his head in shame at having promoted an act which is contrary to sustainability.

This case is not unique and I can cite a number of other idiocies of a similar nature promulgated by our so-called representatives in Brussels, due to a lack of risk assessment, scientific knowledge, coupled with a surplus of prejudice and vested interests.

Conclusion

Sustainability is still an ill-defined word and should be used with discretion and a knowledge of its long-term, "cradle-to-grave" sense. Wind farms are often cited as an example of sustainable energy generation. They are certainly renewable energy generators, but has anyone really determined that they are sustainable? Think "cradle-to-grave"!

This essay may be contrary to popular thinking, which is probably too shallow. I make no apologies for this.