The road to hell is paved with good intentions

Or why government green initiatives usually go spectacularly wrong.

There have been numerous such initiatives, the most obvious one being RoHS. Although it seemed a good idea to remove lead from PCB assemblies, none of the people I know or the research I can find actually showed a real problem.

For people hand soldering with lead free solder, the fume extraction equipment actually has to be far more capable as the fluxes used are much more aggressive than the rosin used in ordinary tin / lead solder quite apart from the soldering time going from less than a second to between 5 and 10 seconds per joint with associated risk to the device being soldered.

There is no evidence that going to lead free has reduced environmental impact, and in fact it probably is worse.

Then we have energy use; SnPb eutectic solder is liquidus at 183C and gets full reflow at about 210C. Lead free (well, SAC305 which is a very popular variant) gets liquidus at 207C and reflow happens at around 245C. That extra heat required for every board that goes through reflow is significant and uses a lot more energy than previously. I know that we have more efficient ovens now, but those still have a cost (and, ironically, a rather large carbon footprint during their manufacture and installation).

The list goes on, but I am sure you get the gist.

Of course, that is not the only one that has issues. There is the debacle in the UK that requires condensing boilers in all new build (again, political fiat) on the grounds it 'sounded like a good idea', but there are a number of issues with them (and I have experienced those myself - it is not a good start to the day to find you have no hot water in the middle of winter).

No initiative column would be complete without a reference to LEDs replacing traditional light bulbs, but doing so can have serious consequences. It saves on the electricity bill, though.

So remember, real research beats 'feel good' in science every time.