PWB Environmental Life Cycle Analysis

• Understanding the environmental impact of electronic products throughout their life cycle is still in its infancy but is becoming of increasing interest to the industry and its customer base.
• To date, from an environmental perspective, producers have primarily focussed on compliance with legislation addressing the removal of toxic substances from products, in use energy consumption and end of life disposal. Attention is now turning to carbon footprint studies and more general life cycle assessments of the environmental impact caused by products. This encompasses product manufacture considerations as well as service life and disposal.
• An assessment by the project team of activities within the industry has concluded that the results of studies to date on the PWB fabrication and related upstream materials production processes do not provide the level of detail and accuracy needed by HDP User Group members participating in this project.
• Detailed (product design specific) data is needed from the discrete process steps of the PWB fabrication cycle that capture energy usage and associated C02 impact. In addition, similar data is needed from the production processes for materials and process chemicals used by the PWB industry.
• Additional information is also required on air emissions, water consumption, effluent discharges and disposal of process materials; however this is of a lower priority to the project members at this time

 Project Scope

 The aim of this project is to conduct an environmental impact study on the fabrication process of a selection of printed wiring board designs. Focus will be primarily on energy and water consumption throughout the manufacturing process. The project will be run in two phases as detailed below.

Phase 1:

Conduct a carbon footprint/energy consumption study of the fabrication process for producing both a traditionally constructed multilayer PWB design and also a high density interconnect design (using partial sequential build construction). To include:

• A comparison of using halogen free materials versus conventional TBBA loaded laminates and pre-pregs.
• Energy consumption data collected from first hand sources (i.e. fabricators & materials suppliers) based on actual analysis on a process step by process step basis. Energy measurements should be based on average consumption to undertake the operations required and not, for example, from machine specified maximum ratings.
• Analysis to cover the PWB fabrication process, the laminate/pre-preg production process and the processes for manufacturing other materials used in the fabrication of the PWB (e.g. Copper foil, solder mask). In addition, where possible, the carbon impact of producing supporting process materials and chemicals (e.g. resists, etchants, plating solutions, bonding and drilling materials) should also be captured.
• Analysis of the source of energy used with a specific focus on power generation preferences (nuclear, gas fired, coal fired etc.) across different parts of the world.
• While not a priority in the project data for air emissions, effluent discharges, water consumption and waste/sacrificial material disposal will also collected.

Phase 2:

 Using phase 1 as a pilot study, develop an energy/ CO2 footprint calculator for estimating impact of any PWB design.