Effect of new EU Directive on batteries

The new law, Directive 2006/66/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 6 September 2006 on Batteries and Accumulators and Waste Batteries and Accumulators and Repealing Directive 91/157/EEC, was officially put into force on September 26th, 2008. It has taken place of the previous laws and regulations on batteries by EU, as well as placed more rigorous demands on all manufacturers and importers of batteries as e.g. all kinds of batteries shall meet the requirements on limited contents of mercury and cadmium whatever they are used for the purposes of daily consumption, industrial utilization or automobiles; meanwhile, they shall also meet the relative demands on marks and labels; and all those failed to meet the above demands shall not be distributed in the markets; in addition, there are some demands on e.g. collection ratio of abandoned waste batteries, prohibition on burial and burn of waste batteries abandoned from automobile and industry as well as the demands on collection of those waste batteries. Please log in www.cn.sgs.com/zh/enewsletter_cn for more details.

Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA 2008) by USA

Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA 2008) (HR 4040), signed by US President George W. Bush, reauthorizes the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) of US to be the executive authority in 2010~2014 to guarantee the consumer product safety especially the products designed to be used by children. The improvement act endows higher executive power to the CPSC (e.g. rights to recall products, etc.), and requires all producers and retailers of products to conduct more measures on safety protection during the processes of production and retailing. In specialty, the new law has revised the limits of contents of lead in the surface coating of consumer products, e.g. it shall be less than 90 ppm (previously it was 600 ppm) since August 4th, 2009. Please log in www.cn.sgs.com/zh/enewsletter_cn for more details.

ROHS of Turkey

The Environment and Forests Ministry of Turkey is responsible for converting the EU laws e.g. ROHS and WEEE into their own national laws and regulations. As a result, they issue their own ROHS law this year, and the law will come into force on June 2009. Contents of Turkey ROHS are similar to EU ROHS e.g. restriction on the use of lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium and PBDE, etc. in electronic products; adoption the waiver clauses of EU ROHS; not only the products shall meet the demands on limit of contents, but also the relative manufacturer shall keep the relevant documentation and certificates for at least 5 years as well as submit a "Declaration of Compliance" by February every year as required in the attachment of the law.

Philippines plans to eliminate those medical equipment that containing mercury

2008-0021 Administrative Order, signed by the Sanitary Ministry of Philippines recently, points out that Philippines will eliminate the medical equipment that containing mercury in all medical and health-caring institutes, including the thermometer and sphygmomanometer. Even though only 0.7~1.5 grams of mercury is contained in each thermometer and 80~100 grams in each sphygmomanometer, but they are in the worry of sanitary and health-caring institutes, due to 1 gram of mercury can kill all fishes in a lake of 20 acres. Instead, there are some objections to the regulations in this Order, because mercury-free medical equipment also have some disadvantages e.g. more expensive, low speed of detection, worse precision and more difficult to operate, etc. Furthermore, some people challenge the problems about disposal of these equipment containing mercury after they are eliminated.

"Clean" products of Apple Inc.

"We are highly concentrating on the environmental protection features on our products", Steven Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc., said in an activity on September this year, "We are making our efforts to decrease their packaging sizes when the products are distributed to worldwide, reduce the discharge of carbon during transportation, use recyclable materials as possible as we can; while more than that, we are caring about whether these products contain some hazards in them?" Apple Inc. always uses mercury-free LED displayer and bromic parts for iPod they distributed; recently, they also introduce MacBook that using arsenic-free glass and mercury-free LED displayer. As in their plan, Apple Inc. is going to abandon the use of PVC, brominated flame retardant and arsenic in all their products before the end of this year.