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Korean Environmental Laws – A conversation with Michael Kirschner
Rob Spiegel -- Design News, May 31, 2006
Korea recently issued RoHS-like environmental laws. To gain some understanding of the new regulations, we turned to Michael Kirschner, president of the San Francisco-based consulting company, Design Chain Associates, LLC
Design News: Michael, tell us about the new Korean laws.
Michael Kirschner: Korea is yet another country following the European Union’s (EU) lead in both regulating the materials used to build electrical and electronic products as well as requiring producers to extend their product-related responsibilities to recycling. The new Korean legislation, issued to the World Trade Organization’s Technical Barriers to Trade Committee on March 30, 2006, is complex and has elements of three different EU directives: Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), Restriction of the use of certain hazardous substances (RoHS), and End of life vehicles (ELV).
Design News: What are some of the details included in the directive?
Kirschner: While short on details of scope, materials, and maximum concentration values (MCVs), it does go in to a level of detail on penalties as well as material reporting and recycling requirements. There is a marking requirement but they indicate that using a pre-existing symbol would be preferable to creating yet another one (I think we can all agree with this!). Automobiles would be subject to both material restriction as well as recycling. How much it parallels ELV is not clear.
Design News: Will the Korean law differ materially from the EU’s RoHS directive?
Kirschner: While the Korean Ministry of Environment (MoE), which is responsible for implementation, has indicated that it intends to harmonize requirements with the pre-existing EU requirements, the legislation (the WTO comment period ends May 13) is slated to go in to effect on July 1, 2007. With such a short timeframe and so many details missing this is yet another law that does not seem to fully account for the realities of the electronics industry. While the MoE has been extremely responsive and reasonable in our discussions with them (a very welcome turn of events!), the industry clearly has to expend some effort to educate governments about how we operate and the challenges involved in implementing laws like this.
