Vehicle recycling is nothing new, but the REACH EU directive is. The vehicles being scrapped today are incredibly complex, loaded with electronic gadgetry which can no longer be consigned to the landfills; it must be recycled in an environmentally compliant manner.
Additionally, new vehicles and their components must be made from materials which obey RoHS and REACH EU legislation. Even if your sole input into a new concept car is some nifty Allegro PCB design work, you must still be aware of what is required by law. There’s no point ordering semiconductors on your Bill of Materials if after they’re installed it’s discovered the lead content is too high. Before you start a PCB layout, it’s vital you triple check the component list to make sure all the components on the manufacturing BOM comply.
As well as the RoHS and REACH legislation, there are a whole lot of EU legislations specifically targeted at the automotive industry. These include: the End of Life Vehicle, or ELV directive; the Global Automotive Declarable Substance List, or GADSL; and the International Material Data System, or IMDS. They cross over into areas like WEEE and REACH to some extent, though this hardly helps simplify things.
ELV compliance affects both vehicle disposal and vehicle design, since at least 85% of the end product must be safely recyclable, and components and materials, from paint finishes to semiconductors in printed circuit boards, totally REACH and GADSL compliant. This can be complex and time consuming to implement. However, we at Enventure Technologies offer a full range of enterprise data management solutions to the automotive industry, including GADSL, ELV and BOM management.
