Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Data Modeling to Support Environmental Information Exchange Throughout the Supply Chain

Published

Author(s)

John V. Messina, Eric D. Simmon

Abstract

With an ever-increasing awareness of the environmental impact of manufacturing, more and more political organizations (countries, states, and unions) are enacting legislation designed to protect the environment. One category of this restrictive legislation is called Extended Producer Responsibilities (EPR). EPR directives place greater responsibility on manufacturers for the environmental impact of their products. These laws shift the focus from the products origin to the products final destination and from the process of manufacturing to the actual product itself. The highest impact of these directives is the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive, finalized by the European Union in 2003. The RoHS directive restricts imports of new electrical and electronic equipment containing lead and five other hazardous substances. For manufacturers to successfully comply with RoHS and similar legislation they need the ability to exchange material content information concerning the absence of restricted hazardous materials. This information would then propagated throughout the supply chain from the raw material suppliers all the way to the final producer. While a solution could be generated for any single piece of legislation, the problem is that companies will need to successfully deal with potentially dozens of laws and directives. To deal with this problem, NIST developed a data model that looked at the underlying material content declaration problem. This data model was then used as the key element in the development of IPCs 1752 Material Declaration standard designed to help the electronics industry comply with RoHS. While the IPC 1752 standard does support RoHS, the data model was designed with the intent that it would be able to support additional RoHS-like legislation (China RoHS, California RoHS, etc) with little effort. The key being, even if different solutions were developed for each piece of Legislation, as long as they where based on the same data model the solutions would be interoperable. This paper looks at the data model designed for the IPC1752 standard and how it can be adapted to similar RoHS-like laws and directives.
Proceedings Title
14th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering
Conference Dates
July 16-20, 2007
Conference Location
Sao Jose Dos Campos, BR

Keywords

RoHS, IPC 1752, data modeling, China RoHS, environmental legislation

Citation

Messina, J. and Simmon, E. (2007), Data Modeling to Support Environmental Information Exchange Throughout the Supply Chain, 14th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering, Sao Jose Dos Campos, BR, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=901689 (Accessed March 28, 2024)
Created August 11, 2007, Updated February 19, 2017