Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

One World, One Industry: Sustainability Challenges—A Collaborative Approach

My personal belief is that changes to the electronics industry due to sustainability will be the most far-reaching in the industry’s history. This is not about if sustainability will impact us, but about when and if my organization will be left behind. We need to accelerate work that promotes sustainability and aims to achieve the ambitious sustainability goals set before us. The “we” includes all of us as individuals, but also as valued members of the global electronics manufacturing community. This diverse community can together address our greatest sustainability challenges.

Why Is IPC Involved?
IPC is committed to helping this community respond to and thrive in our world of continual change. IPC has global reach, is dedicated to electronics manufacturers, and has a long history of collaborating with the industry. IPC knows the industry and that it has the capacity to build electronics better. That means building sustainably if given the right solutions and tools. IPC is positioned to help with industry standards, workforce training, certification and validation programs, industry intelligence, and advocacy.

What Does It Mean to Build Electronics Sustainably?
Honestly, there are several aspects to what this means, and I can only touch on a few. It means we make conscientious lifecycle management decisions for all electronics manufacturing processes and products. More practically, this means we are paying attention to information that can increase resource efficiency and decrease unwanted impacts. I tend to think of sustainability as impacting three broad “Ps” of our environment: products, places, and people. Much of the effort at this point, likely because more of the regulatory information has been clarified here, has been focused on places: where and how we manufacture our products. But for real progress to happen, all three Ps need to go through modification at some point.

What Are the Key Issues?
Information
In this issue, Charles Nehrig, TTM Technologies Inc., calls attention to the critical uses of water in printed circuit board manufacturing processes. He highlights how his company has embedded water use reduction and water footprint goals into its operational and business goals. They know how they’re performing against these goals because they use network-based tracking of water consumption in all manufacturing locations.

Technological innovation
Also within this issue, Dr. Marina Hornasek-Metzl, AT&S, explains how digitalization helps the industry achieve its sustainability goals. Automating data collection and analysis helps to identify where impact reduction is possible. She also highlights that this industry presents a paradox: Electronics present sustainability solutions and challenges. Indeed, there are synergies between the circular economy agenda and digital technologies and digitalization. Electronics manufacturing processes require natural resources, chemicals and materials, and human workers; these processes present circularity challenges. At the same time, electronics products assure progress toward reducing impacts.

AT&S and dozens of other companies and research institutions are working in Europe to develop new technologies to make electronics production more sustainable. Digitalization and leveraging digital technologies will continue to improve what we make and how we make it. Technology solutions like ion exchange systems are less fancy but still elegant solutions, in particular for wastewater treatment. We value processes paired with flexibility and innovation to solve sustainability challenges.

This issue of PCB007 Magazine gives the industry examples of real solutions useful to them now and into the future. Addressing sustainability for electronics challenges takes a collaborative approach with free-flowing communication.

To learn more about IPC’s own Sustainability for Electronics initiative, click here, or contact Kelly Scanlon, IPC’s lead sustainability strategist, at KellyScanlon@ipc.org.

This column originally appeared in the March 2024 issue of PCB007 Magazine.