Insight into quantitative environmental emission analysis of printed circuit board

Abstract

This paper presents quantitative analysis of environmental emissions in different life cycle stages such as raw material preparation (RMP) and production processing (PP) of printed circuit board. A general emission model for printed circuit board (PCB) has been developed to analyze the emissions to air, fresh water, sea water and industrial soil. This work also demonstrates the quantities of renewable and non-renewable resources that are required to manufacture PCBs. Based on these generic models, the environmental assessment has been carried out in a production of one million PCBs. We also make an attempt to give an analytic description for evaluating the amount of emissions in each life cycle stages of the printed circuit board.