The RoHS Directive, declared by the European Union in February 2003, covers restrictions placed of the use of certain hazardous substances in the manufacture of electrical and electronic equipment. This directive will ban the sale of electrical and electronic equipment containing more than agreed-upon levels of six identified substances in the EU market beginning July 1, 2006.
Samsung's online support site for environment management provides an overview introduction on the company''s environment-friendly management along with a search index for environment-friendly products.
The new link (http://www.samsung.com/rohs/) also provides product certificates and material declaration sheets that will assure compliance to the RoHS Directive. The Web-based availability of the compliance materials is expected to shorten response time greatly as it instantly delivers certificates based on a customer's choice of products. The site is linked to a database of more than 8,000 commodity semiconductor solutions. Custom System LSI products are not part of the new Web site and instead will be available through conventional customer contacts.
Samsung Electronics' Semiconductor Business implements environment-friendly measures throughout the full product development and manufacturing lifecycle. Development of environment-friendly products was initiated in 1998 with lead-free products. Samsung expanded its base of products free from hazardous substances to halogen-free products in 2005.
Another environmentally-focused measure that Samsung has implemented in conjunction with green management is a hazardous-substance-free procurement system, dubbed "green procurement," which screens hazardous substances from their raw materials'' level to facilitate production of environment-friendly products.
