Environment
The Complexity of Environmental Compliance
Environmental compliance has evolved from a checklist-driven obligation into one of the most complex governance challenges companies face today. Regulations are expanding in scope, increasing in technical depth, and becoming more interconnected across jurisdictions.
As a result, even well resourced organizations struggle to keep pace with the accelerating demands of climate policy, biodiversity protection, pollution control, and ESG accountability. Electronics are used everywhere and so subject to many regulations and industry restrictions.
Supply Chain Communication
We need to understand that selling products to a global market, we need to be compliant with this global market. The global market contains of regional regulations, industrial regulations and OEM [customer] special restriction.
To combine all these regulations and restrictions it is difficult because they differ a lot. We, PCB Connect Holding AB, have our own substance database where we can monitor all regulations, ever asked by a customer, and all materials used by our PCB manufacturers.
With this database we can see the complexity of the compliance.
The supply chain shall inform each other top > down and other way around about the required compliance regions and industries.
Exemptions
It’s important to understand that if there is an exemption for one regulation, it doesn’t relief us from other regulations.
Example 1: [An RoHS exemption for lead, will still result in a SCIP registration because lead is adopted in REACH].
Example 2: DBDPE 84852-53-9 is adopted in REACH and above threshold.
We can still use this material for REACH and register in SCIP, but the substance is also applicable in POPs as proposal, Medical, Railway, Automotive and Canadian toxication act. The usage will be still limited.
Confidential substances
In our database we have registered for >28000 substances for different materials. From all materials 38% have 1 or more confidential substances. For this reason, we ask the material suppliers for their compliance with the regulations.
PCB Connect environmental team worked together with the supply chain to verify confidential substances and substances of concern. We used the Taguchi method in combination with a worst-case scenario test and found no new unknown substances.
Based on this worst-case scenario approach we were able to create a supplier instruction for environmental compliance of Substances of Concern.
Conflict Minerals &Global Trade Restrictions
Recently, the United States imposed sanctions on Chinese companies under the pretext of so-called "forced labour," which seriously violates international law and the basic norms of international relations, and severely infringes upon my country's sovereignty, security, and development interests. Six US entities, including Applied DNA Sciences, assisted and supported the illegal US sanctions on Xinjiang, which is egregious in nature.
China’s Ministry of Commerce issued MOFCOM Order No. 2 of 2026 on 5 August 2026, adding six U.S. entities, including the Responsible Business Alliance (RBA), to China’s countermeasures list under the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law. The order prohibits organizations and individuals within China from conducting “transactions, cooperation or other related activities” with the listed entities.
For now, it’s unclear how Europe judge this situation.
It’s a challenge to get this reporting obligations controlled. We will be following this and find solutions without violating any of those restrictions.
Would you like to learn more about our sustainability work?
Don’t hesitate to get in touch.
ISO14001:2026
This year ISO launched the new version for environment and is going more in direction of sustainability approach.
Optional examples in the ISO14001:2015 are now mandatory like;
Climate change, Biodiversity, Ecosystem Health, natural resource availability, and pollution levels.
Our environmental team is working on this together with our internal audit team. Per January 2029 the new standard shall be completely implemented.
Regulations under control
In total we investigated 48 regulations and monitor them monthly. We defined how we monitor these regulations in detail. The regulations we have worldwide classified as:
- Regulations for substances of concern.
- Ecodesign, Sustainability and Extended Producer Responsibility {EPR}
- Sustainable Finance
- Forced labour and responsible Sourcing.
- Sanction lists
The most regulations we can monitor in our own substances at risk database.