Here’s an exclusive peek behind the scenes of our greener electronics work from our self confessed policy wonk Melissa Shinn. While you might see Greenpeace climbers swinging from buildings, our policy experts like Melissa are a crucial part of Greenpeace for delivering campaign victories.

One thing we often see being a `policy wonk´ is that a very effective technique to stop a proactive proposal for a law is to play passive aggressive. Our politicians - especially the ones that are more sensitive to the woes of industry and our economic powers that be are very conservative (to put it mildly) about anything that regulates companies further.

So when the more progressive political parties in the European Parliament suggested that the latest revision of an EU law that regulates the use of chemicals and toxic materials in electronics should also ban toxic PVC and BFRs, arguing that there was sufficient evidence to do so and that it was perfectly feasible to substitute these materials it was maybe not surprising that this has a cautious reception from some politicians. Despite the fact that several big companies like HP, Nokia and Apple have proven its feasible.

The chemical industry - driven by the PVC and brominated flame retardant lobby promptly engaged behind the industry trade federation Orgamlime and the US based IPC standards institute to gun down the proposal, fearing loss of market for these toxic substances. At this point if the companies that have already done the hard work to replace BFRs and PVC with safer alternatives - at their own cost, (not cheap they assure us!) mobilise their trade federation to come out and tell everyone that its perfectly justifiable and feasible to ban the stuff then the political dialogue would most likely roll in the direction of the ban.

After all - if the companies representing more than 50% of the market of PCs and almost all the mobile phone market have substituted these chemicals it was for a very good environmental reasons. Typically however the trade federations are echoing the voice of the lowest common denominator and have taken public positions that at best can be said to be 'fudging the issue' - ‘well sure ban it, but only after you’ve set up a better methodology on how to ban a new substance’, ‘oh by the way, there isn’t one...’. Good old passive aggressive destruction.

Thankfully some companies have the honesty and have shown their corporate responsibility colours by breaking out of this passive block - HP and Acer have done this very clearly. A new position from HP a few weeks ago stated clearly:

"HP believes other substances should be included in future RoHS legislation. This includes the restriction of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) from electrical and electronic products (EEE)...".

To leave no doubts as to what it wants, HP even states that it is feasible for the law to set the ban date in 2015. Last week Acer sent a letter to the European politicians with the same message.

It remains to be seen if others such as Dell, Samsung and others will have the integrity to follow their lead. If they don’t it is very clear - as Acer points out in its letter - without making the PVC and BFR ban law these companies that have taken a leadership commitment to voluntarily eliminate these toxic substances will bear the lions share of the costs of new alternatives and face more problems in getting their supply chains to produce enough of them. Companies who haven’t been progressive will get a free ride to continue using toxic chemicals.