Scores of rules and regulations have mandated the removal of hazardous substances from electronics over the past few decades. But the law moves slowly. A faster route would be for companies to proactively eliminate potentially hazardous materials.

I’m in a position to help do this: I oversee supply chain engineering at EMC, which means that my section decides which materials we want to phase out and what we can replace them with.

But eliminating potentially hazardous materials is easier said than done. It’s a challenging process, made even more difficult by the curse of unrealistic expectations. Consumer electronics companies have made very public headway replacing materials, but when we tried to follow their lead, we found that the new substances being used in consumer electronics simply did not work in our enterprise products.

The problem is that we have far greater performance and reliability requirements: our products help ensure airplanes remain in the air, banks remain in operation and medical imagery works in hospital emergency rooms. We simply couldn’t – and wouldn’t – take risks with the quality of systems that are being used in these mission critical situations.

Lessons from the field

But there were still things we could do. One of our first major efforts was to create circuit boards that are free of brominated flame retardants (BFR), yet still meet the standard expected in mission critical environments. It was a difficult struggle, and it taught me two important lessons about making change at scale.

The first is that it’s vital to stick with it. Projects that don’t work the first time aren’t failures. Rather, they’re “delayed successes”, lessons that make it possible for us to succeed the second – or third – time.

Second, I learned that, when it comes to changing the industry, companies can’t go it alone. Although all forward-looking companies want to be the first to achieve a sustainability milestone like this, it’s simply not possible without the industry working in concert.

Our commitment to phasing out hazardous materials often puts us ahead of regulation. It also makes us a more responsive business. In the case of our BFR-free circuit board, we had been hearing from advocacy groups frustrated by the enterprise technology industry’s efforts to get BFRs out of products. Many of them pointed to Apple’s success in removing the chemicals and asked why we couldn’t do more.

Internally, we were getting the same question from our chief sustainability officer. There was just one small problem: an iPod is not a data center, and the new material simply would not work in the demanding data center environment. We know because we tried.

Working up and down the chain

We embarked on a journey to create a viable, BFR-free circuit board. My project lead and I had to sell this idea not only to our suppliers, but also to our leadership in manufacturing, supply chain, and engineering. For our suppliers, it meant having to retool for something that only one customer wanted, with no guarantee of payback.

Our management knew that we’d start out paying a pretty hefty cost premium. But, by analyzing historical pricing trends, we were able to convince them both that volumes would go up and prices would come down – and that it would happen soon enough to matter.

Our suppliers joined in the hunt, but the raw materials worked for only about half of our products. Still, we continued plugging away and, two years later, formulated a new replacement for BFRs that could support the higher speeds of newer technologies without compromising reliability. With this new substance, we were able to get to 100% BFR-free boards. We and our supplier are both moving ahead to ready a formulation for the next generation of technology.

I had been pretty confident this was all going to work out, but I won’t say I wasn’t elated when our supplier told us that the market for this new material was blossoming. The industry was clamoring for it, and the new volume drove prices back down while keeping the environmental improvements.

The next challenge

Now we’re applying what we learned from that experience to our new effort: creating phthalate-free cables. And as with BFRs, it’s taking a few tries and a lot of perseverance.

Our first version of phthalate-free cables weren’t flexible enough to work in our system configurations. Lack of flexibility means a greater potential for fractures, which can in turn affect system reliability. On top of that, the replacement we used was more expensive and the lack of customers for it meant the cables would no longer be a commodity, which would add risk to our supply chain. Without the market for the product, it simply wasn’t viable.

Having tasted success with our BFR-free boards, we felt confident that the economics would eventually catch up to the environmental benefits. So we accelerated our work with suppliers to formulate new materials that deliver the flexibility and performance we need. We are starting to see signs of a market emerging, along with a commensurate drop in the price premium and a reduced risk to our supply chain.

After years of a constant uphill battle, it will be incredibly rewarding to deliver a better product that is also more sustainable. It’s a huge victory for the company and for the industry, but also a personal success for me and my team. With BFR-free boards, we broke through barriers when some said it couldn’t be done. I cannot wait to move the next “delayed success” into the victory column – and to start on the next one.