Green spam!

7/7/2009 12:04 PM EDT

Spam, spam, spam. Sorry to deliver from the classic Monty Python sketch but has there ever been a food stuff so poorly loved as spam? It's so discarded as an item that we used it as the term to represent emails that flood our mailbox advertising anything from "health" pills to helping a foreign accountant get access to his millions while giving you half. In other words, it's the junk mail that clutter our mailboxes.

So what does spam have to do with clean technology and green engineering? Well, as I was cleaning out my spam filter, I came across an email advertising "green" PCB manufacturing. This email intrigued me, as in a previous career I was a supply chain engineer and one of areas was PCB manufacturing. With PCB manufacturing in my time, I can assuredly say there was nothing "green" about the manufacturing process. There was the use of corrosive chemicals, plastics that never made their way into production and the final product (the PCB board) definitely wasn't "eco-friendly". That's why the concept of green PCB manufacturing seemed foreign to me. It seemed like such an impossibility considering what I experienced only 3 years ago.

In my research I came across this article: Implementing "Green" PCB production processes and though the concept is relatively new, great lengths have been made in making the PCB manufacturing process less environmentally harmful. It's a very interesting read so if you've got an interest in green PCB manufacturing, give it a look.