Last week, we brought you a feature on new reliability tests in line with RoHS. Little did we know how timely it would be. India recently became the latest country to enact such legislation, as our sister site EBN reports.

RoHS legislation has also been enacted in the EU, Japan, China, Korea, and California. Ken Manchen, of Newark/element14, wonders which country will be next:

Will it be Australia or Thailand, where no formal RoHS rules exist but where electronic equipment manufacturers are already re-designing their products to remove hazardous substances? Will it be in the United States or Canada, where differing (non-uniform) state and provincial electronic waste rules are making compliance difficult for manufacturers and distributors?"

I think it's less important to speculate about which country will jump on the RoHS bandwagon next. Instead, manufacturers should be worrying about how they're going to comply when RoHS inevitiably comes to their neighborhood.

—Jamie Hartford