Does REACH testing require grinding up my entire product?
No! There is no such thing as grinding up an entire product and analyzing what is in it. Here’s why: You can’t identify which homogeneous material are present. If a product tested ‘hot’ for lead, cadmium or Bromine, you would never know where to find that in your BOM list.
REACH is a little different from RoHS, because we’re looking for greater than or less than 0.1% by weight of the article.
What are the steps?
First we need to define the article: Is it a component that retains a shape, surface or design of its own.? If so, that’s an article.
Next step: Grind it up into a homogeneous material for a REACH sample and go through organics and non-organics to find out if there are any SVHCs above or below 0.1% by weight of the product. This is mostly done with polymers, not with alloys.
With alloys, we perform non-destructive testing for cadmium. If we find cadmium, we have to perform organic testing to find out if it’s one of the cadmium oxides on the SVHC list. It’s a very simple process (usually taking less than 2 weeks), making it easy to stay up-to-date every six months instead of having to go back to your supply chain.
Please visit our website for more information on REACH compliance.
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