RoHS FAQ Lead, Mercury, and Cadmium Exemptions

Start from the restriction, then document the exception. Annex II lists lead and mercury at 0.1% by weight in homogeneous materials and cadmium at 0.01%. Article 4 says those limits do not apply to applications listed in Annex III or Annex IV, so an exemption record must prove that the product's use matches a specific listed application.

Avoid documenting exemptions as broad product permissions. The Commission RoHS FAQ explains that exemptions are granted for specific substances used in specific applications, not for a company or for a whole piece of EEE. A useful record therefore identifies the substance, material, component, product category, and Annex wording that supports the exception.

Do not make an unsourced current-status table for lead, mercury, or cadmium exemptions. Annex entries are technical and time-limited, and many include category-specific expiry dates, scope limits, spare-parts wording, amount limits, or renewal effects. Keep the official source URL and the date you checked it with the exemption record.

The documentation fields differ because the Annex entries differ. Mercury lamp exemptions often use per-lamp or per-burner milligram limits and specific lamp technologies. Lead entries include alloys, solders, glasses, ceramics, coatings, bearings, and application-specific electronic components. Cadmium entries include electrical contacts, optical or filter glass uses, printing inks, thick film pastes, quantum dots, and specialized measurement or monitoring uses.

Use those examples as a cue for record structure, not as a substitute for checking the exact entry. The support file should be precise enough that an auditor can compare the product facts with the Annex wording without asking engineering to reconstruct the design history.

RoHS documentation should connect the exemption decision to the conformity assessment file. Directive 2011/65/EU requires manufacturers to draw up technical documentation, carry out the relevant conformity assessment procedure, draw up the EU declaration of conformity, affix CE marking, and keep the technical documentation and EU declaration of conformity for 10 years after the EEE has been placed on the market.

Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2020/659 identifies EN IEC 63000:2018 as the harmonised standard for technical documentation used to assess materials, components, and EEE against RoHS restricted-substance requirements. Use that structure to keep supplier declarations, material declarations, test reports where needed, exemption mapping, and change-control evidence aligned.

Exemption evidence should not stop at the date the product launched. Article 5 says exemptions have validity periods, may be renewed, and can be deleted when the conditions for inclusion are no longer fulfilled. A renewal application must be made no later than 18 months before the exemption expires, and an existing exemption remains valid until the Commission decides on that renewal application.

The Commission implementation page states that RoHS exemptions are limited in time and reassessed regularly, considering substitute availability, practicability and reliability, environmental, health and consumer safety impacts, socioeconomic impact, and potential adverse impacts on innovation. It also states that a RoHS exemption decision currently takes 18 to 24 months from the application date.

The most common mistake is treating the word "exempt" as the conclusion instead of documenting the legal and technical match. Lead, mercury, and cadmium exemptions are narrow, and the same substance can appear in multiple entries with different applications, categories, concentration limits, amount limits, and dates.

Another weak pattern is relying on a supplier's generic RoHS statement after a material, category, or Annex entry changes. A defensible exemption record should survive supplier changes, market-surveillance questions, customer audits, and future product changes.