Hi all,
I wanted to share some exciting news from here at Harwin HQ – in fact two bits of news, somewhat related to each other.
Award Season approaches…
Firstly, we’ve been nominated for an award! This award is part of the e-Legacy awards, hosted by the Electronic Product Design trade magazine. Harwin has been shortlisted in the category of “EM&T Green Manufacturing” – and this was before the second piece of news (following shortly). We would love to have your support if you would like to vote for us! Here is the link to the voting page:
We feel that this is a subject where we are making an effort to contribute to the world stage, and it is certainly nice to be recognised for that effort. Our thanks go to the e-Legacy team for this opportunity. There are also other worthy companies in the other categories that you can vote for – Harwin are also sponsoring one award, the “Investment in Education and Training”. This is a subject we are active in ourselves, with a strong apprenticeship scheme, so we applaud all the companies shortlisted in this category, and all others who contribute in this field.
Building Work nears completion – we’re getting even greener!
Our second piece of news relates to some major expansion work we have been doing at Harwin HQ. One of our buildings has doubled in size, and the majority of this space will be used for a new water effluent treatment facility. As I’m sure some of you know, we (as a vertically-integrated manufacturing company) have our own plating facility on-site, and plating methods require a high usage of water.
The new facility will clean all the rinse water and recycle it back into the plating area. The heavy metals - gold and tin - cleansed from the water can be reclaimed. Although this is already in practice for gold, this is an industry first to reclaim the tin.
Previous to this construction, our water usage was up to 7,000 litres of water per hour. This new facility will mean we use that same amount of water in 2 weeks! That’s nearly a 34,000% improvement!
We should also see an improvement in the water quality used in the plating line – which will help maintain a high quality of plating finish on our products. Currently, by using standard tap water, the level of conductivity in the water is typically 400-600 microsiemens – recycled water after treatment will be below 5 microsiemens.
The treatment plant is being constructed for us by PureTech, and is due to be commissioned in September. I’m looking forward to my first tour round the new building!
Enough from me for the moment – as always, I can help on any questions specifically relating to Harwin products and their obsolescence. Do please feel free to contact me on LiveHelp, or e-mail me through Element-14, or on technical@harwin.com!
Until next time!
Wendy 
Technical & Marketing Engineer, and RoHS Compliance Project Manager