Following ERA's successful study, carried out on behalf of the DTI in the middle of 2004, it is widely thought that compliance will generally be achieved through a process based on a form of "self declaration". The UK government's proposed RoHS regulations includes elements from the ERA study.

While RoHS does not require that a producer shall prove in any way that their product is "RoHS compliant", the very action of "putting it on the market" for sale will be taken as an implicit declaration of compliance. The enforcement authorities in each member state (who are yet to be defined) will carry out market surveillance to detect non-compliant products. If they do so, the actions they may take will be influenced by what measures have been taken by the producer to avoidance non compliance.

What is currently missing is clear definitive guidance to aid producers seeking to comply. A possible approach is for a producer to use a combination of two complementary approaches:

	Obtaining declarations from suppliers
	Supporting analysis where necessary

Obtaining declarations from suppliers
Producers will need to identify components and materials that do not contain banned substances and obtain materials declarations from their suppliers. They will need to obtain declarations which can be shown to enforcement authorities if necessary. Some producers currently believe that these will be sufficient and that analysis is not necessary. The question of what records need to be retained by producer and supplier and their validity still needs to be resolved.

Supporting analysis
Many equipment producers plan to, and some already do, check supplier materials declarations by analysis. This is a sensible precaution, especially where no declaration is available and for certain "high risk" materials, but also as a random check to audit suppliers. The extent to which analysis is necessary will depend on many factors. The diagram below gives an example developed by ERA of a decision tree based approach to deciding when analysis is necessary.

Figure 1. An example of a decision tree approach to deciding on RoHS analysis requirement