IPC 1402

After nearly one year of discussion among major international electronics companies and the USEPA, IPC 1402 was officially published on 2022/11/28.

IPC 1402 is an industrial standard mainly targeting cleaning agents used in the manufacturing of electrical and electronic products. The standard establishes evaluation criteria based on environmental, health, and safety requirements. Cleaning agents are defined as follows:

Cleaning agents are chemicals and chemical mixtures mainly used for removing contaminants, unwanted materials (such as inks, PVD coatings, adhesives, etc.), and/or manufacturing process residues (such as lubricants, adhesives, flux residues, plastic residues, mold release agents, etc.).

• Individual parts, subassemblies, assemblies, printed circuit board, and/or final assembled products;
• Manufacturing equipment used to produce individual components or final products

Cleaning agents can exist in any form, such as liquid, powder, gas, vapor, paste, strip, block, molded parts, shapes, etc. Applications include optical lens cleaning, solder and flux residue removal, equipment cleaning, screen wiping, coating removal, etc.

IPC 1402 classifies cleaning agents into four levels. The classification is based on five evaluation aspects, as shown in Table 1:

• Restricted substances: IPC-1402 defines 13 restricted substances, 9 of which must be certified with reports from ISO 17025 accredited labs (see Table 2).
• Human health requirements: evaluates hazard levels based on carcinogenicity, reproductive toxicity, mutagenicity, skin irritation, sensitization, etc. for each ingredient in the cleaning agent.
• Environmental requirements: evaluates hazard levels based on acute aquatic toxicity, chronic aquatic toxicity, persistence, bioaccumulation and toxicity (PBT), etc. for each ingredient in the cleaning agent.
• Safety requirements: evaluates hazard levels based on explosiveness, flammable gases, flammable liquids, pyrophoric liquids, pyrophoric solids, etc. for each evaluation point of the cleaning agent.
• pH value: should be between 2 and 11.5.

The product categories covered by IPC 1402 do not include the following types of products:

• Mold release solutions
• Cleaning agents used for non-manufacturing activities (e.g., laboratory, office cleaning, and maintenance unrelated to manufacturing)
• Surface treatment agents used to promote adhesion