It’s in every smartphone, every control unit, every satellite – and yet hardly anyone talks about it: tin. More precisely, solder tin – the metal that makes every conductive connection in electronics possible in the first place. About half of global tin demand flows into the electronics industry. Without tin, literally nothing runs.
The problem: most of it comes from regions where conditions are anything but in order.
What tin has to do with our smartphones
China, Indonesia, Myanmar – these are the three largest producing countries. What happens there has been documented multiple times by ARD and ZDF: large parts of the island surface on Bangka are covered with mines, formerly fertile tropical forests have been turned into barren moonscapes. Workers wade shoulder-deep through mud holes, mine collapses claim lives every year, children drop out of school to support their families.
The EU Conflict Minerals Regulation has obliged all EU importers to due diligence in their supply chains since January 2021 if they process tin, tantalum, tungsten, or gold. Dependency on these mining regions is therefore not only an ethical problem but increasingly also a regulatory and strategic risk. The question is: what do we do about it?
The answer comes from Halsbrücke, Saxony
Anyone driving through Central Saxony has it as a constant companion: the “Hohe Esse.” Built in 1889, it was at the time the tallest chimney in the world and is still considered the tallest brick chimney in Europe. The Esse is operated by a small mid-sized company: Feinhütte Halsbrücke. Founded in 1612, it is one of the oldest smelting works in Europe and Germany’s only tin and lead smelter. More than 30 years ago, the company switched to secondary materials – long before anyone could even spell out the Circular Economy Act.
Today, with its GreenTin+ line, Feinhütte produces the world’s first certified 100% circular solder tin. From scrap and metal-bearing residues from the EU, fine tin is created with a purity of 99.99%. GreenTin+ is available in all common lead-free electronics solders – as bar, wire, or paste solder – and can be integrated directly into existing production processes. For most companies, switching therefore doesn’t mean a rebuild but simply a different order from the supplier.
The prejudice: recycled material is worse
Anyone who raises the topic of secondary tin in the electronics industry knows the reaction. The memory of the switch to lead-free solder – in the wake of the RoHS directive in the mid-2000s – sits deep, with significant problems back then.
The comparison, however, doesn’t hold up. Mayerhofer Elektronik in Sauerlach near Munich began in 2019 to switch completely to circular tin – as the first electronics manufacturer worldwide. The solder joints were analyzed using various procedures, and the results were clear: the quality of the solder joint is no worse than with the previously used primary tin. On the contrary, some analyses even showed slight improvements in solder quality. GreenTin+ is therefore an ecologically obtained material of the highest grade.
Merlin Reingruber, Managing Director of Mayerhofer, puts it like this: “We were looking for a sustainably produced solder that, through circular economy, doesn’t further worsen the conditions in tin mining areas.”
Another prejudice often raised in this context is: circular solders are much more expensive than solders from first smelt. The fact is that the price of tin – the main component of any solder – depends heavily on the price of the commodity exchange. As a result, the solders as end products are in the mid-price range compared to other manufacturers.
What makes this possible in the first place
Feinhütte Halsbrücke and Mayerhofer Elektronik are both part of Symtronics, the world’s first ecosystem of the electronics industry, run by Sym. And that is exactly the actual core of this story.
Circular tin doesn’t work as an island solution. It needs a manufacturer that can process secondary material, a buyer ready to switch, and structures that safely return process residues and feed them back into the loop. Through consistent use of secondary tin, thousands of tonnes of primary raw materials can be saved every year. Symtronics is building exactly this infrastructure: shared data, shared procurement, short transport routes, closed loops within Germany and Europe.
The market is moving
Through coordinated communication and joint marketing of this success story, results have already been achieved: Mayerhofer thereby gained Infineon as a customer, whose electronics were produced with the circular tin from Feinhütte Halsbrücke. Major corporations like Apple, too, have for years communicated the goal of switching fully to circular materials and are partly in the implementation phase. That this can be implemented faster as a small company within a strong ecosystem has now been proven: Mayerhofer has already closed the circular loop in the area of tin.
This doesn’t happen out of goodwill alone. Reducing the strong dependency on imported tin in times of global crises is no longer a “nice to have.” Whoever starts to switch their tin supply now is still early. Whoever waits will have to catch up under time pressure in a few years. And whether catching up is even possible at that point is in the stars – because we have to start now to ramp up production capacities, before the great “run” on tin begins.
Future-fit and already in series production
What Feinhütte Halsbrücke and Mayerhofer Elektronik together demonstrate is not a pilot, nor a paper sustainability project. It is a working model in which equal quality, stable prices, and independence from mining regions are no longer goal conflicts, but the result of real cooperation in the Symtronics ecosystem.
More about Symtronics: symtronics.eco
More about GreenTin+: green-tin.de
