2026 is a special year for ECOS. It marks a quarter century of bringing the environmental voice to standards. This important milestone has also been an opportunity to reflect on our journey and the way forward – and of course, to celebrate. From reflecting on our impact to our annual meeting with members to spotlighting the faces behind ECOS or learning about our partners experiences with us.
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Standards underpin public policies – and can be the make or break of their environmentally ambitious implementation. Delays in standardisation can considerably slow down the implementation phase, create uncertainty for businesses, and hinder innovation - but speeding up the development of standards should not come at the expense of quality.
We are excited to welcome PELUM Kenya to the ECOS Network! They are a national network of organisations working to advance agroecological practices among small-scale farmers, pastoralists, and fisherfolk all over Kenya.
At ECOS, we work across sectors to ensure the technical rules that shape our economies also protect people and the planet. We now bring our expertise to the agrifood sector - where strengthening rules and standards could have profound environmental and social benefits.
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Europe has all the tools necessary to ensure public money rewards innovative technologies, including low-carbon concrete. It only needs equal political ambition to be reflected in the Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA).
Buildings are where people live, work, learn, and heal. Yet European housing and construction policy defaults to metrics that obscure this: costs per square metre, emissions per floor area, units delivered per year. The European Affordable Housing Plan (EAHP) — and the simplification work underway — is an opportunity to change this logic and put the function a building serves for its users, and the resources it consumes over its lifetime, at the centre of how housing quality is defined, measured, and funded. Read on to learn how social lifecycle assessment (sLCA) and environmental LCA (eLCA), underpinned by strong European standards like EN 16309 on the social performance of buildings, can make this shift happen.
As digitalisation accelerates across Africa, how do we ensure the environmental impact of the ICT value chain is considered, from product design, use, reuse and end of life management? On 24 September in Nairobi, Kenya, join the conversation and contribute to shaping a sustainable digital future for Africa.
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80% vs 5%. That is the gap between what Europe could achieve on publicly procured low-carbon concrete – and what the IAA currently proposes. Join us on 5 November from 10:00 to 11:00 (CET) to explore how Europe can scale up investments in low-carbon solutions through robust lead market measures.
Join ECOS and our Spanish Member ECODES for an event in Madrid on 20 October 2026! Drawing on concrete examples, the event will address some of the key challenges surrounding standardisation: ensuring that standards are consistent with climate and environmental ambition, guaranteeing balanced participation of different stakeholders in their development, and examining their impact on strategic sectors such as energy or construction.
12 October - Join us in celebrating World Standards Day with a webinar exploring how standards support the transition towards affordable, clean, and sustainable energy.
Connect with leading marine scientists and join an interactive policy exchange on the European Parliament esplanade in Brussels for EU Ocean Week 2026! In collaboration with Seas At Risk and The Pew Charitable Trusts, we invite you to join scientists and experts on textiles and microplastics to discuss solutions for microplastic pollution from textiles. Come and find our giant whale outside the European Parliament and add your messages of support to curb microplastic pollution!
As digitalisation accelerates across Africa, how do we ensure the environmental impact of the ICT value chain is considered, from product design, use, reuse and end of life management? On 24 September in Nairobi, Kenya, join the conversation and contribute to shaping a sustainable digital future for Africa.
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The EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) will require mandatory minimum ecodesign requirements for apparel and a Digital Product Passport for all garments. Watch the webinar recording as we assess the timeline and progress of this delegated act and discuss opportunities to get involved.
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Watch our two webinars, which tackle green digitalisation in the African region, with a focus on Kenya. African and European stakeholders attended to discuss global policy and standards, with a shared goal of resilient, green, and digital economies.
September has been busy: we released a new study demonstrating that targets for low-carbon concrete production in the EU could be 16 times higher, we focused on Green Public Procurement, which is receiving a lot of attention in the EU, and launched a new workstream bringing our network’s expertise to the agrifood sector. In Nairobi, the ECOS Africa team hosted a workshop to discuss how we can move towards a greener ICT value chain, bringing together African and European stakeholders for a dialogue on best approaches to advancing greener digitalisation. All this and more in this month’s Newsletter.
In this month’s newsletter, we take a look at the current state of ecodesign in the EU – including ecodesign rules for apparel. We also have an update from our project to promote green digitalisation through knowledge exchange of standardisation and policy insights between experts in Europe and in Africa. Read on for this and more updates across the ECOS network – including new vacancies and calls for experts.
With record-breaking heatwaves hitting Europe this month, we focus on the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels and limit climate change, zooming in on the defossiliation of plastics and petrochemical products. From production to the fossil-heavy supply chains behind them, petrochemicals are associated with around 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. We also share insights on the importance of standards in biodiversity monitoring, and updates from our latest ECOS Africa work to promote sustainable ICT products and reduce the staggering volume of e-waste. All this and more from across the ECOS network.
This year we celebrate 25 years of ECOS. For a quarter of a century, our international network of members, experts, and partners has been the environmental voice in standards – hear from them in a new series of testimonials as we celebrate this milestone. We look forward to welcoming ECOS members to our network days and AGM next week to further celebrate our 25th anniversary. We also have an update from the ECOS Africa project on green digitalisation – registration is now open for two webinars, where we will discuss the environmental impact of ICT products and the uptake of sustainable alternatives.
This month we hosted a webinar to discuss the proposed EU Product Act and we co-hosted a session on the Industrial Accelerator Act – missed it? Watch back the recordings in this edition of our newsletter. We also announced some new vacancies in the ECOS team this month – and shared a new interview with our latest member - we invite you to join the ECOS network! All this and more in this edition of the ECOS newsletter.
This month we unpack the EU’s packaging regulations, take a look at the potential of the EU Digital Product Passport, and assess how the Public Procurement Directives could decarbonise heavy industry. We also published our annual report for 2025, detail a new project from our ECOS Africa office, and share plenty of upcoming events and opportunities to meet with the ECOS team, as well the usual updates from our international network of members and partners.
This month, we explain the importance and value of civil society representation in European standardisation, helping to build stronger standards. We also have an update from our ECOS Africa office, as we continue to work with national partners on standards and a Green Public Procurement (GPP) approach to low-carbon construction, and in our latest blog we discuss our valuable collaboration with partners in Kenya to inform the EU’s end of waste criteria.
Press contact: Alison Grace – alison.grace@ecostandard.org +32 493 19 22 59
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Press release | Europe’s standardisation system is unique in the world as its architecture lays the ground for balanced participation, with multi-stakeholder expertise built in via the presence of European stakeholder organisations representing the public interest. This ensures standards are developed with both private and public expertise, ensuring high-quality world-class standards deliver both competitiveness and public policy objectives. Today’s proposed Standardisation Regulation revision maintains this balance, which is the bedrock of globally influential, market-ready standards that advance the EU’s green transition, ECOS says.
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Press briefing | Widely applied Digital Product Passports (DPP) will transform EU product policy. But setting up a DPP framework in the forthcoming European Product Regulation is only the tip of the iceberg. Every product’s digital record must be linked to data – and the measurements will be standardised. Find out how the EU can build a stronger, more sustainable Single Market through DPP, product legislation, and the standardisation system that underpins it all.
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With 2.5 trillion euros on the table, public procurement can be a powerful tool for decarbonisation – and the European Commission is finally unleashing it. For the first time, EU procurement rules could consider more than only the upfront price tag, setting up Europe’s industries for a low-carbon future with benefits for taxpayers, the environment, citizens, and businesses. However, today’s draft Public Procurement Act leaves room for improvement, ECOS says, because it proposes to repeal existing sectoral legislation in key sectors, replacing it by a generic empowerment to procurers to include mandatory green public procurement rules.
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Press briefing, Brussels | The EU’s Public Procurement Act (PPA) will transform how 2.5 trillion euros of taxpayer money is spent across Europe – the bloc’s biggest opportunity to reward EU innovators, secure long-term investments in decarbonisation, and increase resilience.
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PRESS RELEASE | With today’s Electrification Action Plan [1], the European Commission has taken an important step towards a cleaner, competitive and secure Europe. But it could do more to deliver the full benefits of electrification, ECOS says, including making sure it is powered by renewables, prioritising energy efficiency, and better integrating heat pumps and electric vehicles with the electricity grid. It also overlooks the massive environmental impacts of data centres– a gaping hole that must be properly addressed at EU level.
Press release, Brussels | The EU’s new Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) deprioritises decarbonisation with insufficient and unclear public procurement measures for clean industrial products and low quotas for concrete and steel, environmental group ECOS says. Mainstreaming green public procurement is the EU’s most powerful climate solution, with the power to make or break Europe’s climate credibility. Stifling its potential will be a missed opportunity, ECOS explains.
The Rethink Plastic Alliance is deeply concerned by the Commission’s decision to allow the use of certain problematic, so-called ‘chemical recycling’ technologies to achieve the EU’s recycling targets. The first full recognition of ‘chemical recycling’ can set a dangerous precedent for future legislation.
ECOS is co-funded by the European Commission and EFTA
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or EISMEA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.