It’s been another busy year for standards and environmental policy. At ECOS, we took on new challenges, expanded our work programme, and grew the team and network – with our impact set to continue into 2024. Read some highlights from the last 12 months in our end-of-year blog. December saw an important milestone for ECOS - as the final negotiations on EU ecodesign rules came to a close, this marked the end of more than four years since we first called for ecodesign principles to apply across all sectors. Strong ecodesign legislation in the EU will send positive impacts across global value chains.
Plastic pollution is a growing environmental problem the world over. This month ECOS was in Nairobi, Kenya, for the third meeting of the UN Plastics Treaty negotiations - the first significant global cooperation to tackle plastic pollution. Read our thoughts from the meeting in our latest blog. We also supported a complaint to the European consumer authorities against potentially misleading recycling claims on single-use plastic water bottles. Consumers increasingly try to make environmentally conscious decisions – but misleading claims are not giving us the full picture and undermine our efforts to be circular.
As we mark World Standards Day in October, we reflect on more than two decades of working with standardisers, partner organisations and our members to ensure that the environmental voice is heard when standards are developed. This month we’re also sharing information on a new international standard for the sustainable management of e-waste, which could become a game changer in how we approach this rapidly growing – and very problematic – waste stream.
Incompatible products that are not built to last, labelled with dubious and unsubstantiated green claims should be relegated to the past. This month we are celebrating advances to ban greenwashing, ’climate neutral’ claims and new rules that support longer-lasting and more repairable electronic products. We’ve also seen the global impact of the universal charger standards with Apple announcing its first phones with the new USB-C standard across international markets. Simplifying products for consumers and reducing resource consumption and e-waste creation.
Our planet does not recognise borders. We must tackle the environmental challenges we face together, fostering global cooperation and joint efforts to achieve sustainability and preserve our planet. Through our global teams working extensively on international standards, collaboration with the United Nations (notably on the upcoming Plastics Treaty), and expertise on European Union law and standards, ECOS strives for the uptake of strong environmental principles in policies, laws, and standards all over the world.
Green claims are everywhere – and they are often unsubstantiated, vague, or misleading. Consumers need clear, reliable, and verifiable information to make choices with the smallest environmental impact – which they increasingly want. This can only happen if misleading claims, for instance those claiming products or companies have zero impact on the climate (‘carbon neutral’), are avoided. Environmental communication and marketing should never be a way to hide true environmental impacts.
Last month was a milestone for the future of fossil fuel boilers in Europe. At the Ecodesign Consultation Forum held at the end of April, experts from EU Member States and other stakeholders, including ECOS, shared their positions on the future of ecodesign and energy labelling regulations for space and water heaters. We have been calling on the Forum to raise the energy efficiency threshold of heating appliances to 115%. This would introduce a de facto ban on the sale of new ‘stand-alone’ fossil fuel boilers, which would no longer meet energy efficiency requirements. We still have a chance to shape the results of this legislation. Want to find out how? Read on!
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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.