ECOS supports the new material-efficiency standard FprCLC/TR 45550
ECOS has issued a favourable opinion on the final draft Technical Report TR 45550, putting an end to the first generation of material efficiency deliverables developed under the CEN-CENELEC Joint Technical Committee 10 “Energy-related products - Material Efficiency Aspects for Ecodesign”.
The Technical Report on “Definitions related to material efficiency” constitutes a collection of common terms used in the EN 4555x series of standards prepared within the Standardisation Request M/543. The purpose of this collection is to provide a single definition of key terms used in different methods.
ECOS has issued a favourable opinion acknowledging that this document serves an important purpose in consolidating the definitions of the various material efficiency standards facilitating their application. However, we have called for a number of fundamental improvements to be introduced in the future. Namely, we request some of the definitions to be reconciled in order to avoid variations within the different documents, and to create a guidance document for standards users, to make sure that they will refer to this TR whenever definitions are missing within the standards themselves.
CENELEC members have approved this draft Technical Report, and t will be published shortly. The standardisation deliverables under the 4555x series are truly key – they have the potential to give policy-makers and future standardisers a powerful tool to better understand which design interventions and service provisions could help extend product lifetime or support the systematic inclusion of recycled material in products, among others.
The European Commission should now make use of these horizontal methods to systematically consider material efficiency aspects in standardisation requests and future product-specific standards.
