Directive Decoder

Happy New Year to you all

2008 will witness the beginning of a significant period of green development that will impact our industry for years to come.

Among those of greatest importance during 2008:

• The first wave of implementing measures from the European Union (EU) Energy using Products (EuP) Directive requiring the reduction in energy consumption across a broad range of product categories.

• The EU REACH Regulations will kick into gear with a pre-registration period during the second half of the year and subsequent registration deadlines as the EU seeks greater control over the handling and use of many harmful substances.

Article 16 of the Eco-design of Energy using Products (EuP) Directive calls on the European Commission to establish a working plan which will set out a list of indicative products that will be considered as priority candidates for implementing measures over a 3 year period.

At the outset there were more than 600 EuPs that fell within the scope of the Directive. After several iterations a list of 57 EuPs was defined, including sub groups that were excluded from the first 19 preparatory studies. This was further broken down into a priority list of 34 - 25 priority A and 9 priority B products.

A report was produced, at the back end of last year, by Hyder Consulting for the Department of Environment and Water Resources as part of the preliminary environmental and economic assessment of Australian RoHS policy.

The study considered three RoHS policy models identified by an Australian Government roundtable in 2005:

a) No government intervention
(No action to harmonise with the EU’s RoHS Directive)
b) Voluntary code of practice plus possible co-regulation
(For introduction in 2007 followed by a co-regulatory or regulatory scheme in 2011)
c) National legislation
Mandatory obligations under RoHS legislation within four years

As happened with the RoHS Directive, clarification has been sought on how to define the concentration limit featured in the REACH regulations.

REACH requires either informing the authorities or notifying a customer of the presence of a substance in an article (product) under certain circumstances.

Once again the guidance is if the concentration of the substance is greater than 0.1% by weight.

The Oko-Institut, based in Germany, was commissioned to look at the possibility of including further substances within the scope of the RoHS Directive.
The project started in October 2007 and was set to run for several months.
An interim report will be submitted to the European Commission during February 2008. The final draft is expected by 4th April 2008.
A stakeholder workshop will be held after the final draft is published, with the final report available in June 2008.

Directive Decoder

According to Ernst & Young, regulatory and compliance risk is the greatest strategic challenge facing global businesses in 2008.

“The continually escalating burden, as well as ever more complex compliance challenges, means this is still the biggest business risk to be addressed” said a spokesperson. He went onto say “As companies become more and more global, compliance becomes an even greater challenge, forcing them to manage diverse regulations in different markets”.

Enough said!!

Directive Decoder

I asked the Health & Safety Executive when we might see the list of high risk substances for REACH.

Their reply:

“The list you appear to be referring to is the so-called 'candidate list' of substances of very high concern. It's possible that this could be published by the European Chemicals Agency (on their website) this year but our expectation is that it will be early next year”.

When designing with the Energy using Products Directive in mind consider switch mode power supplies. Switch mode is more efficient - uses less power. Also switch mode can operate with a wide range of voltage whereas linear power supplies require one specific voltage. A laptop is switch mode and can be used in the UK at 240 VAC and in the USA at 110VAC.

Directive Decoder