The European Commission (EC) has circulated its proposals for the capacity marking of rechargeable, or secondary, portable batteries. Currently there are no proposals for capacity labelling of primary batteries and the commission has not indicated when proposals are likely to be published for these.
The EC was originally due to publish proposals in March 2009 to enter into force during September, twelve months on from the implementation of the new battery directive (2006/66/EC) but has failed to meet the deadline.
The proposals are to use IEC/EN standards for calculating capacity.
Portable batteries would be marked by the abbreviations mAh (milliampere hours) or Ah (amp hours) and the regulations will also provide details of the label size and location etc.
Button cells, batteries used as memory back-up and battery packs will be excluded from this regulation.
There are also capacity proposals for automotive batteries.
As the regulation will enter into force 18 months plus 20 days after official publication it is unlikely to be in effect before 2012 if not later as many Member States, and some manufacturers are not happy with the proposals.
The problem is that batteries of the same class might be used differently with some designed for high current output whereas others are designed for long life, low current output.
Directive Decoder
Gary Nevison, Head of Legislation at 
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