AUTHOR: Michael Nicholson, IEEP UK

There are a broad array of product standards that this Bill potentially affects from consumer to industrial products (e.g., aerosols, machinery, lifts and toys) and though the Bill is heavily influenced by product safety related concerns, there are significant environmental implications too.

Many consumer and industrial products impact the environment; in how they’re designed and made, used in their lifetime (for example the energy efficiency of the product), and then in how they are repaired, dismantled, recycled and disposed of. In broad terms, this is called ‘ecodesign’.

As such, at the Institute for European Environmental Policy UK (IEEP UK) we are particularly interested in how standards for products can be used to lessen the impact on the environment. Robust ‘ecodesign’ rules are a way to do this and the UK as part of the European Union helped to shape an ecodesign framework that we still implement today. The EU however has recently introduced a new ecodesign framework and new, tighter standards for a range of products are expected in the next years. As EU and UK law and policy gradually diverge from one another, ecodesign is an area where we should be looking to align wherever possible and seek the highest possible environmental product standards.

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