Standards Development

Scope

This document establishes product category rules (PCR) for life cycle assessment of electrical and electronic products and systems. It specifies the process and requirements on how to conduct life cycle assessment in the context of Type Ⅲenvironmental declarations. PCR is complemented by additional product-specific rules (PSR), which further define e.g. functional units and default scenarios in the product-specific context. Therefore, it also gives guidance on how to develop PSR in corresponding product (group) committees (TCs/SCs/SyCs).

This document provides common rules for:

a) life cycle assessment (LCA), including the requirements for developing default scenarios;

b) the LCA report;

c) the development of product specific rules. 

This document provides further guidelines for environmental declarations. The basic LCA principles and framework are based on the ISO 14040 series of standards (i.e ISO 14040 and ISO 14044), and therefore out of scope of the proposed standard.

Purpose

In recent years, regional/national environmental footprint related initiatives call for consistent approach for assessing the environmental performance and providing environmental declarations of electrical and electronic products.

In ISO 14025,PCR (product category rules) is defined as: “set of specific rules, requirements and guidelines for developing Type III environmental declarations for one or more product categories”.

Complementing with the framework defined in ISO 14040 and ISO 14044, PCR can provide consistent rules and help to improve the comparability of Type III environmental declarations.

The basic difference between the ISO 14025 on PCR and this proposed document is:

- ISO 14025 defines the framework of a common PCR content;

- In consistency with the framework, this proposed document will provide a set of specific rules and requirements, which are applicable for all electrical and electronic products as a whole product category.

A PCR standard for electrical and electronic products will ease the PSR (product specific rules) development in product (group) committees.

The EN 50693:2019 will be used as start point to develop the proposed standard. It was offered by CENELEC to IEC TC 111 under the Frankfurt Agreement. However, a number of modifications are necessary, such as:

 Where possible or relevant, make reference to ISO/IEC standards/remove reference to EN standards;

 Align terms and definitions with IEC IEV (add reference or web link);

 Consider material efficiency at relevant scenarios;

 Updates are needed in Annexes B, C, D and G, considerations of updating these Annexes are, for instance:

- Annex B Recommended impact categories

To remove the reference to European documents

- Annex C Correlation with the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) initiative of the European Commission

To make it be compatible with the PEF initiative of European Commission

- Annex D Correlation with EN 15804 standard

To update and to keep a link between this proposed document with LCA methodology at a higher level (building)

- Annex G Recovery activities: Allocation, calculation and default values -3- 111/598/NP 3

Same to update consideration for Annex C.

Based on comments received during the preparation of this NP, initial modifications were applied to the EN in line with above. A working draft for consideration of NCs during the approval of this document is included in the annex of this document.

As to allow for the above mentioned technical changes, we propose to start this standard at the CD stage.

This international standard, if approved, will be proposed as a horizontal standard as it will set the basic requirements for developing product PCRs and PSRs for electrical and electronic products and systems.