Standards Development

Scope

The existing IEC 62474 Ed. 2 covers material declaration for products of and for the Electrotechnical industry. The new ISO-IEC Dual Logo International Standard will cover material declaration of and for products of any industry sector. More specifically, it specifies the procedure, content, and form relating to material declarations for products and accessories of organizations operating in and supplying to any industry sector.

The main intended use of this document is to provide data up and down the supply chain that:

• allows organizations to assess products against substance and material compliance requirements,

• allows organizations to use this information in their environmentally conscious design process and across all product life cycle phases. This new International Standard is intended to allow reporting based on engineering judgement, supplier material declarations, and/or sampling and testing. It does not suggest any specific method or process to obtain material declaration data in the supply chain. However, it provides a data format used to transfer information within the supply chain.  

This new IS will also specify formats and rules to manage sector specific requirements. However, it will not include the creation or maintenance of sector specific requirements such as the content of lists (e.g. declarable substances lists), and other sector specific declaration requirements which are the responsibility of each sector itself.

Last, it is the objective that all generic requirements and guidance existing in the IEC 62474 Ed. 2.0 will be transferred to the new IEC 82474-1 standard. All the Electrotechnical-specific content (such as the declarable substances list), however, will remain in the IEC 62474, but under a new edition (IEC 62474 Ed.3).

Purpose

Environmental aspects have become increasingly more important globally, due to the impact of humans on ecosystems, climate change, energy and depletion of natural resources. Although there are requirements for resource efficiency across most geographies, to date, the focus has been mostly on the energy usage of products, mostly due to absence of adequate metrics, including absence of standards for assessing material efficiency related aspects.

The sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources is addressed by the UN, under the sustainable development goal number 12, to “Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns”. In particular, population is expected to achieve environmentally sound management of chemicals and all wastes throughout their life cycle, in accordance with agreed international frameworks, and significantly reduce their release to air, water and soil in order to minimize their adverse impacts on human health and the environment. This standard is fundamental to deliver this goal, addressing the standardized formats for the transmission of information needed for the management of chemicals and wastes and also the possibility to execute material footprint assessments. For more details on SDG 12, see https://undocs.org/A/RES/71/313.

As the number and complexity of requirements of product chemical legislations increases, it is no longer possible to deal with them manually. Also, there is a recent trend that technology across sectors is converging towards each other (mixed technologies). Steadily, more sectors are being affected by chemical restriction or reporting legislations (e.g. REACH).

More and more product sectors are considering developing a material declaration standard. This could result in a proliferation of standards designed to achieve the same results, and will cause problems in getting material declaration data from one product sector to another, where different sectors would have conflicting standards amongst each other. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a single international standard applicable to any product sector that allows sector-specific requirements to be met as needed.

The purpose of this project proposal is to extend the existing IEC 62474 Ed.2 standard to a dual logo standard that bears both ISO and IEC logos and is able to address generic requirements as well as specific requirements of any industry sector.

This ISO-IEC Dual Logo International Standard benefits any industry sector by establishing requirements for reporting of material declaration data, standardizing protocols, and facilitating the transfer and processing of material and substance data. Material declarations are used by the industry to track and declare specific product information used for instance for compliance and/or as input for environmentally conscious design (ECD) considerations. Standardized exchange of product, product part, material and substance data allow for simplified requirements across the supply chain in an economically efficient way. 

This new ISO-IEC Dual Logo International Standard will cover most of the needs of all sectors for reporting substances and materials in products, parts or articles. The dual logo standard will include declaration procedures, declaration data requirements, rules for creating sector-specific lists (e.g. declarable substance list), and the data exchange format (data model, XML schema, and supporting requirements). The standard may also specify requirements and guidance for creating sector-specific declaration modules.

The new ISO-IEC Dual Logo standard will be based on a modular and extensible architecture where four types of material declaration will be offered, namely compliance, composition, material classes and queries. Options for the integration of sector specific features to accommodate their regulatory needs will be offered through this modular structure. This will also allow other standard development organization (SDOs) to use this architecture as a basis, and to complement these base requirements with their own specific features needed for declaration. The modular architecture is represented by the attached figure.

Last, specific authorities (sector, regulator) can define their own reference data (substances lists) to use along with the new dual logo standard, for example:

- IEC: Declarable Substance List (DSL), Reference Substance List (RSL) and Material Classes for the Electrotechnical sector

- IMDS: Global Automotive Declarable Substance List (GADSL), GLAPS and Material Classes

- IAEG: AD-DSL, Query Lists, and Descriptor lists

- ZDHC: RMSL substances list for textile sector

- ECHA: REACH Candidate List, etc.

In order to be able to respond in a quick and timely way to regulatory changes and the needs of each product sector, the new IEC 82474-1 will continue to use the database management process of ISO/IEC Directives Supplement. This provides for fast updates and a standardized process that all stakeholders may depend on.

Last, to facilitate this and also future cooperation between ISO and IEC, it was chosen to bring this material declaration standard into the 80000-series of standards (IEC 82474-1). We believe this will incentivise and also facilitate cooperation, allowing for new parts to be added to the series, lead by both, ISO and IEC.