Standards Development

Scope

his document provides guidance to manufacturers of measuring equipment for electrical and electromagnetic quantities (ME3Q) in evaluating and improving the environmental impact of their products, and in enabling effective communication using common references for environmental information throughout the supply chain.

This standard covers only fixed installed equipment.

For this edition, only power metering and monitoring devices (PMD) complying to IEC 61557-12 as well as monitoring and measuring systems used for data collection, gathering and analysis complying to IEC 62974- 1 are covered.

This document provides: guidance on the process and general aspects to implement environmentally- conscious product design principles, as given in ISO/IEC 62430, essential for low-voltage switchgear and controlgear and their assemblies; the Product Specific Rules (PSR) for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA);

NOTE 1 The general methods and the process to execute the LCA are in accordance with ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 but not addressed in this document.

NOTE 2 PSR and LCA can be used for quantitative ECD and also apply for some environmental declarations, for example Type III.

– standard environmental impact data derived from case studies and a means of using them;

NOTE 3 This is to encourage manufacturers to apply more effective quantitative methods in the ECD process to improve the environmental efficiency of their products.

– common rules for communicating information about the presence of regulated substances and the materials contained in the product, according to IEC 62474;

– guidance on communicating information about the end-of-life treatment of the product.  

Purpose

Specific rules for assessing the environmental impacts and providing appropriate data for measuring equipment for electrical and electromagnetic quantities are among the purposes of this document. These rules establish a common evaluation scheme of their environmental impacts in terms of characterized impact indicators (e.g. CO2-equivalents, ozone depletion) over their whole life cycle. Therefore, it is necessary to define product specific rules to ensure consistency between manufacturers.