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Standards Development
This standard contains guidelines and requirements for the validation of an organization’s preparedness to make a lifetime claim of a physical product (product lifetime) in the context of circular economy to support trust between producer and customer, as well as between other relevant value network actors.
The standard sets requirements about how the validation shall address the contextual aspects that may influence product lifetime. It also provides requirements on how a product lifetime needs to be specified so that it can be validated, including start and end points of the product lifetime scope, within one or more use cycles and with respect to cascading and allocation, including how such boundaries must be defined prior to validation.
This standard is applicable for the development of third-party validation schemes for product lifetime claims and can also be applied for internal or second-party validations as part of supplier–customer assurance. This standard also gives guidance on how an organization should validate its own readiness — in terms of evidence, systems, and documentation — before publicly making a claim about product lifetime.
This standard does not set requirements for a specific scope or measurement method for any particular product or product category. It does not prescribe minimum product lifetime values or thresholds, nor cover intangible products or purely digital services.
Product lifetime is a fundamental determinant of circular economy performance, influencing resource efficiency, environmental impacts, economic value retention, and the feasibility of reuse, repair, remanufacturing, and cascading applications. Organizations across many sectors increasingly communicate product lifetime–related claims. These can take the form of “expected lifetime,” “actual lifetime,” “extended lifetime,” “designed for longevity,” “number of use cycles,” or “reuse suitability.” Such claims are widely used in marketing, sustainability reporting, procurement documentation, investment communication, and circular business model descriptions. Despite this proliferation, most lifetime related claims lack clear definitions, transparent assumptions, or standardized boundaries. Organizations often fail to specify what exactly is meant by their product lifetime claim and frequently make such claims without defining baseline conditions, the measures implemented to achieve the extension, or the real world scenarios in which these claims hold. This ambiguity risks undermining trust among customers, regulators, market surveillance authorities, and investors. It also creates fertile ground for overstated or misleading interpretations that may inflate perceived circularity without guaranteeing real-world performance. In addition, lifetime claims are often presented as inherent product attributes, when in practice they are deeply conditioned by contextual factors such as chosen business models, establishing the value network to maintain the claimed lifetime, as well as estimating conditions when the product is out of control for the organization, for example, after a long time or at distant geographies. Without clearly articulating these dependencies, product lifetime claims can obscure the systemic nature of circularity and overstate the effectiveness of the measures taken.
Despite this growing importance, product lifetime remains one of the least harmonized claim areas in current standardization. For example, existing international standards on environmental claims and declarations, such as ISO 14020, ISO 14021, ISO 14025, and ISO/TS 17033, establish general principles for truthful, transparent, and substantiated claims, but they do not provide specific guidance on how product lifetime claims should be framed, justified, or assessed for credibility. The ISO 59000 Circular economy family of standards provides a coherent framework for circular economy terminology (ISO 59004), business models and value networks (ISO 59010), traceability and sustainability of secondary material recovery (ISO 59014), and measurement of circularity performance (ISO 59020). Together, these standards recognize reuse, repair, and value retention as central circularity aspects. However, none of them address how claims related to product lifetime can be validated in a consistent and comparable manner. This creates a structural gap between circular economy principles, performance measurement, and the credibility of lifetime-related claims communicated to markets and authorities.
In the European context, this gap has become particularly critical. EU initiatives such as the Circular Economy Action Plan, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, the Green Claims proposal, and the Taxonomy Regulation increasingly rely on credible information about product lifetime. Without a harmonized European approach to validating preparedness for product lifetime claims, organizations face legal uncertainty, uneven market conditions, and increased risk of disputed or misleading claims, while authorities and market actors lack a reliable basis for comparison and enforcement. The absence of such a standard also undermines investments in circular business models. Product lifetime claims are frequently dependent on conditions extending beyond the product itself, including the designed business model, value network coordination, and adaptation to conditions beyond the organisation’s control. When these dependencies are not transparently defined and assessed, lifetime claims risk overstating actual outcomes, thereby weakening trust in circular economy solutions as a whole.
This proposed standard responds to a clear and unmet need by establishing a basis for assessing whether an organization is adequately prepared to make product lifetime claims in a credible, transparent, and comparable manner. The proposal aims to create a conformity assessment standard that will apply the principles of ISO/IEC 17029 Conformity Assessment – General principles and requirements for validation and verification bodies, by adopting structural, process, competence and governance requirements of ISO/IEC 17029, and specifying additional requirements necessary to validate claims regarding organizational preparedness to make product lifetime claims. As a European Standard, it will provide a consistent reference that supports regulatory alignment, market confidence, and fair competition, while strengthening the integrity of product lifetime claims as a cornerstone of the circular economy transition.
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