TED - THE ECO DECLARATION Standard

Silvio Weeren1, Hans Wendschlag2

1IBM Deutschland, Stuttgart, Germany 2Hewlett Packard, Stockholm, Sweden

↵ ↵

TED – The Eco Declaration – is the new standard (ECMA-370, published June, 2006) for communicating environmental attributes of ICT and consumer electronic products to professional buyers. It combines the benefits of the most widely spread eco declarations - Ecma TR/70 and IT Eco Declaration. Ecma TC38 and IT Företagen experts cooperated to make the successful IT eco declaration principle available to whole Europe and beyond. TED provides 2 declaration forms, Company Environmental Profile and Product Environmental Attributes, which are aligned with the eco design standard ECMA-341 that is being further developed as IEC 62075. The Eco Declaration is an excellent tool for green procurement to ease the communication need between demand and supply side which is an essential part of the EU Integrated Product Policy, IPP, and Eco Design and Energy Efficiency, EuP Directive, allowing customers to make informed decisions.

↵ ↵ ↵

1. INTRODUCTION In response to interest from public and institutional customers, ICT and CE experts started to develop ECMA TR/70 in 1995, with two revisions in the decade to follow. TR/70 catalogued ICT&CE product attributes related to the environment with an international scope in a flexible format. As the TR/70 was free to download, the number of declarations issued has been estimated about 2000 based on input from Ecma members. To meet the growing customer demand for standardized, comparable IT product environmental information, IT Företagen developed the IT Eco Declaration system in 1996 for the Nordic countries with frequent updates. The usage was restricted to the members of the system basically introduced by the funding need for the third party quality control system. About 6000 declaration have been issued in the last 10 years. Starting in early 2005, IT Företagen and Ecma International experts joined to combine the benefits

and harmonised both declarations into one widely accepted type II eco declaration, ECMA-370 “THE ECO DECLARATION - TED”. TED meets the basic principles of ISO 14021 (environmental labels and declarations / self declared environmental claims). TED provides two declaration forms, a Company Environmental Profile and a Product Environmental Attributes, and is aligned with the eco design standard ECMA-341 and the CDV for IEC 62075. It also addresses stakeholder comments on ECMA TR/70 and the IT Eco Declaration as well as recent regulatory changes. 2. OBJECTIVES The objective of TED is the widespread use of accurate and verifiable environmental self-declarations that: • increase the potential for market forces to

stimulate environmental improvements in products

• prevent or minimise unwarranted claims • reduce marketplace confusion • facilitate international trade • increase the opportunity for purchasers,

potential purchasers and users to make more informed choices.

As the efforts for public green procurement increased significantly in the past years, especially in the European Union [1] and Japan, the first edition of The Eco Declaration is international in scope but

rather EU specific in the declarations forms referencing EU or member states legislation. TED provides an answer for 90% or more of the commonly asked environmental questions. Because market and green procurement needs differ in various regions of the world, further annexes may be developed. The ECMA-370 standard (TED) can be freely downloaded from www.ecma-international.org. Word forms are available for ease of use. 3. TED QUALITY CONTROL

To ensure basic quality, a valid TED must have all mandatory fields filled in. Voluntary fields enable to promote additional attributes and achievements. To ensure the correctness of the eco declarations, the company shall enforce a quality control system. Two types of systems are possible: • company internal quality control • independent quality control IT Företagen has implemented a third party quality control system providing an equivalent quality level as compared with eco labels. Companies who want to reach this quality level may join the IT Företagen eco declaration system or an equivalent system. 4. COMPANY ENVIRONMENTAL PROFILE (CEP) The product independent CEP (annex A) provides legal and market requirements and also allows software vendors, business partner and dealers to issue an environmental declaration. An optional section allows to list special company environmental programs or achievements. 5. PRODUCT ENVIRONMENTAL ATTRI-BUTES (PEA) The PEA (annex B) declaration contains legal and market requirements that cover the whole range of eco design: • hazardous substances • batteries • electrical safety, EMC and connection to the

telephone network • consumable materials • product packaging materials • treatment information for recyclers/treatment

facilities • environmental conscious design (such as dis-

assembly, recycling, product lifetime) • material and substance requirements

• energy consumption; • noise emissions • chemical emissions from printing products • electromagnetic emissions for computer displays • ergonomics • documentation. Energy consumption and noise emission are main focal points because of their relevance to customers and being a frequent source of confusion when communicated in free form, 5.1. Energy Consumption Throughout the covered wide product range, energy modes and definitions are not commonly available. Therefore, TED promotes a new, highly flexible scheme – with the very generic energy modes from ECMA-341 - to best inform the user or purchaser. To that end, companies are required to describe the modes for the specific product in detail and to list the measuring standard used. Where agreed definition and measuring standards are not available – frequently for the on modes – publicly available company procedures shall be referenced. Since the energy costs during the lifetime of many products is at least in the range of the purchasing cost for them, companies are encouraged to provide the energy consumption needed to estimate the annual energy consumption (and costs). As Ecma TC38 members are actively driving or involved in energy efficiency initiatives like the worldwide ENERGY STAR® program for office equipment, the Ecma TC38 task group “Energy Efficiency” (initially focussing on computer for. ENERGY STAR® tier 2) and SPEC power-performance committee (for server), TED will be frequently updated to integrate the newest developments. 5.2. Acoustic Emissions Acoustic – or noise – emissions are a frequent concern but few purchasers and users know how to handle the various sound power and pressure levels in product comparisons. We recommend using the declared sound power level LwAd, which provides the best information on all “noise” emitted from a product. Annex E provides detailed guidance. 6. TED AND THE ECO LABELS TED presents the state of the art environmental declarations (Type II) in terms of coverage and 'ease of use'. Type I eco labels as the European eco flower, the German Blue Angel or the Japanese Eco Mark set pass/fail criteria for a limited number of attributes, resulting in no differentiation for products which

pass. Furthermore, eco labels are available for a rather limited number of ICT&CE product categories, often with only few awarded products. While the eco label community has over many years failed to make good on their promise to harmonise their criteria, TED reports the result of each criterion or the attribute values allowing a better assessment of the real product environmental performance. In particular the detailed energy consumption and noise information help to select a suitable product. TED also allows stating compliance to major eco label criteria. 7. FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS The first revision is planned for December 2006 to take into account feedback from stakeholders and to include the typical energy consumption (TEC) as defined in the coming Energy Star MOU for imaging devices. TED implementations in national language may be performed by the relevant industry associations (e.g. BITKOM is preparing the implementation for Germany). The TED team has opened the dialogue with stakeholders for the next major revision planned for Dec 2007. The goal is also to achieve further harmonization with other well-established

declarations such as the Japanese Green Procurement Network and the recently introduced US EPEAT© declarations for personal computers and monitors. Interested parties have proposed to publish all declarations centrally on the web and to further ease product comparisons – similar to the Japanese PC Green Label [2]. This is in discussion and feedback from stakeholders is welcome. Further information can be found on www.ecma-international.org and www.itecodeclaration.org .

8. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors wish to acknowledge the significant contributions of the other project members in producing this standard: Lars Bjalkvall, Onno Elzinga, Thomas Fischer, Kyoko Fujisawa, Robert Hellweg, Ikuo Kimizuka, Thomas Hedin (Leijergard) and Ewa Thorslund. 9. REFERENCES [1] EU Handbook on Environmental Public Procurement, http://ec.europa.eu/environment/gpp/handbook_en.htm, 2004; [2] Japanese PC Green Label, http://www.pc3r.jp/e/index.html