Ecodesign: trialogue agreement reached

While all eyes are on the trialogue negotiations for the AI act, another very important negotiation round has just closed in Brussels - namely the one concerning the proposed Ecodesign regulation. We have become more and more aware that most of the environmental impact of products is generated at production stage - making it necessary that we buy less products and use them for longer. Improving product durability is one of the core objectives of the proposal, which may now get turned into legislation by the end of the current parliamentary term. 

The new draft Regulation builds on the Ecodesign directive, which prescribed energy efficiency requirements for a variety of electricity-connected devices, by expanding both the range of potentially covered products and the sustainability requirements. According to the Commission,

"The new Ecodesign requirements will go beyond energy efficiency and aim to boost circularity, covering, among others:

• product durability, reusability, upgradability, and repairability
• presence of chemical substances that inhibit reuse and recycling of materials
• energy and resource efficiency
• recycled content
• carbon and environmental footprints
• available product information, in particular a Digital Product Passport."

The proposal is not only meant to assist consumers in accessing better products and shopping better - think in particular of the use of "Digital Product Passports" - but also to change producers practices that have been identified as particularly unsustainable, such as the destruction of unsold goods. In this and other areas, the regulation operates at two speeds: some rules will be immediately applicable, for instance a ban on destruction unsold clothing and footwear, whereas other rules will be adopted at a later stage. 

The passport, that needs to provide consumers "information on the product's sustainability", entails advancing EU rules on sustainability information - what counts as sustainability information? In this sense, it is easy to see that the draft Regulation is in a tight relation to the green claims rules, which seek to standardise claims but also relies on industry understanding different dimensions of sustainability information. 

Crucially, the ecodesign rules are the basis for reparability requirements under the Right to Repair proposal, which however is much less far along the legislative procedure - will the whole package become law before the next elections?