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The EU Ecodesign and Energy Labelling Directives set regulations on the energy efficiency, environmental, and information requirements of energy related products entering the EU market. Each individual product regulation stipulates that the EU Commission must undertake a review after a certain number of years. This review stage is crucial to improve the effectiveness and ambition of regulations, and also presents an opportunity to include new resource efficiency aspects. The strength of a review depends on the review process, which has followed various approaches in each reviewed product group so far. This article aims to summarise and discuss these varying review processes and identify their differences and shortcomings. The analysis is based on comparing the review processes to the standard Methodology for Ecodesign of Energy related Products (MEErP) used in preparatory studies to develop new Ecodesign regulations. Analysis questions were discussed with a small number of experts to gain deeper insights on opportunities and difficulties; suggestions are made for improving future review processes.
In this study the processes driving the EU Ecodesign Directive's preparatory studies forward are summarised and issues occurring in recent product groups are reviewed. As product groups move away from standard mass-produced products, finding ways to bring them under the scope of the Ecodesign Directive becomes more controversial and complex. Through literature review, challenges facing study consultants are outlined and their specific impacts are demonstrated through outline case studies of the fans, industrial ovens, machine tools and thermal insulation product groups. Inconsistencies in the process are found where possible and matched up to the historical process to determine whether preparatory studies could be made more effective or should be more flexible, given the limited resources available at the European Commission and amongst Member States. A number of recommendations for improving the regulation process and the structure of the preparatory study are presented, based upon literature review and the presented analysis.
It is hypothesised that as a result of used electronic goods exports to developing economies, the projected energy savings made by the Ecodesign Directive at the EU level do not immediately equate to the same savings at the global level. A significant volume of the EUs inefficient used/obsolete products are exported after reaching the end of their useful life in the EU and after a relatively short second usage phase, these products become electronic waste and undergo particularly poor end of life treatment in developing countries. To determine whether the energy use of used exports could be significant, the annual energy use of EU stock and exported used products is simulated in the case of televisions, using a simplified stock model over the time period 2006 to 2025. This simulation is based on available data, estimates and simple projections for the annual number of exported used televisions and annual television energy use over time. The model shows that the scale of energy usage is highly dependent on the number of exported televisions and their second lifetime. Assuming the number of exported used units to average 15% and be in a range of between 5% and 25% of annual EU sales, an indicative estimate of the energy use of exported televisions is found to be 8.1% (range: 2.7% - 13.6%) of the annual energy use of EU television stock in 2013. Similarly, the annual energy use of exports is estimated to be 26.9% (range: 9.0% - 45.0%) of new EU sales energy use in 2013. Using the model results it can be deduced that Ecodesign regulations first impact the used goods market after the average EU lifetime for the televisions, taken as 9 years in this study. Full savings are expected to be achieved at the global level after the second lifetime in the developing world, assumed to be an additional 5 years in this case (i.e. 14 years total). Further positive effects of Ecodesign regulation at the global level are also discussed, while the model also indicates that the short second lifetimes of used televisions leads to significant WEEE generation in developing countries.
