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The European Commission has recently announced two guiding principles for EU product policy: First, product policy shall ensure that the performance of front-runner products in terms of sustainability becomes the norm, and second, the effectiveness of the current Ecodesign legislative framework is going to be significantly improved. Within this paper, already existing front-runner approaches and recent and ongoing product policy-making processes were reviewed. Based on the results, an EU front-runner approach is outlined. The presented approach (i) refers to performance levels of the best products already available on the market, (ii) aggregates information in existing databases, and (iii) works semi-automated. Together, all three attributes have a high potential to facilitate and accelerate the specification of appropriate minimum requirements for products at the EU level. This way, EU policymakers can deliver on the core objectives of the Ecodesign legislative framework much better. The basic mechanism and its legal entrenchment of the approach are illustrated for the energy efficiency of energy-related products. In addition, the Front-Runner Approach can be applied to any product group in the scope of the upcoming Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and to a wide range of product-related minimum requirements, such as durability, reparability, or recycled content. The study’s objective is to suggest a tailor-made and dynamic approach to keep the EU product legislation up to date using innovative technology based on the investigation of current regulations and identify the gap. Experiences from three international case studies suggest that a front-runner approach to setting energy-performance standards can drive innovation and reduce energy consumption via promoting energy-efficient products; transparency about available products is one of the key factors and can be established by a database. The EU front-runner approach comprises extending the existing energy label database (or making use of the digital product passport) and introducing a legislative procedure that triggers changes in the energy efficiency requirements in the specific EU regulations if the database shows that a certain threshold value is reached. Challenges such as limited EU staff capacities and opportunities such as increased dynamic are discussed.
Whilst the concept of ecodesign is intended to account for the environmental impacts of the product across its whole lifecycle, European ecodesign policy to date has been heavily focused upon energy efficiency in the use phase. The Ecodesign Directive and Energy Labelling Regulation have achieved substantial energy savings since their inception. For many products, the magnitude of savings available from further tightening existing energy efficiency requirements is now often outweighed by savings that can be achieved by material efficiency requirements. Further, there are some products such as smartphones for which there are limited gains to be made in energy efficiency but for material efficiency. In the Commission’s Circular Economy Action Plan from 2015, a new direction was defined for ecodesign policy, to systematically examine considerations such as reparability, durability, upgradability, recyclability, or the identification of certain materials or substances. The Commission consequently issued a standardisation request (M/543, 2015) to the European Standardization Organisations (CEN / CENELEC / ETSI) to develop generic/horizontal standards relevant to energy-related products that address these major aspects of material efficiency. In this study we evaluate the potential contribution of these new standards (with specific focus on the standards for repair, durability and recyclability) to future developments under the European Ecodesign Directive. Opportunities for the impact of these standards to be enhanced by future work are highlighted.