It has just been released by the European Commission, and is in line with the European approach in favor of a "Single Market for Green Products" and with the Environmental Information Recommendation. This document proposes a method to calculate the environmental footprint of a product, and will soon be followed by an open call for volunteers to participate in a pilot.
Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) is a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) based method to calculate the environmental performance of a product.
A 3-year trial phase is already planned to implement it, comprising several targets:
• to set up and validate the process of the development of product group-specific rules (Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules – PEFCRs), including the development of performance benchmarks. Where product group-specific rules already exist and are used by stakeholders, the Commission will use these as a basis for the development of the PEFCRs;
• to make the application of the environmental footprint methods easier, especially for SMEs, by testing innovative ways of managing the process and through the development of tools;
• to test different compliance and verification systems, in order to set up and validate proportionate, effective and efficient compliance and verification systems;
• to test different business-to-business and business-to-consumer communication vehicles for PEF information in collaboration with stakeholders.
The Commission will soon publish on this page an open call for volunteers to participate in the pilot.
The development of rules will be led by the Commission in a restricted number of cases; in others, industry (individual companies or organizations both from the EU and outside …
