scope:

This Guide specifies principles, requirements, and guidance for standards writers to identify whether an assessment method in their standard can be used to obtain an indication of the environmental performance of a product and to ensure that such assessment is credible.

This Guide applies to standards covering environmental performance of new products and as appropriate to standards covering environmental performance of second life products (for example, refurbished or remanufactured).

This Guide is therefore intended to ensure that assessment methods developed by standards writers are credible. The credibility of an environmentally relevant performance assessment method is determined by taking into account all the related principles, namely representativeness, measurement repeatability, measurement reproducibility, measurement accuracy, cost of testing, anti-circumvention, as well as review of standards.

Environmentally relevant performance assessment methods can be present in many IEC standards (for example, standards covering performance aspects of products), and not only those focused on the environment. This Guide will be applicable to those as well.

This Guide is not applicable to standards containing environmentally relevant performance assessment methods that are not assessed by test (for example, assessment by inspection or simulation), nor is it applicable to other aspects not linked to environment, such as electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and electromagnetic fields (EMF).

This Guide does not include guidance on whether all environmentally relevant aspects are covered by an IEC standard. This Guide also does not give guidance on whether a performance assessment method was successfully identified as environmentally relevant.

NOTE The IEC Standardization Management Board (SMB) has decided that Guides such as this one can have mandatory requirements which shall be followed by all IEC committees developing technical work that falls within the scope of the Guide, as well as guidance which may or may not be followed. The mandatory requirements in this Guide are identified by the use of "shall". Statements that are only for guidance are identified by using the verb "should" (see IEC Directives Supplement Part 1, A1.1).