2005 Volume 44 Issue 4 Pages 225-234
EU has been promoting an environmental conservation of the earth with a magnificent vision and goal also in the field of environment while driving a strategy to become the most competitive economic bloc in the world by 2010. Environmental policies, strategy, action plan, regulations and EU harmonized standards are taken into account to enhance their consistency, and various methods are adopted to promote the environmental action plan. Of such methods, effective methods are chosen to evolve their effectiveness in a wide variety of other fields. Looking at trends significantly coming out from environmental policies on products development, it will be necessary for those operating their business in EU in the future not only to implement environmental conservation activities taken to date mainly in production sites but to expand their activities also in the stages of material procurement, designing, production, marketing, product collection to recycling while taking into account product life cycle. Since environmental regulations enforced in EU last several years has been implemented under such background and aims, a fundamental direction of EU regulations seems to be unchanged but they will probably be accelerated furthermore in the future. Therefore, manufacturers need to realize such fundamental direction to promote development of their products while setting high environmental targets on a routine basis so as not to rush into an immediate countermeasure after a regulation is enforced.
