Japanese Electrical and Electronic Industry in Response to the EuP Directive

Abstract

The sixth environment action plan was adopted in Europe in 2002, and the prioritized areas of the environmental policy were indicated. IPP (Integrated Products Policy), which was base on it, was announced. This policy aims at reducing environmental impact through the life cycle of the product by the extension of the product life, energy saving in use, reuse and recycle parts of the product. To achieve this, environmental labels, green procurement, eco-design and national subsidy are used as the policy tools. And it will push forward environmental improvement and performance improvement of the product by their synergy effect. In such situation, “Framework Directive for setting eco-design requirements for Energy-using Products” was suggested as the directive about the environmental consideration for design of the energy consumer products such as electric / electronics equipment and heater. It was adopted in July, 2005 by European Commission (2005/32/EC). This directive in general terms is called “EuP directive.” In this paper, the summary of the EuP directive, Japanese companies' responses to this EuP and the recent trends of EUP directive are presented. Furthermore, mainly in the domain of personal computers, the latest trend about international energy star and the environment evaluation labeling of product, which seems to affect in the future EuP directive largely, are explained.