17 April 2014

All BOSS members are invited to the first stakeholder consultation meeting of the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) Pilot Phase for stationery products

BOSS members are invited to attend the first meeting of consultation with stakeholders of the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) Pilot Phase for stationery products, to be held in Brussels on 30 April from 10:00 to 15:30.

As part of the SOFEA project, the European Commission initiated this PEF Pilot Phase as part of its 'Single Market for Green Products Initiative' which aims to establish a common methodological approach to enable European Union Member States and private organisations to assess, display and benchmark the environmental performance of products, services and companies.

In this context, the European Commission took 2 major initiatives in April 2013:

1. The publication of a reference document, the PEF Guide: a generic method and guideline to measure environmental performance of products throughout their life cycle.
2. The launch of a 3-year testing period to develop product and sector specific rules (PEFCR) that complement general methodological guidance of the PEF method by providing further specification at the level of a specific product category, through a multi-stakeholder process. Such rules will become an integral part of the EU guidelines for each product category.

UFIPA (a French professional organisation which federate major manufacturers and resellers of the office products industry) has been selected by the European Commission to coordinate this pilot phase; the test product family being chosen is 'stationery'.

The purpose of this meeting will be to give the opportunity to all stakeholders involved in the European stationery products industry (including manufacturers, resellers, consumers, organisations and NGOs) to discuss and give their feedback on the first works done by the Technical Secretariat for the development of the PEFCR for stationery.

The organisations which are members of this Technical Secretariat to date are:

For manufacturers: 3M, Exacompta-Clairefontaine, Esselte, ACCO, Brunnen, Hamelin Group, International Paper, Fellowes

For resellers: Office Depot, Staples, Bureau Vallee

For professional organisations: FEPE, UFIPA

For local government institutions: ADEME

For external experts: SGS

The issues which will be discussed at this meeting include:

The precise definition of the product group of the PEFCR

The results of the analysis of existing Product Category Rules to check potential compliance with the requirements of the Product Environmental Footprint method

The 'Representative Product', which describes the features of a typical average product sold on the market (see the Guidance Document for more details)

To register for this meeting, simply CLICK HERE. You will need to create an ECAS account and complete a short survey.

This is a unique opportunity for your company to be part of this ambitious project and to share your comments or suggestions for the development of the PEFCR, which could become a European reference for the evaluation of the environmental performance of all stationery products.