COMPLIANCE INFORMATION SERVICE
We are pleased to be able to advise that the Euralarm Compliance Information Service is now fully operational on line - accessible from the REGULATIONS tab on the home page of the Euralarm web site (www.euralarm.org). This requires authorisation from the standard members log-in, so is immediately available to all members.
We hope that the service will be of benefit to many more individuals than those that currently have access to the member-only section of the Euralarm web site. Please therefore, bring this new service to the attention of anyone within your organisation that even might be interested they can then apply for their own password by completing the form that appears when attempting to access the site.
For Trade Association members, we can, at present, only offer this facility to staff of those members. However, the Component Fact Files are designed to be downloaded (with your logo embedded) so that you can place them on your own web site, or otherwise make them available to your members.
We thus hope that the benefits of the new service will be widely used.
The only problem is that, at the moment, we only have about a dozen files available. This is by no means a lack of ambition on our part simply a shortage of manpower! It takes time to draw on appropriate experience or carry out the necessary research to produce further documentation. We aim to increase the number of files available substantially over the next few months and welcome any volunteers to assist!
A major distraction from this is the need to keep up to date with all the recasts under way of around 50% of the European Directives and Regulations that we are monitoring!
To highlight a few of the major ones:
CONSTRUCTION PRODUCTS DIRECTIVE
Progress toward the new Construction Products Regulation is now well advanced more detail is provided in a separate article in view of the importance of this topic.
RoHS DIRECTIVE
The recast continues to be controversial. The Belgian presidency expects to have agreement between European Parliament, Commission and Council in place in time for its first vote late in November (2010).
Among the proposals expected to be agreed are:
SCOPE to be completely open, bringing to an end the exemption for monitoring and control equipment - and extended to peripheral equipment, including cables! There will be a number of exclusions.
List of prohibited substances at present unchanged with some potential additions to the list (including PVC - link that to the inclusion of cables!!!) having to undergo full assessment procedures before possible future inclusion, not included immediately as was earlier threatened.
STOP PRESS: The European Parliament passed the compromise proposals for the recast Directive in plenary vote on 24th November.
WEEE DIRECTIVE
A number of changes have been proposed, including harmonisation of the registration process across Europe and extension of the producer responsibility concept. However, this is less likely than RoHS to gain acceptance in the immediate future.
For more information about these, and other related topics, read issue 4/10 of Compliance News available from the Euralarm Compliance Information Service web page.
If you want to contact us for any reason, please do so compliance@euralarm.org.
Brian Harrington
Euralarm Technical Manager