First CPR working plan

The Commission started the CPR-acquis process in 2020, aiming the update all existing harmonized standards under the CPR and extend their scope to cover new products. The acquis process is well underway, but certainly not finished yet. To support the acquis process there are three horizontal Expert Groups on Fire, Dangerous substances and Environmental sustainability. Next to that there are subgroups for each Product Family under the CPR (37 in total). Overview can be found in Figure 1 of the working plan.

There is a priority list of product families, in which order they will receive their Standardization Request (SReq.) from the Commission, table 2 shows the current status:

Environmental sustainability

The new CPR dictates that the declaration of performance and conformity must include the product’s environmental sustainability performance over its life cycle. The required essential characteristics are listed in Annex II. First only global warming potential is needed to be declared, later followed by the mandatory indicators mentioned in the EN 15804:A2 and then finally followed by the optional indicators as well.

Important will be that each Product Family will be required to draft a complementary product category rule (c-PCR). Where before a Product Family could voluntarily draft a c-PCR, and quite some groups did, this will become mandatory and the c-PCR will become a harmonized standard and be important. It will mean that each product family will have one moment to determine the specific conditions, requirements, scenario’s under which the manufacturers will execute their life cycle assessments. From the Commission assistance will be organized to support Technical Commissions of the product families in this work, since it will be highly specialized work and horizontal requirements also must be taken into account.

An important aspect of life cycle assessments under the new CPR will be the use of background datasets. Allowing the use of all available datasets without further considerations could result in declarations that are not comparable. Therefore the development of background datasets has been taken up by the commission and the dataset developments will follow the Product Families priority order. Interesting the working plan includes the following paragraph: