Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 – Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation – ESPR
The ESPR is based on, and will ultimately replace in full, the Ecodesign Directive 2009/125/EC. Since the ESPR’s entry into force in July 2024, a transition regime – lasting until 2030 – has been in place. To ensure that the public and stakeholders are well informed of what is planned under the ESPR, the Commission will adopt and regularly update working plans, setting out lists of products for which ecodesign requirements will be adopted and other measures that will be assessed. The first ESPR working plan will be adopted and published in the first half of 2025 and will cover a minimum period of three years.
The ESPR is part of a package of measures that are central to achieving the aims of the 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan and fostering the transition to a circular, sustainable, and competitive economy. It contributes helping the EU reach its environmental and climate goals, double its circularity rate of material use and achieve its energy efficiency targets by 2030.
The ESPR enables the setting of performance and information rules for almost all categories of physical goods, including:
- Improving product durability, reusability, upgradability and reparability
- Enhancing the possibility of product maintenance and refurbishment
- Making products more energy and resource-efficient
- Addressing the presence of substances that inhibit circularity
- Increasing recycled content
- Making products easier to remanufacture and recycle
- Setting rules on carbon and environmental footprints
- Limiting the generation of waste
- Improving the availability of information on product sustainability
The ESPR introduces a Digital Product Passport (DPP), a digital identity card for products, components, and materials, which will store relevant information to support products’ sustainability, promote their circularity and strengthen legal compliance. The information will be accessible electronically, making it easier for consumers, manufacturers, and authorities to make more informed decisions related to sustainability, circularity and regulatory compliance. It will also allow custom authorities to perform automatic checks on the existence and authenticity of the DPPs of imported products. Based on that DPP, there is also a Digital Product Passport for construction products under the new Construction Products Regulation.
Many unsold products in the EU are simply destroyed, a practice that wastes valuable resources. For the first time in the EU, the ESPR introduces measures to address this practice by introducing a ban on the destruction of unsold textiles and footwear, opening the way for similar bans in other sectors if evidence shows they are needed.
The ESPR will help steer funds in a more sustainable direction by enabling mandatory Green Public Procurement rules to be set for specific products. Under those rules, public authorities who purchase the products concerned will be required to purchase products that meet the highest levels of performance in terms of sustainability and circularity.
The policy implementation of the sustainability principles is expected to take place by widening Ecodesign Directive beyond energy related products, and made applicable to the broadest possible range of products, including construction.
Implementation of Ecodesign to construction products is challenging, because product performance in a building depends on design, construction, operation and external conditions (climate, orientation, latitude, etc.) and due to the risk of creating overlapping and conflicting provisions[1] with the Construction Products Regulation.
An effective approach to implement the sustainability principles to construction would be to integrate the necessary product characteristics and indicators in the regulatory framework of the CPR. In fact, some of them are already implemented e.g. declaration of thermal performance of products, durability tests and release of dangerous substances. The digital perspective is also covered because the CPR was considered one of the first regulatory policies to implement efficient delivery of digital documents. In fact, most manufacturers upload their declarations of performance in digital format.
SPI implementation to construction products through the existing
CPR framework would deliver results faster than through other policies
A clear benefit of digital declarations is the availability of complex and detailed information but the concept of product passport needs to be implemented together with Building logbooks to ensure product information can be correctly tracked to the relevant construction site. Finally, any information should be compatible with BIM, the global megatrend to digitalise construction and construction activities in the world.
On the sustainability side, policy implementation should consider the efforts of Member States to establish methodologies to assess sustainability of buildings and the action of the EC to develop a common framework called Level(s). To be efficient, the sustainable product initiative should be built on the existing methodologies and avoid defining parallel routes.
[1] Solid fuel stoves are covered by the CPR and Ecodesign. Discrepancies between them were identified and are in the process to be solved by the EC.