New European Initiative Includes Eco Assessment for UPS Systems

Within Europe it is sometimes difficult for a company to highlight and promote the environmental performance of their products across several EU member states. This is because manufacturers have to choose from a range of local government and private organisation’s initatives and methods. These can and do vary between countries and can involve a manufacturer paying multiple costs associated with providing environmental information.

To tackle this problem, the European Commission launched a new ‘Single Market for Green Products’ Initiative including a Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) category. Their aim is to establish an EU-wide measure of the environmental performance for both products and organisations.

For EcoPowerSupplies, this was a headline grabbing action for two reasons. Firstly, Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) are included within the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and secondly, one of our key partners Eaton Power Quality has been included as one of 40 volunteer stakeholder organisations.

Within the pilot phase of the new Initiative (that will last three years) the stakeholders will be involved in a testing period that will help to indentify, determine and test EU-wide Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCRs), compliance and verification systems and overall methods for general communication. The Initiative will help to support international efforts, more co-ordination and data availability. The PEF and Organisation Environmental Footprint (OEF) methods come from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. These are essentially Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and cover from the mining of raw materials to end of life disposal.

Under the Initiative Eaton Power Quality has commissioned its own life cycle assessment for its latest modular three-phase 93PM uninterruptible power supplies. We are eager to see the results at EcoPowerSupplies, especially as we expect this form of UPS to become the accepted norm for small to medium sized datacenters wanting to invest in a vertically scaling modular UPS technology.

For more information see The EC SIngle Market For Green Products website or contact EcoPowerSupplies.