The European Parliament voted for the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation-ESPR (455 votes in favour, 99 against, and 54 abstentions), which aims to introduce environmental sustainability standards for most products sold in the EU. The new regulation will improve EU products’ circularity, energy performance, and other environmental sustainability aspects.

The proposal establishes a framework to set ecodesign requirements for specific product groups to significantly improve their circularity, energy performance, and other environmental sustainability aspects. It will enable the setting of performance and information requirements for almost all categories of physical goods placed on the EU market (with some notable exceptions, such as food and feed, as defined in Regulation 178/2002). For groups of products that share sufficient common characteristics, the framework will also allow to set horizontal rules.

The framework will allow for the setting of a wide range of requirements, including on product durability, reusability, upgradability, and reparability; presence of substances that inhibit circularity; energy and resource efficiency; recycled content; remanufacturing and recycling; carbon and environmental footprints; information requirements, including a Digital Product Passport.

By 2030, the new sustainable products framework can lead to 132 mtoe of primary energy savings, which corresponds roughly to 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas, almost equivalent to EU’s import of Russian gas.

The new “Digital Product Passport” will provide information about products’ environmental sustainability. This information will be easily accessible by scanning a data carrier and it will include attributes such as the durability and reparability, the recycled content or the availability of spare parts of a product. It should help consumers and businesses make informed choices when purchasing products, facilitate repairs and recycling and improve transparency about products’ life cycle impacts on the environment. The product passport should also help public authorities to better perform checks and controls.

The rules proposed under ESPR will apply to all products placed on the EU market, whether produced inside or outside the EU. ESPR will be compliant with international trade rules and the European Union will continue to work in partnership with producing countries who share to goal to improve the sustainability of their products. Moreover, the EU will be providing support to partner countries and assess possible impacts on third countries thoroughly.

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