EU Commission Notice regarding COVID-19 impacts

La Commissione Europea ha pubblicato una nota sull'applicazione dei nuovi requisiti di etichettatura energetica in risposta alle sfide poste dalla pandemia COVID-19 e del loro conseguente impatto sulle attività produttive del settore dell’elettrodomestico.

02.06.2020

The Notice invites member States’ Market Surveillance Authorities to consider this exceptional context when enforcing those Energy Labelling Regulations.

In particular, in order to avoid the unnecessary and unwanted scrapping of some new appliances, manufacturers would then be allowed to place accumulated stock of products on the market that only have the current energy label until 1st March 2021, i.e. four months after the deadline set in the legislation.The Commission adopted the Covid-19 Notice in order to ask Member States to be more tolerant on the 2 labels requirements during the 4 months period, but it maintains a strict date (1st March 2021) to show the new label to consumers. The Notice text explicitly reports that: “[…] the Commission will refrain from launching infringement procedures as long as that lack of enforcement does not go beyond what is required, is limited in time from 1 November 2020 to 1 March 2021 and suppliers provide missing labels to dealers before 1 March 2021.“.

Therefore, a supplier should re-register a product in EPREL before 1st March 2021 and be able to provide retailers with the rescaled label by that date, if s/he failed to provide the 2 labels with new products during the 4 months period.