BERLIN — Europe's Energy-using Products (EuP) directive is expected to have a sweeping impact on the worldwide electronics industry similar to the RoHS legislation, said Karsten Schischke, senior engineer at the Berlin-based Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration (IZM), Europe's largest applied research organization.

OEMs will have to adopt eco-design practices in the design and supply chain so that products meet mandatory energy-use requirements set by the EU — or see their gear excluded from the 27-country market.

Initially, the Commission asked the electronics industry to set voluntary energy-use standards that legislators would agree with, but that approach didn't work out.

"For almost all product groups, my impression is that the Commission doesn't accept proposed voluntary standards and they will set their own mandatory requirements," Schischke said.

EuP requirements will cover a product's conception to end-of-life. Standards will be based on a comprehensive view of environmental impacts resulting from product manufacture, usage of energy and water and emissions and disposal.

"The EuP should have a huge impact on the electronics industry," he said.

The EuP is among the topics at the Electronics Goes Green 2008+ conference in Berlin, September 9-10.

This year's conference is much more focused on eco-design and energy-related topics than on RoHS or WEEE.

"There's a hard push for green electronics," Schischke said.

A main conference topic will be how to effectively design products that use less energy. Consumer electronics devices overall show increasing power consumption despite the work done by companies to lower it, Schischke said.

The notion that smaller electronics equals less use of power is fundamentally wrong.

"The question is whether the industry is doing enough, whether stricter requirements are needed or if a totally different approach is needed," he said.

The conference will also have a discussion on how to control environmental claims, with Greenpeace expected to participate.

NGOs have been effective in pushing OEMs toward environmental compliance because companies are concerned about product studies, he said.

Nonetheless, OEMs have an issue with NGOs that can't substantiate claims, or implied claims, based on the analysis in a given study.

"NGOs often analyze products themselves and turn them into a huge PR campaign, then OEMs react," Schischke said. "But some NGOs put the wording in a certain light so that it sounds as if the compliant companies are not compliant."

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