Paolo Falcioni further explained that ensuring safety globally, giving the presumption of conformity, shortening the time for a product to be placed on the market and fostering international trade are only some of the benefits that standardisation brings to consumers and to the business environment. Having set the scene, he also said that the biggest challenge he sees is to keep standards part of the adopted 10 years ago New Legislative Framework, a package of measures that aims at improving market surveillance and boosts the quality of conformity assessments. “I see tendency to double check what European Standardisation Organisations are delivering”, he noted.
The Association’s Director General highlighted a number of initiatives on which APPLiA has collaborated with ECOS: one of the many workshops on home appliance testing methods, ECOS’ involvement in the industry’s stand at COP21 when the Paris Agreement was signed and its help in the brainstorming of how the energy label at the time had to look like. “We share a challenge: standards are not fashionable. They are technical, sometimes obscure, often complex. We are all searching for the holy grail of standards: to be a reflection of real life while keeping the necessary repeatability and reproducibility”, Paolo Falcioni pointed out.
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