END-OF-LIFE VEHICLES, WASTE ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT, BATTERIES AND PACKAGING
Legislators worldwide excavated individual waste streams, such as those in the heading, from the overall government responsibility for waste management and transferred them to manufacturers, importers and resellers. Today they are obliged to take back and recycle this waste. For the purpose of control and for statistical purposes they must register and report volumes put on the market and taken back. Despite the same objectives and procedures, attention has to be paid to divergent stipulations in all countries.
One of the next complex challenges is going to be take-back and recycling of old batteries of eCars.
THE EUROPEAN REGULATIONS REACH AND CLP
REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals)
The European Union wants to capture, assess and monitor all substances and mixtures that are manufactured, imported and put on the European market. The Regulation entered into force in 2006. The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) is assuming that the full implementation of the regulation will take the time until 2020. In 2018 the last registration wave for existing (so called phase-in) substances ended. Now new substances must be registered before production, importation and sales can start.
CLP (Classification, Labelling and Packaging)
This regulation transposes the Globally Harmonized System (GHS) of the UN for substances and mixtures into EU law. It is closely linked to the REACH regulation.
Other substance related legislation
Despite the clear aim to eliminate the patchwork of chemical legislation, REACH regulation rules a number of exemptions. Important examples are waste, medicine, food and cosmetics.
BAN OF SUBSTANCES, ENERGY EFFICIENCY, ECODESIGN AND PRODUCT SAFETY
- Product-related legal provisions for the protection of workers, users and of the environment shaped a complex landscape. Basic legislation such as the EU Product Safety Directive (Germany: Product Safety Act 2011) and numerous special legal acts supplement or exclude each other. Recent examples:
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- Manufacturers must comply with the substance prohibitions of the RoHS directive for electrical and electronic products in addition to those of the REACH regulation.
- The number of candidate substances for which manufacturers have to meet information requirements has grown from initially 14 to now 201 (as of December 2019).
- The EU is continuously adding new products to the list of those which have to meet specific requirements for better energy efficiency.
- The same is true for the list of products, such as washing machines, light bulbs and TV sets which must bear an energy label.
Collection societies are imposing copyright levies on manufacturers and distributors of IT products and consumer electronics
Many people know GEMA of Germany, the collection society levying organisations and events for playing music. For a number of years, the collecting societies in Europe have begun to extend the scope of copyright levies to the progressive digitization of our daily lives. With this background – step by step – collection societies addressed, among other things, PCs, Printers, Scanners, Smartphones, and Set Top Boxes to earn revenues for the works of musicians, writers and artists. Collecting societies charge royalties for legally permitted analogue or digital private copying as well as for analogous reprography. The enlargement of copyright levies naturally results in many open legal questions and considerable differences in the comparison of Member States.
The ITC technology has not yet fully arrived in medicine
Digitization does not stop in front of medicine. Under the keyword “telemedicine” the following aspects have been discussed for quite some time without generally accepted results:
- Electronic communications between health care professionals, including doctors and hospitals;
- Mobile telemedical applications for the treatment and monitoring of patients without visiting a doctor’s office or a hospital;
- Software support for diagnosis and therapy;
- Recently, apps for tablets and smartphones have been added, the importance of which is still largely unknown to health care professionals.
Numerous legal questions have to be answered in the process of digitizing medical everyday life, in particular in the fields of data safety and integrity, data security and protection, contract design, charges, support functions.
Genetically modified microorganisms make great demands
In recent years, the safety requirements for chemical, microbiological, diagnostic and biotechnological laboratories have increased. This development is caused – inter alia – by the development of drugs based on genetically engineered organisms. It adds complexity to the requirements of successful licensing procedures as well as to project and partner management.