Imaging Equipment and TV standards move forward!
Hurrah! The IEEE 1680.2 Imaging Equipment and 1680.3 Television draft standards have both received the required percentage of balloter votes – more than 75% — to move ahead to publication. That means that EPEAT will expand late this year and early next to cover printers, copiers and televisions – a huge step forward!
EPEAT is constructed on the premise that stakeholder participation, bringing all perspectives to the table, is essential to achieve meaningful market transformation. And we’re grateful to the several hundred valiant stakeholders in the IEEE 1680.2 and 1680.3 development processes for these new standards!
Decisions about the content and structure of environmental rating systems can be reached more quickly (and certainly more easily) by a small group of technical experts than by an open standards development process. But as EPEAT’s remarkable success demonstrates, the process of achieving consensus among a large, varied, unwieldy stakeholder group addresses, and often accommodates, system users’ needs and wants in a way that private development may not fully allow.
The new Imaging Equipment and TV standards will double the number of unit sales potentially covered by EPEAT ratings, and bring new manufacturers and purchasers – including consumers – into the system’s orbit. The new Server standard, now in its early stages of development, will expand the covered product set still further. And upcoming revisions to 1680.1 criteria will raise the bar for the original PC and Display standard.
That’s a lot of progress to celebrate as we complete our 6th year of operation this July.