Opinion on energy efficiency labelling - Rapporteur: Mr Fatovic

 

The EESC supports the Commission's proposal as it addresses the main problems relating to current legislation, including effective enforcement, efficient market monitoring and the right of consumers to receive clear, comprehensible and comparable information. In the Committee's view, it was the right choice to use a regulation instead of a directive as legislative instrument. The EESC also agrees with the proposal to set up a product database and to revert to the previous A-G energy scale. The EESC has also presented the following key recommendations:

 

  • Introduce stricter controls on products on sale to check that the characteristics of the product actually correspond to those shown on the label,
  • Include other information of relevance to consumers in the new label, such as the minimum life-expectancy of products and the energy consumption of the product in the course of its lifecycle,
  • Introduce a common Europe-wide system of penalties,
  • Take action to prevent that any additional costs under the new labelling system are automatically passed on to end users,
  • Regulate online marketplaces, where the most serious infringements of the obligation to display energy labels occur,
  • Regulate the marketing of "reprocessed" energy products in order to avoid legal loopholes and to promote greater integration between strategies on energy efficiency and on the circular economy,
  • Pay particular attention to products imported from third countries, in order to protect European products from possible forms of unfair competition or fraud,
  • Organised civil society should work alongside national governments in order to launch more effective and widespread information and awareness-raising activities,
  • The period at the end of the transition period should be extended to 30 days, in order to allow enough time to switch permanently to products labelled under the new system,
  • Adopt a more prudent and measured approach to delegated acts,
  • A mid-term impact assessment should be carried out during the period of eight years allocated for reviewing the framework for labelling,
  • The automatic rescaling of products should take place as and when necessary in the light of actual technological developments; rescaling should only occur when products in energy class A represent at least 20% of the market.

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