Integrated Product Policy

When integrating environmental aspects into the EU's internal market a balance between the free movement of products and environmental protection has to be found. Implementing EU legislations in several areas like standardization, product policy, public procurement, industries and eco-labelling will help to follow the EU strategy.

What is Integrated Product Policy?

All products cause environmental damage somehow. Those are related to manufacturing, use or disposal.
Integrated Product Policy (IPP) takes a closer look on all phases of a products life-cycle and puts a focus on environmental improvement potentials.
The whole life-cycle of a product is often long and the influences affecting it mostly unpredictable. Life-cycle covers all stages from the extraction of natural resources, through their design, manufacture, assembly, marketing, distribution, sale and use to their eventual disposal as waste. The comprehension of the people working in or dealing with different stages of life-cycle is an advantage of the integrated product policy. Every individual product-phase will be enhanced through IPP by considering environmental aspects. Paying attention to the immense variety of products integrated product policy offers different obliging and open tools. Economic instruments, substance bans, voluntary agreements, environmental labeling and product design guidelines are some of those.

IPP on Small and medium sized enterprises

On the base of innovation and economic growth IPP provides an active role in acquiring solutions for greener products. Innovative SMEs will take part in the market transformation process and will profit from environmental leadership. Therefore an easier access to information and tools will be given and a special focus on the product chain as a support for SMEs. Costs expended for implementing IPP can be covered for example by reduced energy consumption and production cost.

Different Approaches for life-cycle analyses

For analyzing the life-cycle of a product several tools can be used and different ways to obtain helpful results are practicable. Life-Cycle-Assessment is one efficient tool and used often.

The "bottom-up" approach:

Focuses on a specific product and performs a Life-Cycle-Assessment (LCA) on it. The significant result of the specific product can be transformed to a bigger group of products from the same type. By dividing products into product categories and arising LCAs on them it is possible to single out significant environmental improvement potentials.

The "top-down" approach:

"Input-output" tables produced by statistical agencies contain data about the emissions and resource use of product categories. Calculations based on those data demonstrate the environmental impacts covering the full production chains.

EU Links

• IPP Home Page
• EU Green paper on integrated product policy