The purpose of conducting surveillance of environmental protection products is to conduct after-market product testing and inspection activities, as well as follow-up audits of product manufacturing sites, marketing venues and service provision venues, in order to confirm the continuing conformance of certified products to specified requirements. Therefore, this project established the patterns of likely product non-conformances through conducting routine surveillance activities on environmental protection products. The non-conformance patterns are then compiled and analyzed in order to develop the recommendations for future improvements. When implemented, these recommendations will lead to improvements in the surveillance of environmental protection products and result in further adoption of environmental protection products.
The major tasks of this project include improving surveillance of environmental protection products, conducting surveillance on environmental protection products, and further promoting the environmental protection product promotion system. The verification of project goals’ implementation will be confirmed through the “2016 Plan for Conducting Surveillance of Environmental Protection Products”; while the verification operations will be conducted in accordance with the “Standard Operating Procedure for the Conduct of Surveillance on Environmental Protection Products”. In addition, the "Procedure for Handling Misuses of Green Mark by the Environmental Protection Products" has been developed to serve as the basis for handling the misuses of Green Mark by the manufacturers or service providers not certified to use Green Mark on their products or services.
For the year 2016, this project has completed the following tasks: organized two (2) sessions of experts and scholars forum/workshops; completed the revision of “Standard Operating Procedure for the Conduct of Surveillance on Environmental Protection Products” and "Procedure for Handling Misuses of Green Mark by the Environmental Protection Products"; and completed planning for systematic control mechanism in order to track the processing progress after Green Mark products are found to be non-conforming after product sampling and testing or misuses of Green Mark.
For the procedure related to handling misuses of Green Mark, clear distinction has been made regarding Green Mark licensees and non-Green Mark licensees. For Green Mark licensees found to be non-conforming during the surveillance activities, or entities with records of multiple Green Mark misuses, they will be subjected to legal prosecution, and banned from applying for Green Mark or Type II environmental protection product status for the next three years. Examples were also established for handling the corrective actions of entities misusing Green Mark.
With regard to the procedure for conducting surveillance activities, standard operating procedure and basic requirements for conducting annual product sampling and testing operations have been clearly defined and established in this procedure. In addition, this procedure also revised the form used for documenting the verification organizations, manufacturing sites and retail venues involved in the surveillance activities, so that consistent forms can be used by all involved parties to reduce duplicating documents.
Regarding the surveillance of environmental protection products, 417 product samples from 244 manufacturer/retailer visits were sampled and tested, with 15 samples from 10 manufacturer/retailer visits found to be non-conforming. The non-conforming products were dealt with in accordance with the requirements of the “Guidelines on the Promotion of Environmental Protection Products”. In addition, on-site audits were conducted for 125 products from 31 manufacturing sites and 104 products from 16 retailing sites, as well as 31 products from 2 online stores. Follow-up activities have been completed for non-conformances of 15 products from 10 manufacturers or retailers, and Green Mark misuses for 115 products from 7 manufacturers or retailers.
On the promotion of environmental protection products, three promotional seminars have been held in the northern, central and southern part of Taiwan respectively, in order to enhance the manufacturers’ willingness in applying for Green Mark ecolabeling, as well as to improve their awareness in the misuses of Green Mark and proper product quality control measures. In addition, two seminars on legal requirements, education and training needs were held in order to improve Green Mark certification personnel’s awareness of relevant legal requirements. As the training seminars for legal requirements have been conducted for three consecutive years, it may be appropriate to return this task to the certification or verification organizations, so that they can conduct their own training on legal requirements which may better suit their own training needs, improve personnel capacity and easier for them to assess training effectiveness.
With regard to the follow-up review and recommendation part of the project, it is recommended that for selected test items which did not meet the requirements in the past but have met all requirements during this year’s sampling testing activities be returned to the routine sampling and testing protocol. Also, during this year’s testing operations, several test items were found to have multiple non-conformances and are recommended to be considered as next year’s priority test items. These items include: lead content for plastic components of air conditioners, energy efficiency of water fountains or hot water pots, azo dyes of toner cartridges, thermal collection efficiency of natural circulation solar water heaters, and formaldehyde content of household cleaners. It is also recommended that full scale sampling and testing be conducted for the arsenic content of water-based paints in order to establish comprehensive database which can serve as important reference and basis for deciding whether to revise the specific product category’s product criteria.
This year’s on-site audits include manufacturing sites and retail sites. These sites were found be in conformance with relevant requirements, it is therefore recommended that auditing of manufacturing sites be conducted by certification/verification organizations, while the auditing of retail sites be conducted by the Green Mark implementation organization. It is also recommended that all Green Mark licensees be invited to future Green Mark information seminars, and that information provided during the seminars be focused on the rights and obligations of the licensees after they have been granted the rights of Green Mark usage, so that improvements can be made to strengthen the licensees’ suppliers management, licensed product management, product/application modifications, conduct of surveillance activities, handling of non-conformances, and analysis of relevant cases and examples.
In the future, the implementation of surveillance and on-site audit activities should be based on a system which organizes records on relevant data verification activities, so that the progress on follow-up activities and corrective actions related to non-conforming products after sampling and testing and products with Green Mark misuse offences can be effectively tracked and monitored. Moreover, in line with the revisions of Taiwan-EPA’s Guidelines on Promotion of Green Consumption and Environmental Protection Products, the non-compliances of environmental regulations related to Green Mark applicants’ manufacturing sites or service provision venues will be analyzed so that recommendation on how to proceed with their applications can be proposed.
The mid-term and long-term recommendations to this project related to the program’s assignment of tasks, funding mechanism, legal basis and proper handling of Green Mark misuses. In principle, as an important part of the certification activities, certification organizations are responsible for conducting surveillance activities to ensure continuing conformance to certification criteria. It is recommended that in the future, the responsibilities of certification organizations to conduct follow-up surveillance activities be strengthened through the changes in Green Mark funding rules and fee collection scheme.
The original Green Mark operating guidelines and relevant legal requirements all require the regulation and control of Green Mark licensees, however, for non-licensees, their misuses of Green Mark will be governed by other laws. This year, the relevant Green Mark guidelines have been revised to include the requirements on dealing with non-licensees. For long-term development, it should be noted that Green Mark itself has no legal basis for law enforcement. Legal prosecution of Green Mark misuses by non-licenses will have to rely on civil litigation related to trademark infringement of Green Mark based on Trademark Act and Fair Trade Act. Therefore, the future goal for the Green Mark Program will be to obtain the legal basis for Green Mark.
