IEC GUIDE 121:2023 specifies principles, requirements, and guidance for standard writers to identify whether an assessment method in their standard can be used to obtain an indication of the environmental performance of a product and to ensure that such assessment is credible.
This Guide applies to standards covering environmental performance of new products and as appropriate to standards covering environmental performance of second life products (e.g., refurbished or remanufactured).
This Guide is therefore intended to ensure that assessment methods developed by standard writers are credible. The credibility of an environmentally relevant performance assessment method is determined by taking into account all the related principles, namely representativeness, measurement repeatability, measurement reproducibility, measurement accuracy, cost of testing, as well as circumvention.
Environmentally relevant performance assessment methods can be present in many IEC standards (e.g., standards covering performance aspects of products), and not only those focused on the environment. This Guide will be applicable to those as well.
This Guide is not applicable to standards containing environmentally relevant performance assessment methods that are not assessed by test (e.g., assessment by inspection or simulation). Nor is it applicable to other aspects not linked to environment, such as EMC and EMF.