The European Union has now made available new drafts of its Eco-Design and Eco-Labeling regulations for lighting. This third draft, released on October 8th, is what is proposed as the final version of these rules. 

A PDF document of the press release from the European Entertainment Ecodesign Coalition on the current position can be read / downloaded via this link

It is worth re-iterating that we - the entertainment lighting industry - have achieved a great deal over the last few months. The second draft of the regulations, released in July, achieved a number of important things for us, particularly an exemption for many of the tungsten light bulbs in common use, and for additive colour-mixing (what the EU calls ‘colour tuneable’) lighting fixtures. All of these remain in this final draft.

However, that draft also included some details that were problematic to our industry. These included:

• the inability of entertainment lighting products to achieve the 0.5W maximum power consumption when in standby mode - ie. when not emitting light - because of the need to keep processing incoming data all the time in order to be able to respond immediately to commands.
• the inability of high-powered / high output white LED sources to meet the efficiency level required, because of the way that optical systems naturally become less efficient as they get larger
• the definition of green used for colour-tuneable fixtures, which is not set at the right point for the most efficient design of such fixtures
• a number of specific lamp bases still in use which were included in our original request for exemption, but not included in the revised rules.

The entertainment lighting industry, through Pearle (the European producers league that has been our ‘voice’ in Brussels) has been trying to feed this back to the EU’s Energy team since July. The version linked here is a slightly updated version with more signatories. However, there has been no response to this from Energy, and none of these issues have been addressed in the latest draft.

The regulations now enter a consultation period during which member states can comment on the regulations through their appropriate government body. In the UK this is the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy - BEIS. The ALD and others in entertainment lighting have been talking to this department for some time, and they are fully aware of the issues and are poised to help. However, if you work in other countries, or know people who do, it would be incredibly helpful if they could contact the relevant department (the department responsible for Ecodesign) in their country and make sure that department is informed and asked to help. The more countries that respond with the same message (and particularly countries that are not Britain - announcing that we are leaving does not put us in a particularly strong position within Europe), the better. If people, companies or organisations need help working out who to contact or need more information about what to tell them, please ask them to contact the ALD - we’d be happy to help.

If that fails, the manufacturers are already starting to plan their workarounds. But we continue to believe it would be better to get these outstanding concerns resolved properly, so manufacturers can concentrate their efforts on making innovative new products, not having to engineer work-arounds to rules.

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