A bilateral meeting between CHEAA and APPLiA was held in Brussels on August 29, 2023. The meeting discussed the overview of the current EU and Chinese legislative, industrial and market landscape, environment topics, digital & competitiveness topics, corporate topics, and topics related to carbon accounting and CBAM.
Jiang Feng, Executive President of CHEAA, introduced CHEAA’s latest work regarding carbon footprint accounting of home appliances and PFAS. On May 18, 2023, CHEAA released Action Plan for Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality of China’s Home Appliance industry before 2030. At this meeting, Wan Chunhui, Vice Secretary General of CHEAA, provided a detailed introduction to this work and exchanged views with APPLiA on whether the EU will require carbon footprint disclosure for home appliance products in the future and how could the mutual recognition of carbon footprint accounting of EU and China be reached.
Paolo Falcioni, Director-General of APPLiA, introduced the market landscape of the Europe in 2022. Policy Directors and Managers of APPLiA including Korrina Hegarty, Matteo Rambaldi, Michał Zakrzewski, Candice Richaud, Giulia Zilla, Franziska Decker and Alvaro Vilas introduced legislative updates of the EU including the Green Deal, ESPR, DPP, PFAS, packaging and packaging waste regulation, microplastics, CBAM, Data Act, AI, Cyber Resilience Act, sustainable finance and governance, etc.
According to APPLiA, the carbon footprint of home appliances, from a lifecycle perspective, mainly comes from the use stage, and energy efficiency is critical for the carbon reduction during the use stage. APPLiA also highlighted challenges facing the carbon footprint accounting for home appliances such as accounting standards, data collection, and data verification. At the EU level, the focus is currently on the sustainability of products. APPLiA proposes for an effective methodology to assess the sustainability based on an aggregated and weighted (evaluation) system of products that makes a balance between parameters such as the lifecycle energy consumption of products (including energy efficiency, energy used in production and energy used for end of life treatment), recoverability, recyclability, upgradability, repairability, reliability, recycled content, lightweight, etc. APPLiA proposes product individual specifications, which provide flexibility to manufacturers. The final aggregated evaluation will serve as the basis for setting ecodesign requirements
Plus, it is learned that APPLiA suggests the EU Commission to expand the scope of CBAM to include finished home appliance products to level the playing field as it believes the competitiveness of local enterprises will be decreased due to an increase in cost as the current CBAM focuses mainly on raw materials.