Underwriters Laboratories (UL) has announced two new services for organisations seeking to demonstrate due diligence in compliance with the EU's Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive
UL offers both a UL restricted substance product certification and a UL restricted substance management systems registration to help organisations self-declare compliance to RoHS.
"UL created these services in response to the need in the industry for additional confidence when self declaring their products are in compliance with the requirements of the RoHS directive." said David Haataja, vice president and general manager of UL's restricted substances compliance solutions.
"UL's RoHS product certification and system registration services serve as important methods to help the customer have confidence in its due diligence when declaring its products compliance with the RoHS directive".
Under its RoHS product certification programme, UL tests representative samples of a product at the homogeneous level for the six substances restricted by RoHS and that the levels for those substances are in compliance with the limits set by the RoHS directive.
Substances covered under RoHS include lead (Pb), mercury (Hg), cadmium (Cd), hexavalent chromium (Cr+6 ), polybrominated biphenyls (PBB) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE).
If the product meets the RoHS directive limits, UL authorises the organisation to apply the UL RoHS mark to the manufactured product.
Products that qualify for the UL RoHS product mark also must meet UL's RoHS product certification requirements, including on-site surveillance visits twice per year from a UL representative.
UL's restricted substances management system registration assesses an organisations compliance with the standards established by the International Electrotechnical Commission Quality Assessment System for Electronic Components (IECQ QC 080000 HSPM).
These standards require that organisations have implemented processes to identify and control the hazardous substance content in their products.
Processes covered include, but are not limited to, management responsibility, product design, purchasing, production, and analysis of data.
The QC 080000 contains additional requirements to the ISO 9001 standard.
Therefore, organisations that have quality management systems that conform to ISO 9001 will realise comparability when they implement conformance to the QC 080000 standard for HSPM.
Additionally, organisations with management systems that conform to other standards such as ISO 14001 for environmental management systems will also realise benefit as they implement conformance to QC 080000.
