Product Verification

Verification Overview

In the EPEAT system, manufacturers add their products to the registry by declaring that the products meet specific individual criteria of IEEE 1680. Product declarations are not precertified; however manufacturers must be able upon request at any time following product registration to produce the required supporting evidence spelled out in the IEEE standard. In order to maintain the credibility of the system, EPEAT periodically selects a batch of products and criteria from the registry and verifies that they meet the criteria as declared.

All criteria declared by all products on the registry are subject to verification at any time. Criteria are selected for investigation by the Product Verification Committee (PVC) based on random selection, environmental significance, or the expectation that a criterion may be difficult to meet or highly significant in terms of environmental impact.

The verification process may simply require a manufacturer to provide production reports, lab analysis or other data, or EPEAT may independently obtain products and subject them to detailed laboratory analysis or destructive disassembly.

PLEASE NOTE: Stakeholders are encouraged to contact EPEAT if they have good reason to doubt the veracity of a product declaration; their concern can trigger a special investigation of criteria or products or inclusion in an upcoming verification round. Purchasers with questions about a product proffered in response to a bid tender may request an expedited review.

While EPEAT will work with manufacturers to correct or clarify a nonconforming declaration, if a manufacturer is found over time to be an untrustworthy user, they may be barred from using the EPEAT system.

Why not Precertify?

EPEAT’s unconventional approach - product declaration by the manufacturer, followed by registry surveillance and ongoing verification investigation - was decided upon by the stakeholders during development of the IEEE 1680 standard.

The group very carefully considered the most effective way to maintain the credibility of the Registry based on the unique characteristics of these high-tech products:

Very rapid technology development,

Very short time to market

Very complex and continually morphing global supply chains, and

Very high variability in the configurations of individual products (components from totally different manufacturers may be found inside of the "same product" over time )

Electronic and computer products experience as high as a 70% rate of changes in components, sourcing and other elements from the original product launch through the commercial life of a given model . Given this rate of change, a precertification based on a one-time investigation before a product is on the market is fundamentally inadequate to assess IT equipment as it will be delivered to the purchaser. Stakeholders recognized that ongoing and randomly timed surveillance is the best way to identify potential problems.

Therefore, in accordance with to the IEEE 1680 standard, EPEAT has developed rigorous and transparent post-declaration verification procedures based on unannounced and very in-depth investigations, and on public exposure in case of non-conformances. The system is designed to make nonconformance publicly embarrassing, and to maintain the constant likelihood of investigation at any time.