Sep03GovtReport

This is a reminder that if you need a visa to travel to the United States for IAAPA Orlando 2003, you must apply for it as soon as possible. Material remains available on the IAAPA website with full details at www.iaapa.org, or you can contact the IAAPA Government Relations Department at 703/836-4800.

If you are traveling from a Visa Waiver Country, you must make sure that your passport is machine-readable. If it is not, you must apply for a visa. Again, further details are available as described above.

Currently, 27 countries participate in the Visa Waiver Program: Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brunei, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

Greener Standards
The European Community Treaty aims at a harmonious, balanced, and sustainable development of economic activities and a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment. It reinforces the principle of integration of environmental requirements into other policies, recognizing that it is key in order to achieve sustainable development. The community seeks a coherent approach to the pursuit of its objectives in relation to the single market and the environment, while also honoring its international obligations.

European standardization is a tool that has been used frequently in the implementation of community policies. Consequently, there has been an increasing focus on the role it can play in protecting the environment and supporting sustainable development.

In various political documents, the European Council and the European Parliament have highlighted the wish and need to consider environmental aspects in standardization. Also, the European Commission referred to standardization as a potential tool to reduce the environmental impacts of products and services.

The European Union’s latest thinking on how technical standards can help attain sustainable development goals is set out in a draft communication.

This communication, on integrating environmental aspects into standardization, should be finalized and published by the end of 2003. The “Enterprise and Environment Directorates General” draft, which was well-received at a stakeholder meeting on July 16 in Brussels, looks at environmental thinking, priority-setting, stakeholder participation, and the use of specific tools to help produce greener standards.

Green standard examples include environmental management standards, which help firms measuring and upgrade their environmental performance, and testing and measurement standards for air, water, and soil quality or energy efficiency.

The European Union’s integrated approach to standardization includes drawing on the environmental expertise of non-governmental organizations in the standardization process, as to make standards a more widely accepted vehicle for creating products that consume fewer resources and have fewer detrimental effects on the environment throughout their life cycle.

The European Commission claims that some developments that European standardization has undergone over the last couple of years have helped increase the potential for it to be a useful tool to protect the environment. These developments are:
• The growing number of European standards; in 2003 a total of about 13,500 European standards exists.
• The growing range of sectors using European standards.
• The growing take-up in European
legislation.
The draft “Integrating Environmental Aspects into Standardization” was published in July and sent to all interested parties for consultation.

The stakeholders addressed in this communication are: European standardization organizations and their national members; national public authorities; industry and business associations; and non-governmental organizations.

The European Commission invited these stakeholders to give their opinion about the possibilities of greener standards with a view to advancing the standardization system and to making it more responsive to the environmental dimension while respecting all other dimensions of sustainable development.

Altogether this new thinking on how technical standards can help attain sustainable development will lead to new kinds of standards, that, besides aspects of trade, quality, health, and safety of products, processes and services, will also need a consideration of the environmental aspects.