Market Surveillance and the Ecodesign Directive – Nordic Experiences

The Ecodesign Directive (2009/125/EC) and its successor, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, play important roles in ensuring more sustainable products. The Ecodesign Directive has proven effective in reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions. A key aspect in ensuring the full potential of the Directive is that regulations are enforced by the authorities, which renders market surveillance imperative. 10-20% of the products entering the European market are not in compliance with the ecodesign requirements. In this article, we analyse the challenges of market surveillance focusing on three Nordic countries, by answering the research question: How are the material efficiency requirements within the Ecodesign Directive verified through market surveillance and what are the challenges and potentials of the current approach? Our results show that the current experiences with market surveillance of the adopted material efficiency requirements are limited and that there are significant synergetic effects related to effective market surveillance.