RIC Participation in ISO/TC 323
RIC is a participating member in the U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to the ISO/TC 323, the group working on developing international standards for Circular Economy. Read more about RIC’s participation in this previous post.
An Overview of the Standards
ISO/TC 323 is developing a series of standards that will be designated as the 59000 series. There will be several interrelated standards published, as outlined below.
The standards are being drafted by teams of experts called Working Groups. Each group will produce a series of drafts for their standard. The initial draft, a Working Draft, is reviewed within the Working Group. The next level draft is the Committee Draft, which is distributed to all participants in the international group to review and comment on. The next step after the Committee Draft is the Draft International Standard.
Current State of Work
RIC’s Trade & Policy Committee recently reviewed Committee Drafts from 59004, 59010, and 59020. Our goals during review were to ensure that remanufacturing was treated fairly and was well represented throughout the documents. To that end, we submitted several comments to the U.S. TAG for suggested revisions to the documents. The TAG collected comments from all participating members and compiled them. The committee then met over several sessions to review the comments in order to submit a unified set of comments from the U.S. to the international group.
RIC’s Wins
The definition of remanufacturing included in the draft of 59004 was missing some key components. We proposed replacing it with the remanufacturing definition included in our American National Standard, ANSI/RIC001-2.2021, in order to provide a robust definition that has already been through a rigerous vetting process. This proposal was accepted by the U.S. TAG and forwarded as a recommendation to the international group.
The draft for 59020 included a list of relevant standards. Our ANSI standard was recommended for inclusion in this list.
Additionally, we made recommendations for standardizing how reman was listed and addressed throughout the group of documents.
Next Steps
The U.S. TAG, as well as representatives from more than 30 other countries, submitted comments to these drafts at the end of July. All of these comments will be compiled for review by the Working Groups responsible for the respective documents.
ISO/TC 323 will meet in-person at the end of September to review the comments and work them into a new draft.
The next draft, a Draft International Standard, may be ready for review for some of these documents before the end of Q4.
Final publishing of the standards is expected in 2024.
Disclaimer
The recommendations that RIC made and the U.S. TAG accepted still need to be reviewed by the international Working Groups. There is no guarantee that these recommended changes will be included in the final published standard.