A key element of the Government’s market transformation policy is to ensure the availability and accessibility of information about the environmental performance of consumer products and other traded goods to:

  • Enable the development of market transformation strategies;
  • Enable informed choice and procurement decisions by consumers and throughout the supply chain;
  • Stimulate and enable competition;
  • Identify performance Standard Specifications for products and traded goods.

Whilst all these information applications might require different user interfaces, they all require access to the same set or subset of basic technical product information. UK EPIC acts as a primary information base and makes product information freely available in machine-readable formats. This approach has benefits to everybody involved in improving the resource efficiency of products and traded goods in the UK:

  • Intermediaries gain access to information to help set up energy efficiency initiatives and incentive schemes, and to distribute information to retailers (such as Carbon Trust, Consumer Association, Energy Saving Trust, etc).
  • Product suppliers and trade associations are under pressure to make their product information available to a growing number of third party applications. Submitting information to a single primary information base will reduce demands and costs on individual suppliers and trade associations. It also allows suppliers to get ahead of their competitors and differentiate their products on efficiency and/or performance.
  • Major buyers of products (such as hospitals, schools, etc.) gain access to product information to help inform their green procurement policies. Retailers can select products to stock with the help of UK EPIC and in accordance with their own procurement policies.
  • Government department and agencies as well as researchers can base their policy scenarios and decisions on solid information about the environmental performance of products and goods, rather than generic market assessments.

At present, for domestic appliances at least, manufacturers tend to use different model codes depending on where the product is to be marketed. Therefore, a separate product database is needed in each market area or country. Although this means that there is little immediate prospect of complete transparency for consumer information and of a simple EU-wide product information base, there is scope to progressively increase linkages and to share information with other similar product information databases.