The requirements concerning the CE marking on building materials will be tightened, due to which customers will have an access to more information about a product. However, it is a bad news for manufacturers, whose costs will increase. They will not only have to pay extra for additional research on their products, but also repack the already made materials.
Till now all the products from building sector had to have the declaration of conformity issued by the manufacturer, which confirmed fulfilment of the EU rules. Then CE mark could have been placed on the package. Now, however, in order to have the mark placed on the product, the so-called declaration of performance has to be issued.
What is the new declaration to consist in? It has to comprise of a description of product’s features and the rules of its use on the basis of reliable data. Consequently, declaring is not sufficient, but appropriate technical testing has to be done to confirm the properties of the product. By dint of this a consumer will have more information about a given material.
These are pieces of information about a product’s performance characteristics, for instance, about strength of brick, or about its absorbability. Such measured, counted and researched parameters will show the real performance characteristics of a given product – explains Ryszard Kowalski, the President of the Association of Employers-Manufacturers of Materials for Building Industry.
Higher costs for manufacturers and importers are related with a necessity of adding to a product a new documentation. There is also a problem with already made materials, which are in warehouses, because it is necessary to change their packages. It may result in deepening the problems of building industry.
Fulfilment of this purely bureaucratic requirement will cause a necessity of changing documents, and in extreme cases throwing away hundreds of thousands of loose materials packages and repacking – says Ryszard Kowalski.
According to the expert, the rules concerning building materials in the European Union are not homogenous, and consequently particular countries may allow their own interpretation.
I hope that Polish authorities will rethink the issue and will not demand from manufacturers purely bureaucratic fulfillment of regulation’s requirements, not to mention the interpretation of this regulation. There are countries, in which administration simply concluded an agreement that they will not demand it for some time. They are waiting for it to change naturally – comments Ryszard Kowalski.