Construction Fixings

By Barbara Sorgato, secretary general, European Consortium of Anchor Producers

Before getting to the subject of the title, I feel I have to do a quick summary of the previous articles on this topic – ‘Repetita  juvant – repeating does good’, as the Romans would say, and I agree that it helps to continue to raise awareness.

The proposal for the new Construction Products Regulation is in the pipeline, with the final text expected by the end of the year. At the same time, the Member States, and the European Commission, are working to unblock the publication of the standards in the OJEU – The Official Journal of the European Union.

This work is called ‘CPR Acquis’ and can be followed from the European Commission website¹. Here are the main concepts, explained with the words of the European Commission: ‘Simultaneously with the impact assessment and the preparation of a new CPR proposal, the Commission initiated dialogue with EU countries to plan for and organise future work to adapt the acquis (i.e the harmonised standards, the European assessment documents and the legal acts of the European Commission). Adapting the acquis is necessary in any case and irrespective of the final form the revision may take.

The original process for delivering harmonised technical specifications under the Construction Products Directive (CPD), and continued under the Construction Products Regulation (CPR), lacks coherence. The evaluation of the CPR also states that the current process of developing technical specifications is underperforming.

Existing harmonised technical specifications are mostly incomplete as they are CPD-based and fail to address the specificities of the CPR. To a large extent, they do not even cover most of the basic work requirements (BWR) set out in Annex I to the CPR. As a result, several product groups that could benefit from harmonisation are not covered at all, and those that are have incomplete coverage’.

What is our role in all this? Stakeholders are ‘invited to contribute’ to the process but, in fact, basically, the adaptation of the Acquis goes through Member States. The goal is to ensure that the legal basis for the standards contains all products and related characteristics that will be covered in the standards. The industry can suggest, but it is the Member States that have to vote. 

For decades we were contributing at European level to the drafting of technical specifications on post-installed fasteners. But now, in the corridors of the European Commission, engineers who were used to dealing with the technical specifications of construction products shake their heads and feel lost, hissing between their teeth “lawyers, lawyers”. It is indeed the Member States’ lawyers and law makers that play the main rule now, and they should really play it well, to ensure a smooth recovery of standardisation in our sector. They have to ensure that a Member State should no longer be allowed to block a European standard because it does not contain or is incompatible with its national legal bases. 

This blockage has unfortunately been going on for years and it is one of the aspects of the impasse of standardisation in the construction sector. One wonders where the Member States were when these legal bases were debated and voted on by their leaders in the past decades. Anyway, here we are, and once the new legal bases are ready, they will form the legal basis for harmonised standards in future years. However, because harmonised standard must be compatible with their legal basis, these should be ideally written before the standards – which was proven to be almost impossible. 

Today we are doing the reverse process. There are many standards that have been technically updated, but which have not been published in the Official Journal of the European Union because they were not compatible with their legal basis – perhaps written still in the last century – and we are trying to update the legal bases partly also according to the new standards.

The challenge faced by regulators and associations that actively participate in the standardisation of their products is to involve and inform their members in order to draw up a list of products and characteristics, as exhaustive as possible, to be delivered to the Member States for their comments and observations. 

The work is demanding, for each product family, which corresponds to an old legal basis (mandate), one needs to take into consideration the harmonised standards published on the OJEU, the non-harmonised standards published as CEN, any drafts under discussion, any national standards, any existing European Assessment Documents (EADs) and everything that is available at a standardisation and/or national legal level and that could be useful to include in the new legal basis. The detail of the discussion covers not only the intended uses, but also the materials, the diameters of the products, in short, everything that uniquely identifies a certain product. Finally, the list of products and their characteristics should be completed and drafted according to a format given by the European Commission.

The work is intertwined with that on the text of the new CPR, and the related discussion is not academic, as we will see now. The new CPR presents challenges for which it seems reasonable to consider moving as many products as possible into the area of standardisation. The challenge is given by the fact that the CPR text makes it clear that the EADs are outside the harmonised zone. However, if, as the CPR draft says, it will still be possible to CE Mark products with an ETA, what does it mean to be or not in the harmonised zone, and what does it imply? It seems that the difference lays in the fact that, in case of EAD-based CE Marking, a Member State can be allowed to add further requirements – e.g national certifications – on top of the CE Marking, which is not the case for CE Marking based on a harmonised standard.

The logic is that EADs, being covered by confidentiality, are not subject of an open European discussion, whilst a standard-based CE Marking is considered to be exhaustive, as the related technical discussion was discussed in European tables accessible to all interested stakeholders, and endorsed by Member States. In one word: harmonised.

This could imply as an example that, in case of an EAD whose seismic requirements do not fully satisfy the Italian requirements, Italy could request manufacturers that want to place their products in the Italian market to have a further seismic certification; similarly, Germany could ask for a Zulassung on top of the EAD-based CE Marking for products that do not fully satisfy German requirements, and so could every Member State. If the final text of the new CPR will keep this approach, manufacturers who invest in ETAs will be exposed to the risk of returning to a national certification system – a system that is particularly penalising for SMEs who want to access the single market. 

Regardless of when and how the market will react to the new CPR, our sector has a priority – a rapid adaptation of the ETA format to the CPR and digitisation needs. This change has not been made so far, even under the current CPR, exposing manufacturers to considerable obstacles and risks, and – let’s face it – to a certain creativity in drawing up the Declaration of Performances, almost none of which in our sector seems to match the legal requirements of the CPR. Why was this change not made? On the one side manufacturers and EOTA like to maintain the status quo and to remain in their comfort zone, on the other side there is an ‘elephant in the room’ that cannot be ignored any longer. It is called Unique Identification Code.

The concept is already present in today’s CPR and is taken up verbatim in the new proposal: Unique Identification Code means that the declared performance of a product must refer ‘to the product that the final user has in his hand’, and not to the whole range of its diameters and possible applications, leaving to the final user the task to extrapolate characteristics from whatever table or graphic. Each single product shall have its own DoP, so requires the CPR. A nightmare for the fasteners sector, which is used to expressing performances in tables that include several diameters and several variations related to installation. 

Having the European Commission confirm that there is no deviation from this concept for our sector, the only way out is through digitalisation, bearing in mind that, with the new CPR, Digital Product Passport, Digital DoP and Declaration of Conformity are coming, a mass of data that will necessarily have to be interchangeable with other databases and data models, e.g BIM.

Producers are required to be aware of this reality, and to organise themselves in order to invest in ‘a common solution’, which will bring them back as soon as possible to a comfort zone. TABs are required to invest to provide their customers with EADs suitable for digital format, namely with EADs with characteristics expressed in a XML file.

Whilst TABs are reluctant to invest time and money in digitalisation, some product families, driven by other sectors of the construction industry, have already started implementing their standards with XML files to allow digital DoPs. This ‘common approach’ is very important for manufacturers, because it prevents the digitalisation of product families from being managed individually by big manufacturers, causing not only the fragmentation and proliferation of solutions at an IT level, and related high costs, but most of all causing dependency from some few IT sector parties. 

For this reason, ECAP members began drafting the XML files of the three most common post-installed anchors (plastic, mechanical and bonded) about 3 years ago, and put the result of their work at disposal of EOTA and other manufacturers. However, to push the TABs to provide this essential service, awareness, participation to the work and the unity of purpose of the whole sector are required. 

Word of mouth among producers is sowing awareness and developing working alliances between similar sectors. The latest initiatives bode well for the creation of a comprehensive working table for the development of digital files for the post-installed fasteners sector. 

¹https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/sectors/construction/construction-products-regulation-cpr/acquis_en