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Dr Melanie King, Loughborough University

My personal website showcasing my research and developments

EU Battery Regs (1): The battery information obligations on economic operators

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The information in this post is now superceded.

NOTE – this blog post relates to a 2023 reserach project which was analysing the evolving EU Batteries Regulation.

The EU is soon to adopt new regulations for batteries and battery waste. These place new information requirements on a range of economic operators, who place battery products “on the market” or “into service”, to make available a range of battery-related information points via a QR smart labels, battery passports, and via the EU’s proposed Electronic Exchange System (sometimes called the ‘European Dataspace for Batteries’). While these three ‘systems’ are presented separately in Articles 13, 64 and 65 of COM/2020/798, in practice their integration and overlapping functions mean that these cannot be understood in isolation from each other.

Different information is required dependent on the type of battery. As a general rule:

Clicking on the above links will take you to pages explaining the detailed information requirements for each system.

All economic operators, who place battery products “on the market” or “into service”, have a regulatory obligation to develop or commission information systems that deliver the necessary information to the necessary stakeholders. But all organisations in the manufacturing ecosystem will have a some responsibility for supplying information. We’ve attempted to show this in the figure below, that synthesizes the different components of a battery information ecosystem, as inferred by the regulations:

We hope that this information is useful to build awareness of the regulations. However, we present this information (January 2023) without guarantee to its accuracy, given the transient nature of the EU regulatory development process, and the complexity of the regulations. Those seeking to understand the regulations in more detail are encouraged to read the original commission text and parliamentary amendments in more detail.

Regulatory Background

This European Regulation exists within a process of three stages and three sets of actors:

  • The European Commission (the EU’s politically independent executive arm) is responsible for drawing up proposals for new European legislation, and implementing these once agreed upon by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU. The European Commission (EC) first published its Proposal for a REGULATION OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL concerning batteries and waste batteries, repealing Directive 2006/66/EC and amending Regulation (EU) No 2019/1020 (source), on 10 December 2020.
  • The European Parliament (the EU’s elected governing body) is the EU’s lawmaking arm, responsible for passing EU laws, together with the Council of the EU. On 10 March 2022 (source), the European Parliament agreed to the council proposal, with amendments (source), principally to raise the level of ambition in the legislation.
  • The Council of the EU contains representatives of each member state in the EU, responsible for committing their respective governments to any agreed actions in EU meetings, including the adoption of new laws. On 9 December 2022 (source) it was announced that inter-institutional negotiations, between the commission, parliament, and the council of the EU had resulted in provisional agreement, that must now be formally approved by the commission and parliament.

The above information is based upon the amendments made by the European Parliament, as the content of the third-stage negotiations has not yet been published. Progress of this regulation can be tracked via the EU’s legislative train and procedure file pages.