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Lighting Product Compliance
 Monitoring, verification and enforcement (MVE), is about ensuring product compliance. MVE has been gaining prominence as countries around the world work to establish standards and guidelines for energy efficient lighting and other products.
MVE is especially critical to maximize the potential for energy savings, emissions reduction, and the effective phase-out of the most inefficient lighting products. Achieving high rates of compliance has overall benefits for all stakeholders:
- Industry can operate in a fair market that encourages investment and technological innovation;
- Consumers get reduced energy costs, quality products, fair product prices;
- Governments achieve key environmental and economic policy objectives.
Without the existence of compliance regimes, non-compliant products can compromise the effectiveness of programmes and policies. For example, the results of recent international and regional surveys indicate that a savings of over 4,000TWh, equivalent to over 2,000 MtCO2, may be lost due to non-compliant products being sold between 2010 and 2030, through all energy efficient programmes on a global basis. These studies also demonstrate the need to improve MVE structures and practices in most countries and that investment in these procedures has been shown to be highly cost-effective.
Compliance activities complement standards and labeling programs and ensure that they achieve successful results. MVE actvities encompass a wide range of actions:
- Monitoring processes to check product conformance and to measure the success of programmes in the market;
- Verification processes to confirm declarations of conformance by product suppliers, typically by independent third parties;
- Enforcement processes to take actions against suppliers of non-compliant products. Enforcement requires rigorous and transparent monitoring and verification processes.
Successful MVE implementation requires long-term policy commitment, investments in training and support at each implementation level, as well as enhanced collaboration with regulators, public authorities acting in cooperation with industry, NGOs and others.
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