EPEAT
ELECTRONICS
CONFIDENCE HIGH · ANALYSIS ONLY, NOT AN AUDIT OR CERTIFICATION
Our read
EPEAT is the broadest of the electronics marks, and by a wide margin. Its 2025 criteria set reaches climate, circularity, chemicals and supply chain in one structure, and much of the demanding content sits in the Required tier rather than the optional points: a disclosed product carbon footprint, a corporate GHG inventory, a science-aligned reduction target, minimum recycled plastic content, design for repair, published repair information, take-back, and social audits of high-risk suppliers. Bronze is therefore not a low bar. GEC also publishes named Outcomes Reports every monitoring round, which almost no private scheme does. The limit is what the evidence is made of. Conformity assurance is Documentation Review: an accredited body reads paperwork the manufacturer submits, and nothing in the system requires it to visit a factory. Some monitoring rounds review only publicly available information. GEC also owns one of the approved assurance bodies while owning the standard and the registry, a conflict it discloses itself. Read EPEAT as a strong statement about a manufacturer's disclosed management systems and a specific model's design attributes, not as evidence anyone verified conditions in the supply chain.
What it covers
- A public registry of individual product models across Computers and Displays, Imaging Equipment, Mobile Phones, Servers, Televisions, Network Equipment and photovoltaic modules and inverters
- Three tiers on a single point structure: Bronze meets all Required Criteria, Silver adds at least 50 percent of available optional points, Gold at least 75 percent, with no rounding up
- Climate: required product carbon footprint disclosure with assurance, required corporate GHG inventory, required manufacturer GHG reduction target aligned with climate science, required renewable electricity use, required conformance with the applicable ENERGY STAR criteria
- Circularity: required minimum post-consumer recycled or biobased plastic content, required recycled metal content disclosure, required design for repair and reuse, required availability of repair services and replacement components, required publicly available repair information, required take-back service and end-of-life processing to a qualified recycling standard, required packaging content and recyclability
- Product longevity: required firmware or operating-system update commitment, required durability testing for notebooks, tablets and phones, required long-life rechargeable battery and battery software, required limits on software parts pairing
- Chemicals: restrictions on named hazardous substances including PFAS, lead, cadmium and beryllium
- Supply chain: required manufacturer labour and occupational health and safety commitment with performance audits, required supplier code of conduct, required social responsibility performance audits of high-risk suppliers, required certified environmental management system, required conflict minerals (3TG) due diligence disclosure and sourcing from validated smelters and refiners
- Conformity assurance by GEC-approved Conformity Assurance Bodies holding independent accreditation to ISO/IEC 17020 or ISO/IEC 17065, with annual GEC audit of every CAB
- Annual Continuous Monitoring surveillance of all registered products, with published Outcomes Reports naming manufacturers found non-conformant
What it leaves out
Not a criticism of the scheme. A standard is a scope, and this is where this one ends.
- Not a chain-of-custody or materials-provenance standard: no traceability of any material back to mine, forest or field, and no certified custody chain for the recycled content it requires to be disclosed
- Conflict minerals criteria require disclosure of the due-diligence process and sourcing from validated smelters, not verified mine of origin for the material in the specific product
- Conformity assurance is Documentation Review of evidence supplied by the manufacturer; the standard does not require the CAB to audit the manufacturer's own or its suppliers' facilities
- Social responsibility criteria require the manufacturer to run an audit programme; GEC and its CABs do not themselves audit factories or interview workers
- Some Continuous Monitoring rounds are Level 0 investigations, reviewing only publicly available information rather than product or facility evidence
- Only covers IT, electronics and photovoltaic product categories; nothing in food, beverage, apparel, household or personal care, so the mark is unavailable to most consumer brands
- Tier does not describe content: Gold is 75 percent of available optional points, and two Gold products may have selected entirely different optional criteria
- The registry does not disclose which of the two conformity assurance pathways a product used
- No requirement on total product volumes, absolute corporate emissions reduction achieved, or business-model impact; the unit of assessment is the model
- Legacy EPEAT 1.0 registrations built on the older IEEE 1680 and NSF standards remain valid on the registry until 1 July 2027, so an EPEAT badge today may rest on the weaker prior criteria set
The scheme
| Issued by | Global Electronics Council (GEC), a non-profit that owns and operates the EPEAT registry and criteria; criteria developed by voluntary consensus technical committees facilitated with NSF International, under ISO 14024 Type 1 ecolabel principles |
|---|---|
| Where it applies | Global. Manufacturers designate the countries in which a registered product is offered, and some criteria (take-back, spare parts availability) are assessed per designated country. Heavily used in United States federal procurement, which mandates EPEAT for covered IT purchases. |
| Audit and renewal | No fixed certificate term. Initial Documentation Review results remain valid until GEC implements a Full Criteria Revision, at which point review must be performed again. All registered products are subject to Continuous Monitoring annually, and manufacturers on the Certification Pathway undergo an Annual Renewal review of corporate-level annual disclosure criteria. |
| Cost | Not published. GEC charges an annual EPEAT Participating Manufacturer Fee per product category, which covers an unlimited number of registered products in that category, plus trademark fees for use of the mark; CABs charge the manufacturer directly for Documentation Review and Continuous Monitoring at commercially set rates GEC states it does not control. No fee schedule is published. |
What we read
EPEAT Policy Manual P65 Issue 2 Rev 5, published 15 February 2026, effective 1 July 2026; EPEAT-CCM-2023 Climate Change Mitigation Criteria, 16 May 2023 with interim corrections 15 May 2025; EPEAT-SUR-2025 Sustainable Use of Resources Criteria, 2025; EPEAT-RSC-2025 Responsible Supply Chains Criteria, 20 February 2025; EPEAT-COC-2025 Chemicals of Concern Criteria, 2025; Continuous Monitoring Outcomes Report CD-2025-02, 14 December 2025
- tier thresholds — EPEAT Bronze products meet all Required Criteria... EPEAT Silver products meet all Required Criteria and a minimum of 50% of the available points for Optional Criteria... EPEAT Gold products meet all Required Criteria and a minimum of 75%
- no rounding up between tiers — if a product achieves 49.4% of the Optional Criteria, that number is not rounded up to 50%, and that product would achieve EPEAT Bronze, not Silver
- conformity assurance is documentation review of manufacturer-supplied evidence — Documentation Review is the process by which a GEC-approved CAB assesses documentation provided by a Participating Manufacturer to determine if the evidence supports conformance with EPEAT Criteria.
- pathway used is not disclosed on the registry — EPEAT registered products are not publicly identified in the EPEAT Registry as being assessed through Certification or Verification
- published outcomes reports naming non-conformant manufacturers — the EPEAT Program publishes an Outcomes Report at the conclusion of each Round to summarize the activities conducted and to identify the products and Participating Manufacturers that received nonconformances
- removal from registry on failure to correct — Should a Participating Manufacturer fail to make the necessary corrections, the products will be removed from the Registry by either the Participating Manufacturer's CAB or the EPEAT Program.
- GEC owns one of the approved conformity assurance bodies and discloses it as a conflict — GEC CAB and independence: GEC recognizes that as EPEAT Program owner and operator of a [CAB]... GEC CAB is subject to the same level of scrutiny
- CAB accreditation basis — maintain independent accreditation to ISO/IEC 17020 or ISO/IEC 17065 to demonstrate that they have the necessary technical competencies
- continuous monitoring applies to all products at any time and correction window — all registered products in all product categories from all participating companies are subject to Continuous Monitoring at any time... participating companies have 30 days to correct them. If they are unable to, the affected products are re
- required climate criteria — Required - Product carbon footprint disclosure and assurance... Required - Corporate GHG inventory... Required - Manufacturer GHG reduction target aligned with climate science... Required - Manufacturer use of renewable electricity... Requi
- required supply chain criteria — Required - Social responsibility performance audits of high-risk suppliers... Required - Sourcing 3TG minerals from responsible smelters/ refiners validated by approved programs
- required circularity criteria — Required - Minimum post-consumer reused or recycled and/or biobased plastic content... Required - Design for repair and reuse... Required - Availability of repair services and replacement components... Required - Provision of product take-b
- monitoring rounds can review only publicly available information, and recent round outcomes — Round CD-2025-02 used Level 0 Investigations, which involve reviewing publicly available information... 59 investigations completed... 37 decisions of Conformance... 22 decisions of Inconclusive
- EPEAT 1.0 registry deadline and criteria category list — EPEAT 1.0 documents exist for legacy products across multiple categories, with a Registry deadline of July 1, 2027
What we could not establish
Read from GEC's own Policy Manual and four current criteria documents, so scope, tier mechanics, conformity architecture and enforcement are well grounded. Three gaps. First, the EPEAT Conformity Assurance Implementation Manual (P66), which holds the operational detail on how many criteria and products are sampled in each round and how depth Levels 0 through 3 are assigned, is referenced throughout the Policy Manual but was not located as a public document; the depth of any given round is therefore stated only from what the published Round Plans and Outcomes Reports show. Second, no fee amounts are published for either the GEC Participating Manufacturer Fee or CAB services, so cost range could not be quantified. Third, the criticism that manufacturer self-declaration carries much of the weight is stated here from GEC's own description of Documentation Review as assessment of manufacturer-supplied documentation, plus GEC's own disclosed conflict of interest in operating a CAB. Widely repeated secondary accounts of the 2012 dispute in which Apple withdrew from and rejoined the registry, and iFixit's argument that a glued-battery notebook nonetheless earned EPEAT Gold under EPEAT 1.0, were not verified against a primary source in this pass and are therefore not asserted above; readers should note that EPEAT 1.0 repairability criteria were materially weaker than the EPEAT-SUR-2025 set read here. Independence is scored 3 rather than 4 because the accreditation route is genuinely third-party but the assessment method is desk review of applicant paperwork, which the brief's anchors place lower.
If you hold this certification, it is already on your record. What a buyer cannot see there yet is the evidence behind the parts this standard does not reach.