IEC 62474 – Material Declaration for Products of and for the Electrotechnical Industry

Industry Regulations like RoHS, WEEE, REACH, Prop 65 and Conflict Minerals have sprouted from product chemical composition management. Collecting material declaration has thus become the foundation of compliance management in the electrical and electronics industry. Multiple compliance regulations across the globe today, drive manufacturers in tracking and managing this information on a continuous basis.

The electro-technical industry and various companies associated with it make use of material declarations for tracking and declaring specific information regarding the material composition of the various final products. The new international standard of IEC 62474 aims to harmonize the requirements of various members within the supply chain and also improve economic efficiencies.

The role of new standard IEC 62474

To synchronize the requirements across the industry and to reduce the cost of data management, IEC has come up with a new standard called IEC 62474. This standard can act as the basis of data exchange for material composition data and provide material declarations.

IEC 62474 specifies: Material declaration content, including terms of substances, substance class and material groups. It also provides data standards for software developers to create applications to manage this data.

Information offered in the IEC 62474 database

There are four types of information provided in the IEC 62474 database

• Declarable substance groups and declarable substances: This section contains substances and substance groups with information like “reportable applications”, “reporting threshold” and “reporting requirement”
• Reference Substances: This section contains an indicative list of specific substances that are included with in the substance group. This list is an informative list and not an exhaustive one.
• Material classes: This list includes designated material classes that need to be included in material declarations, if contained in the product.
• XML schema for materials declaration: In this category an XML schema and developer table is available for download.

Getting material declarations for the entire product Bill of Material is an important activity in the compliance effort of most companies. IEC 62474 is a step forward to support the mammoth task undertaken by companies every year to conform to the Environmental Compliances.

What are the substances that should be declared?

The substances that form a part of the products manufactured in the electrical and electronics industry should be mentioned or declared in this material declaration file as set according to the IEC 62474 standard. The manufacturing chemicals or substances that react and form other chemicals and/or otherwise do not continue to remain within the product are not needed to be reported. Nevertheless, in certain cases, a chemical reaction once started may not reach completion and traces of some unreacted quantities of any intermediate chemical substance may continue to remain within the finished product. Such chemicals must be reported at all circumstances. If the intermediate chemicals are presented in the declarable substances list of IEC 62474 and quantity of this component remains above reporting threshold in final product, then that needs to be included in the report. If that is not done, then the material declaration is not going to be in compliance with the requirements of IEC 62474.

A user may simply state that their firm within the electrotechnical industry is compliance with the norms as presented by the IEC 62474 provided they have included in the list all the reportable substances and the varied substance groups which are present within the final product in quantities above the final reporting threshold.