Activities in progress of CEN TC 189 on “Geosynthetics”

May 11, 2020

CEN TC 189, the technical committee for the European Standardization on Geosynthetics chaired by Daniele Cazzuffi , organized a convenor and leadership meeting on Friday 24 January 2020 at the EDANA premises in Brussels. Aim of this meeting was to coordinate the work among the different six working groups and the “ad hoc” group on mandate and sustainability and also to plan the 2020 annual meeting, which was planned to be held in Geneva, Switzerland, from 31 March – 2 April 2020, in conjunction with the exhibition Index 2020 www.indexnonwovens.com

During the meeting at EDANA in Brussels there were several topics discussed. One major issue was the topic of the non-citation of the candidate harmonized standards developed by WG 6 and published in 2018. CEN TC 189 followed the guidelines as issued by CEN when preparing the different standards. When they were published by CEN, the standards were forwarded to the EC for citation in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU). By this time the requirements of the EC for accepting the standards had changed and the standards were refused. CEN TC 189 was informed in May 2019 about the reasons for this refusal, but after a discussion with both CEN and the EC no solution could be found to resolve the issues the EC had brought forward. Further developments in 2019 made it clear that the current way for preparing candidate harmonized standards used by CEN TC 189 (and many other CEN TCs) would not meet the new criteria of the EC. Since the candidate harmonized standards have been a central part of the CEN TC 189 work program the last decades, the CEN TC 189 leadership wanted to evaluate the situation and propose a new way forward for the CEN TC 189 work program.

During the meeting there was a very constructive discussion on this topic and a proposal was formulated and circulated to the TC. The aim was to discuss this proposal during dedicated meeting of all working groups on the first day of the Geneva meetings.

Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 emergency, the CEN TC 189 meeting from 31 March to 2 April 2020 was postponed to a later date. The new date will be carefully evaluated during the summer, taking into account on the development of the COVID-19 crisis.

Shortly after the CEN TC 189 leadership meeting in Brussels, Andrew Leech, the WG 3 convenor, announced that he would resign from his duties as convenor and BSI nominated Rob Marshall as new WG 3 convenor, which was recently confirmed by electronic balloting in CEN TC 189.