Regulation (EU) 2017/1369 aims to promote the uptake of more efficient energy-related products, repealing Directive 2010/30/EU and the first Directive 92/75/EEC. This regulation that will enter into force at the beginning of 2020 will allow a rescaling of the current energy label of products. The rescaling will create many difficulties amongst consumers as well as amongst market actors (retailers, distributors and manufacturers). BELT has the objective to facilitate the transition period informing and supporting all stakeholders and to reduce to a minimum errors at all levels of the value chain from manufacturer to consumer. Furthermore BELT aims to promote the new label on two key levels: primarily raising awareness and informing consumers (citizens but also public and business procurement staff) thus allowing them to make better and more informed choices; and secondly helping manufacturers, distributors and retailers to adapt their practices and use the rescaled labels to push innovation in designing energy efficiency products. BELT will create targeted communication campaigns for all stakeholders, it will organise workshops and events and it will develop training activities. The excellence of BELT relies on its multidisciplinary expertise and geographical coverage able to reach 20,000,000 million European consumers and 5000 market actors. BELT goes beyond its five primary target countries (Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium and Slovenia). It is going to have in fact an impact in other four secondary target countries (Ireland, Croatia, Greece and Lithuania) and at European level thanks to the support of retailers and manufacturers’ associations as well as members of the consortium as BEUC and ICLEI.

CLEAR 2.0 - enabling Consumers to be Engage with and Adopt Renewable energy technologies. 2.0- is a new project that builds on the learning of an EU funded project IEE13-588 CLEAR. It will actively guide consumers in the energy market and enable them to be more aware, active players, save money and easily become "prosumers". The Consortium will accompany consumers through all the stages leading to the purchase and the correct efficient use of domestic renewable and low-carbon energy technologies. The CLEAR 2.0 project will focus as well on changing behaviour and optimisation of existing installations. The main needs of a home, including heating/cooling and electricity production (including storage and monitoring systems) will be addressed through a consumer-centric approach and actions that will lead to the changing behaviour and form collective consumer groups to support the purchase of renewable energy technologies such as photovoltaic installations, batteries, pellet stoves and heat pumps for heating and cooling. The three major barriers (awareness, behaviour and price) to the investment in RES will be directly addressed, having as a result a higher consumer engagement. BEUC and the consumers organisation focus their advocacy work on relevant legislative developments in order to overcome existing barriers and facilitate consumers’ participation in the energy market. It will distil policy lessons to create a favourable and stable national and European policy framework for the benefit of all European consumers.

Waste production and resource use is increasing for electric and electronic consumer products. At the same time many critical materials cannot be recovered in recycling processes. Therefore a promising strategy would be to lengthen the lifetimes of these products in order to get closer to a Circular Economy. The project PROMPT is going to support the development of more durable and longer lasting products by lowering the asymmetry of information between consumer and manufacturer and thereby to allow consumers to make better choices. This is achieved by the development of an integral testing programme for electric and electronic consumer products that takes into account the main key issues of product failures and premature obsolescence: • Product durability and reliability • Adaptability, upgradability, and reparability • User behaviour and market PROMPT takes a multi-stakeholder approach by including different consumer, test, repair and research organisations in the consortium who will carry out the work. Consequently, results will be achieved that are viable for different stakeholders and independent from manufacturers. With the help of an Advisory Board, additional stakeholder input will be gathered. The board will consist of experts from industry, retail, design, environmental, science and consumer sectors. A baseline of research will be established by collecting empirical data on technical issues, design shortcomings, market obstacles and replacement causes for premature obsolescence. These results will give input to the development of a range of specific testing methods addressing the three fields of issues outlined above. The results will be synthesized in an integral testing programme for premature obsolescence that will be validated and benchmarked through test cases. Results will be analysed and prepared to give validated input to standardisation, product design, consumer communication and policy recommendations.