ISO/TC 313 Packaging machinery: work in progress

Regulatory developments in the packaging and wrapping machinery sector: historical excursus and updates, in view of the meeting of the ISO 313 Technical Committee scheduled for October 2019.

Since 1989, in the field of packaging machines, 10 technical standards called EN 415 have been produced which have covered all types of machines.
 
Standards in the making
Currently the five oldest standards are being revised to keep them up to date with technological developments over the last thirty years.
In this period of time, packaging and packaging machines have in fact largely changed their structure and technical solutions, moving from mechanical kinematics and single motorizations to robotic systems, with multiple motorization and automated command/control systems through intensive use of electronics.
The machine-operator interface has also undergone many changes: the machines are set up for remote connections and the maintenance procedures both on the hardware and software parts are very different from the past.
In parallel, the reference markets for the major manufacturers have been changing: from domestic or mainly European community markets, we have reached the current situation, in which exports to the rest of the world are decidedly prevalent.
In this context the opportuneness of bringing the normative activity from the European tables to the international level managed by the ISO, which is precisely the world standardization body, seemed evident.
 
Open comparison between the various regulatory approaches
On the initiative of UCIMA, the ISO 313 Technical Committee was set up (see box) joined, in addition to the main European countries by the USA, China, Japan; other countries will most likely join soon.
The secretariat is managed by the Italian standardization body UNI, which has also been in charge of the European secretariat for thirty years; the presidents of the two European and world committees are also Italian.
The ISO technical committee held its first meeting at the end of 2018 and a second meeting is scheduled for next October. In parallel, a working group was set up to develop the first ISO standard, which concerns the "general requirements for packaging machines".
The first meeting served above all to compare European and American regulatory approaches. Europe has the technical standard EN 415-10 and the USA ANSI B155-5: both relating to "general requirements", differ not so much for the technical measures as for the way they are formulated.
The European standard tends to be more deterministic while the US standard mainly directs manufacturers to make accurate risk assessments and puts the emphasis on collaborative relationships between the manufacturer and user of the machines, on the training of users and on the hygiene requirements of machines for the food and pharmaceutical industry which, within the European framework, are currently covered by specific rules.
Over the next two to three years, the maximum effort will be made on this project to make a world standard available, appropriate to the state of the art and above all fully shared and agreed upon, so that it can be accepted without exception by the largest possible number of market players.
A more precise picture of the orientations of the other countries present at the working table will already emerge from the next meeting in October.

Paolo Capelli
Coordinator of regulatory activities at the European Committee for Standardization in the field of packaging machines, as well as UNI group coordinator and member of the Safety Commission.

Common standards to avoid conflicts
Last April, the ISO - International Organization for Standardization, in fact created the ISO/TC 313 Packaging Machinery Group, approving the proposal presented by Italy for the creation of a new international working group, to be entrusted with the task of developing a series of rulings for the standardization of packaging machines and systems, with particular reference to safety, terminology, classification, design, efficiency and availability. Underlying the "operational" task, is the intent to "find a common language" to reduce potential disputes, improve the transparency of negotiations and, ultimately, share economic benefits thanks to the removal of obstacles. But what are the major problems for companies producing packaging technology that export to foreign markets? Indeed the most difficult obstacles to overcome are precisely associated with the quantity of non uniform technical rules, the presence of many national certifications and, last but not least, to the customer's corporate norms and standards, often different from each other. This does not enable homogeneous planning and leads to  the strong penalization of some machine builders, forced into an excessive effort to adapt to the multiplicity of technical standards.
The  working group will try to find a solution to all these problems by proposing univocal international standards, which will not only enable the raising of the quality standards but will also favour both the customer companies as well as packaging machine manufacturers.