Reasons for Proposal and Major Provisions

Following the increased urgency of greenhouse gas reduction, such as the Special Report on 1.5 degree warming announced at the 48th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) General Assembly in 2018, the demand for quantitative environmental assessment of products and the movement for trade regulation using it are strengthening recently, especially in the European Union.

Among them, the European Union reveals plans to regulate CO2 emissions from batteries and automobiles by using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). If the CO2 emission regulation through LCA is strengthened, Korean exporters should also be prepared to evaluate CO2 emissions emitted in the entire process of raw material collection/processing, production, assembly, sales, use, and disposal.

However, a life cycle inventory (LCI) database is required to calculate and efficiently reduce LCA-based emissions. This is a step-by-step assessment of CO2 emissions from the entire process; currently, Korea's LCI database is limited to some materials and products used for environmental certification, and the list is not being updated either.

Therefore, this amendment aims to encourage the Government to develop the “environmental assessment list (i.e., LCI)” to respond to increased international regulation and establish new provisions calling for the provision of individual lists each company holds and specify that the eco-label certification system operated based on these shall also be upgraded to meet international standards (Article 24-3 newly inserted).