ANACAM MAGAZINE - n.1 gennaio | marzo 2021

NORME GLOBAL I D I L U C I A N O FA L E T T O Efesme has always fostered a culture of safety, so as to ensure equal standards worldwide. With this in mind, in 2019, Efesme was among the promoters of the World Elevator and Escalator Federation-WEEF, alongside a number of European, American, Asian and Russian associations. Part of Efesme’s activity takes place outside the European borders. Safe- guarded by Small Business Standards- SBS, Efesme is carefully following the evolution of ISO 8100-1 and ISO 8100- 2 standards, making sure their content adequately protects the interests of SMEs in the elevator industry. In 1983, when there were at least ten safety standards for lifts in the world, the Technical Committee ISO TC 178, “Lifts, escalators and moving walkways”, established the WG4, “Safety requirements and risk analysis”, whose task is comparing the requirements of lifts’ main standards, which are the ones in USA / Canada, Europe and Japan. A careful examination of the two documents, the first for electric lifts and the second for hydraulic lifts, unveiled the differences between the different standards, leading to an agreement over the more appropriate options, case by case, in order to reach a single unanimously shared document. The first result led to the identification of the European standards EN 81- 20 “Safety rules for the construction and installation of lifts - Lifts for transporting people and things - Part 20: Lifts for people and things accompanied by people” and EN 81-50 “Safety rules for lift construction and installation - Checks and tests - Part 50: Design rules, calculations, checks and tests of lift components” as the most appropriate basis on which to insert the necessary modifications and obtain an ISO standard set to recommend worldwide: the future ISO 8100-1 and ISO 8100-2. An attempt was also made to identify the changes brought about by the new standards from the examined national standards, as to align them with the new proposals. Based on this, even the CEN has introduced a series of new requirements in the revision phase of the EN 81- 20 and EN 81-50 standards, new standards that take into account the emergence of a need to expand the technical solutions included in the previous versions of the standards. At the end of the revision of the EN 81-20 and EN 81-50 standards, these documents were submitted to the European Commission to evaluate their suitability for the Official Journal of the European Union, to confirm their conformity with the Lift Directive’s requirements. They were simultaneously sent to the ISO structure to verify their compatibility with the related standardization rules in ISO. This procedure led to numerous changes to the original CENdocuments: the standards were published as ISO 8100-1: 2019 and ISO 8100-2: 2019. Meanwhile, the European Commission has rejected the EN 81-20 and EN 81- 50 standards, as they do not comply with Mandate M / 549, sent to CEN in 2017 with the updated requirements for the preparation of standards for lifts in support of the Lift Directive 2014. / 33 / EU. This refusal by the European Commission urged CEN to make a thorough revision of the two standards EN 81-20 and EN 81-50, simultaneously with the revision of all the lift standards related to them. These activities require a very high commitment from industry experts, therefore the European Commission, in agreement with CEN, have established a three –phase-process for these reviews. The first phase involves a partial revision, limited to the editorial, non- technical aspects, as well as a detailed new version of Annex ZA, which lists all the essential safety requirements of the directive that have been adequately considered in each standard, listing all the individual articles related to them: this is an important point for SMEs. The first phase ends with the publication of the EN 81-20: 2020 and EN 81-50: 2020 standards. The second phase is a revision of lift standards that have been rejected by the Commission, and are partially revised, analogously to the two main standards, whose new references have been included in the updated texts, which are now in the final phase of CEN publication. Concurrently, the drafts of the prEN ISO 8100-1 and prEN ISO 8100- 2 standards are being examined to include all changes resulted from the plentiful negative comments received, many of which directly from the European Commission.The third phase entails the publication of all standards, perhaps, not before the end of 2023: probably being significantly different from the version published by ISO! The primary objective is to improve accessibility and safety of lifts The ISO 8100-1 and ISO 8100-2 standards 10