To help ensure quality, manufacturers often seek to have their product certified by a third-party organization. These organizations, called Certification Bodies, play a critical role in ensuring electrical safety and reporting accurate energy use levels for countless products sold worldwide. Ecolabels reporting on the environmental preferability of a product also rely on certification bodies to verify that the product meets the criteria outlined in the ecolabel schemes and standards. International consensus on how certification bodies perform conformity assessments is outlined in the 2012 standard ISO/IEC 17065.
But how is the marketplace assured that the Certification Bodies are operating properly? Accreditation Bodies, such as the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), assess Certification Bodies to check for conformance to ISO/IEC 17065. Many Certification Bodies seek out accreditation as a way to add further credibility to their operations.
Recent Projects
Assessing Certification Bodies for ANSI
Eileen Ekstrom is working with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as a technical assessor to determine certification bodies’ conformance to ISO 17065 and relevant technical standards and schemes. Since 2014, Eileen has assessed certification bodies that verify Environmental Product Declarations and also certification bodies that grant ecolabels. As a technical assessor, Eileen performs document reviews, quickly becoming adept at comprehending the organization’s processes, procedures, and technical requirements for certification. She reviews a sampling of certificates issued to ensure that all procedural and technical requirements have been fulfilled. She interviews key staff members during web-based conference meetings or on-site meetings and summarizes the findings to the certification body in meetings and reports. When accreditation is being voted on by the accreditation committee within ANSI, Eileen helps provide details about the assessment to the committee and helps advocate for accreditation based on the assessment results.