If not quite exasperated, Thorsten Arnhold is at least rueful about what the latest EU Atex directives have meant to his company.

This is not really surprising given his role as Director of Marketing and Product Management at R Stahl, a company whose products are particularly affected by these new directives.

"It's a very expensive process - it cost our company alone E3 million to implement. But in my opinion the benefits for the customer, especially in highly developed countries such as the UK and Germany which have had high safety standards in place for a long time, are only minor. This is just typical of what is happening in the EU right now."

For Arnhold this is yet another reminder of how much better things could and, indeed, should be. Arnhold spends many months of every year travelling to and from meetings at which experts put together suggestions that are ultimately forwarded to the EU committees responsible for drawing up new directives and other regulations.

Arnhold's complaint is that, when published, final regulations are often only distantly related to the original suggestions. Even worse, they often have a standalone quality - as if they were not related to, or influenced by, existing regulations.

"The new safety integrated level (SIL) regulations are the latest example of what I mean," he says. "They require evaluation and certification by yet another independent organisation. This is on top of the ATEX audit that is required in the European Community already. We now joke that there is hardly a day in the year when we don't have the auditors in. But it's not a joke because it takes up a lot of time, costs a lot of money and I'm really not sure what the positive benefits are for us."

For Arnhold, the solution to this problem is quite straightforward - bring all the audits together into one or two annual plant visits. It's so obvious that last year he suggested this course of action to the German national inspection body Physikalisch Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) while it was carrying out R Stahl's Atex audit.

"I pointed out that they could do an ISO9000 certification audit at the same time because it's 98percent the same procedure. But PTB said that under the regulations that audit has to be carried out by a separate auditor."

It is this fragmentation, with so many organisations involved and so little overall general coordination, that he finds galling. "The ISO9000 series of standards were designed, published and promoted to give us a basis for all the directives that have followed in the last ten years and to make the work for the manufacturers easier. These were two of the main reasons for its creation in the first place. Those original intentions simply haven't worked well enough. Sometimes it is just an advertising tool now."

Not surprisingly, he feels that the process of generating new regulations is fraught with difficulties right from the start. Notified bodies - those organisations responsible for the inspection and certification activities - might submit very detailed suggestions about how a potential new directive and standard should be applied and enforced.

At the same time, in their submissions, trade bodies might suggest that nothing needs to be changed at all because existing legislation does the job. Starting with this huge divergence of views, a compromise has to be reached.

Worse is to come. What begin as imperfect directives are then more than imperfectly enforced. While Arnhold feels that enforcement in Germany is not a great problem, he is extremely concerned about the extremes found across Europe. At one end there is UK-style enforcement, which he describes as 'sometimes more than necessary'. At the other end of the scale are those other European states, which, he says, 'do almost nothing'.

"This is not good for competition within the EU, but a big problem is that there is no Europe-wide organisation to police these differences. We know that there are lots of products on the markets that don't meet the standards, but they have the certificate. There is no way to fight this at the moment. The notified (certification) bodies are only responsible for the product test and the surveillance audits of the quality management systems. If you query a certificate from another notified body or a bad quality but certified product, you can only 'talk to Brussels'. But who do you talk to? Even I wouldn't know who to call. We don't have a level playing field now and this problem is only going to get worse with the new members of the community. There isn't an notified body anywhere in the Baltic states, for example."

A lesser man might find such frustrations hard to bear, but Arnhold stoically maintains his membership of the three 'maintenance teams' working on new International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standards - general requirements for electrical explosion protection, increased safety and zone II. The IEC is the leading global organisation that prepares and publishes international standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies.

His main concern here is that more manufacturers should send people to maintenance team meetings. At the moment they are top heavy with people from testing bodies and government departments. "Success depends on getting people from industry to attend. But industry often doesn't want to invest the time and money involved. Then when the standard is published they complain. You can't have it both ways," he says wryly.

Worldwide harmonisation

Although Europe is struggling to harmonise standards and enforcement over such a wide area, Arnhold believes that future success lies in worldwide harmonisation.
It's not a paradox. In his own specialist area of explosion protection, he believes that worldwide IEC regulations will adopt the best bits of both the European and US regulations. "The Americans are very pragmatic and don't want too much bureaucracy. I think this in turn will eventually lead to parts of some regulations being replaced by more pragmatic solutions."

A first step is the parallel voting procedure which reduces the number of IEC meetings needed to create and maintain international standards. Once this has happened, there are no further meetings necessary on a European level.

"Since the US accepted the IEC zone classification for hazardous areas in their National Electrical Code1996 they have become great enthusiasts for such co-operation," he noted.

"Once the Americans realised that many IEC electrical solutions were both cheaper and more flexible than their own they started getting involved. Now Americans chair 80percent of all the maintenance teams. I have no problem with this - they are very intelligent people and together we have worked up some very good compromises."

The current IEC Ex Scheme to get one explosion protection certificate that is accepted worldwide is step down this road.

However, and there always seems to be a however when talking about EU directives, China's interest in the IEC Ex Scheme activities is growing rapidly too. At a recent meeting in Budapest the US and China sent the biggest delegations.

Arnhold points to two challenges that this poses. Firstly, it is dangerous for EU manufacturers because it means that Asian companies could sell certified goods into the EU: "It's no longer just a one-way street."

Secondly, it has to be borne in mind that the Asians are very good at copying technology. At a trade show in Beijing two years ago, Arnhold was amazed at how many copies of R Stahl products were on offer. Back in Germany, he asked how the notified bodies would respond if asked to test such a copy. "We enforce the safety rules, not the competition rules," was the response.

"There's no doubt that worldwide harmonisation opens up many new markets, but we in Europe have to remember that it creates very many new challenges too."

And in the meantime, Arnhold carries on coping with the very many challenges that the EU keeps springing on European industry.