Differences Between European (CEN) and ISO Standards, 1995 Process & Product Quality Conference Proceedings

G. Youd

Group Adviser Fibrous Raw Materials

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is well known throughout the world and many of the standards in the pulp and paper field are interchangeable with national standards. With the advent of the European Common Market, a new standards organization was born to promote common procedures through the region. This organization is known as “The European Committee for Standardization” or “CEN”. The two standards organizations have broadly similar aims, programme scopes, membership categories and methods of operation. However, they do differ in their method of generating standards, speed of operation, voting techniques and the status of the standards when published. A mechanism does exist to bring the two organizations together, known as the “Vienna Agreement”. This agreement allows for pooling of information and the adoption of ISO standards by CEN, wherever possible. Generally there should be no real difficulties for a non-European country supplying its product into Europe, as long as the specification and its attendent testing protocol can be fulfilled. One area of concern to a non-European supplier maybe the trend in CEN to incorporate European testing procedures in product specifications.