So, how do you wade through all the various EG legal requirements and the voluntary, but ustomer demanded standards and policies, to determine how they may affect your products and business? And, if they do indeed affect you, then how do you go about figuring out what to do about it?

Ignore the laws and regulations? Nope! Break a law and pay the consequences.

Ignore the standards and policies? Perhaps - but your business could lose those customers and markets who demand compliance.

Now that you have been punched... How do we sort this all out?

CAVEATS�

First, it's vital to understand the four, basic driving-forces behind all these burgeoning international environmental requirements:

Each of these EG caveats should be self-explanatory and are quite reasonable from an environmental and consumer safety viewpoint. The first three are directly attributed to conservation and the guardianship of the health of consumers and environments. Caveat 4 is included because of the surging litigious impediments businesses are experiencing resulting from product infringement of the first three caveats.

The figure below (WHERE ENVIRONMENTAL DICTUMS APPLY TO THE CAVEATS) was created to help you distill the many seemingly disparate EG Dictums into a framework that has operational meaning within the product development process. It maps some of the more widely known EG dictums to the EG Caveats. These caveats will later be mapped to the Product Development process to show how the process can be affected by the dictums.