The General Secretariat of Industry and Small and Medium Enterprises has published the Resolution of 23 April 2020, concerning personal protective equipment in the context of the health crisis caused by COVID-19. The Spanish Association for Standardization (UNE), which has been playing a very active role in initiatives to support the Administration and the sectors in the fight against the pandemic, has collaborated in its drafting.
The urgent, large-scale need for protective equipment with guarantees led MINCOTUR to regulate the extension of the list of standards considered equivalent to European harmonized standards for CE marking, and to extend to other PPE established in the Resolution of 20 March 2020 on alternative specifications to PPE masks with European CE marking. The resolution thus contains a list of technical specifications (American, Japanese, Australian and Korean) that differ from the harmonised European standards, for the different types of PPE.
In order to implement this Resolution, UNE has provided key information on equivalencies, in collaboration with the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety (INSST) and the MINCOTUR. UNE standards have been compared with those of other countries such as China, the United States, Korea and Japan; through cooperation with their national standardisation bodies within the framework of ISO as a global body, in which Spain is represented through UNE.
In this area, UNE has also worked with the Chinese standardisation body (SAC) on the standards that PPE masks must comply with. Thanks to this action, the recognition of non-European standards has been formalised to facilitate the arrival of this material, through the Resolution of 20 March 2020 on alternative specifications to the PPE masks with European CE marking.
Among the other initiatives addressed by UNE to deal with the health emergency, there is free access to UNE standards to promote the manufacture of essential healthcare products, such as filtering facepiece respirators or protective clothing. In addition, UNE has led a working group, with four ministries and private entities, to develop the UNE Specifications for face masks UNE 0064 and UNE 0065, which are available free of charge. Through these actions, all interested parties have been able to download 55,653 documents, the market value of which, alongside other solutions, would be around €5.3 million. This is an exceptional measure to support the fight against coronavirus; given that the income from the sale of standards is fundamental to the sustainability of the current Spanish model of the development of standardisation.
You can download the standards free of charge at this link.
