Title: CEN/TC 189, January 2007 Review
By: Fred Foubert, Secretary

It was already clear at the Trondheim meeting in May 2006 that the Finnish initiative to amend the EU Commission mandate would form a major stumbling block for further standardisation work in CEN/TC 189, unless a compromise could be found.

It should be stated clearly that writing and changing mandates is not really a task of CEN/TC 189. Mandates are developed by the Standing Committee of the Construction Sector, a group of high officials. After acceptance by CEN, the mandate becomes a guideline for the standards, which can be seen as a technical translation of the mandate. However, in this case the CEN Technical Board could not find an agreement on the new mandate and referred the issue back to CEN/TC 189 for advice. To this purpose an additional meeting was organised in Brussels on 13th of December 2006.

Some delegations mainly feared that the inclusion of "elongation" would lead to a distorsion of the market, to the disadvantage of woven geotextiles, which have generally lower elongation at break properties than nonwovens. The combination of elongation and breaking load into a "strain absorption" parameter, as proposed by some countries, contributed greatly to these concerns.

After long discussions, where all parties had the opportunity to express their views and doubts, a consensus text was drafted. All delegations recognized that "elongation" was an important parameter, which should be considered for all applications and functions of geotextiles, which meant an acceptance of the mandate. However, the way how this parameter should be technically measured and expressed should be subject to further discussion in CEN/TC 189 working groups. It was also agreed to organise a meeting with EU officials to present them additional proposals to improve the mandate further. A thorough discussion will probably take place at the next TC meeting in Prague, end of May 2007.

Further developments:

• The French proposal to start an immediate revision of the geosynthetic barrier standards did not obtain sufficient support. This does not mean that the revision issue will disappear from the discussion table. There are a lot of proposals circulating and the discussion will probably be continued at a next WG 6 meeting in the beginning of 2007.
• Test methods for the assessment of compressive creep properties of geotextiles are being developed under the Vienna Agreement (CEN-ISO cooperation). Both tests (prEN ISO 25619-1 and -2) are now out for public enquiry.