The IPC-1754 standard titled “Materials and Substances Declaration for Aerospace and Defense and Other Industries”[1] was recently published by IPC.  It’s a new standard that establishes requirements for exchanging material and substance data for products between suppliers and their customers for Aerospace and Defense, Heavy Equipment and other industries.

This standard covers the process for exchanging data on substances that may be present in materials in the product and substances that may be used in production, operations, maintenance, repair or overhaul/refurbishment.

IPC-1754 was developed to meet the broad range of requirements of Aerospace, Defense and several other industries that were involved in the development of the standard. The standard includes several innovative features to support compliance assessment against a variety of substance regulations and other uses such as obsolescence management. Features to assess compliance to EU REACH and similar regulations (including the ability to identify articles in the declaration hierarchy) were particularly important.

Some of the new features include:

• support for declaring chemicals used in manufacturing and maintenance processes (more on this in  future posts);
• flags to identify articles (as defined in the REACH regulation), homogeneous materials, and to indicate that this is a full substance declaration (FSD/FMD)  and/or includes all materials;
• support for declaring that some information is “unknown”;
  • The unknown capability was especially added to help suppliers in industries that are new to material and substance declarations to provide information to downstream manufacturers,
• use descriptors (more information coming in future posts)

IPC-1754 enables an external authority such as an industry association to specify external lists that provide the basis for a declaration by a supplier to a downstream requester. This includes the declarable substance list, a query list, and optionally a use descriptor list established by the declaration Authority. The Query List (QL) provides a set of product statements (also referred to as queries)  — the supplier answers each statement with either a “true”, “false” or “unknown”.  An example of such a statement is that the product contains a substance in the Declarable Substance List (DSL). The supplier than answers true or false depending on whether a DSL substance is included or not.

ECD Compliance was extensively involved in developing IPC-1754. Our principal consultant is a co-chair of the committee.  For information on the IPC-1754 standard, how it can be used by your organization, or other support to use the standard, contact ECD Compliance.

A joint press release on IPC-1754 by IPC and the International Aerospace Environmental Group is available.

[1] Note: This is the approved title for IPC-1754. The title in the published standard is incorrect.  A title that is several revisions out of date was inadvertently inserted during publication.  IPC is aware of the issue.