A conference dedicated to results of the public project Cable Without Danger was held in Moscow on November 2, 2017. It was attended by representatives of 140 companies, producers and suppliers of cable & conductor products and materials, trade companies, retailers, the Federal Agency for Technical Regulation and Metrology (Rosstandart), and the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation.
The Cable Without Danger project was launched in July 2016 after signing of the joint Declaration of Ethics in the Electric Engineering Market by professional communities, large producers and distributors of cable & conductor products. The signatories undertook to produce and sell only high-quality, safe and healthy cable products and combat dishonest players.
Currently, the number of companies, which are participants of the Cable Without Danger project, has reached 124. Producers of materials used to produce cable and wires also expressed their support to the project at the conference.
According to the Ministry of Emergencies of Russia, every third fire is caused due to malfunctioning of the electric wires. In many events, fires are caused by defects in the cable design tolerated by the producer seeking to save on raw materials and components. The most common of them are a lower electric conductor diameter (it is regulated by the State Standards and Technical Specifications for each grade) and using poor-quality materials to produce cable insulation and coating.
According to Vladimir Kashkin, Coordinator of the Cable Without Danger project and Deputy Head of Electrocable Association, for 1.5 years of the initiative they managed, together with Rosstandart, to held liable several tens of companies violating standards during production of cable & conductor products or selling counterfeit cables. Some of them, for example, Smolensk Cable Plant, Kaluga Cable Plant, and LLC Cable Resources (Moscow Region) promptly addressed their violations.
Meanwhile, a repeated testing of products from LLC Nizhny Novgorod Cable Plant, Electrocable NN, and Northern Cable Plant showed that the production facilities did not respond to the comments. If they fail to pass the testing for the third time, their operations may be suspended for up to 90 days.
According to Natalia Sakharova, General Director of Electrocable Association, the production and sale of falsified cable products are often accompanied by false certificates of conformity.
'At present, the Unified Register of the Russian Accreditation Service comprises over 250 certification authorities accredited for compliance with the Technical Regulation 'Low-Voltage Equipment Safety'. This means that there is one organisation issuing certificates per each cable plant in Russia. Among them there are those that are ready to issue a document in one hour, one-day firms. For example, LLC SPB-Standart issued 114 certificates of conformity for one year and SM-Test - 112 certificates. Some of them were issued after official termination of activities. This is also true for testing laboratories. However, certain known cable plants use or used services of such organisations. They include Electrocable NN, Tomsk and Orel Cable Plants, Uglichcable, and other. I'll tell you more: 90% of imported cable & conductor products go to Russia with doubtful certificates. So, the import substitution issue may be solved rather easily in this case,' said N. Sakharova.
She informed that currently the State Duma was discussing an initiative to withdraw certificates of conformity if a production facility failed to pass the annual inspection control. Besides, Electrocable Association prepared a public demand to cancel the certificate of conformity voluntarily if it was issued with violations and pass re-certification in a proper laboratory. It will be send to dishonest production facilities in the nearest future.
Representatives of Honest Position, an association of cable & conductor distributors, also spoke at the conference. According to Sergey Gvozdev-Karelin, Executive Director of the Association, since the beginning of 2017 distributors returned to producers over 1,000 km of falsified cable products (non-compliant with Technical Regulation on Low-Voltage Product Safety TR TS 004/2011) for more than RUB 53 mln as part of the Cable Without Danger project.
An important event was adding an article regarding non-acceptance of unsafe products by a manufacturer, seller, etc. to the Code of Administrative Offenses in July 2017.
According to the new requirements, the contractor must take relevant measures or pay a fine of RUB 100-500 thou. (for a legal entity).