I don’t know how well-informed everyone is on the topic of European legislation and standardization, but I’ll try. Sorry in advance for the long post 
The Ecodesign Directive is the piece of European legislation that banned the incandescence lamps (and other electronic devices) because of their excessive energy use. Next to the energy use, they want to take new criteria on board, focusing on “material efficiency”. These criteria could be durability, repairability, use of recycled content, recyclability etc.
Of course, we can’t just write a law saying “every product should be at least 80% recyclable”. In theory, everything on this world is 100% recyclable and I’m sure you would soon see this claim on every single product…
So, the European Commission ordered to draft a standard. Basically, a standard is a document telling how to do something. Maybe you heard about ISO 9001 or ISO 4001: these are worldwide standards telling how to do quality management and environmental management, respectively. While DIN A4 is a German standard setting the measures of a standard sheet of paper.
Every one of these new material efficiency-criteria should be defined and a way to measure them has to be found. This work is done by a “standardization group”, where government experts (like me), ngo’s (not many) and industry (more than half of the group) are present. 93 people are involved in this discussions, so discussions are not very easy.
On the topic of “recyclability”, it’s complicated. We don’t even agree on the question if we want to measure it and end up with a number (“this tv is 56,27% recyclable”), or if we prefer a guidance on how to avoid some of the problems recyclers face every day.
Currently, it looks like we will evolve towards a guidance for product designers. This will probably be based on current recycling techniques. This has some consequences: a Fairphone 2 would, for example, not get a very high score. It would be a very recyclable product if recyclers would currently take time to dismantle smartphones before they enter the recycling plant. But this is not the case: there are just too many smartphones to be recycled and too little to gain by giving people ( = wages) this task. Time is money, and recycling is currently barely profitable. Smartphones are shredded before materials are separated.
You may remember the blogpost about the recyclability of the Fairphone. It was clear that dismantling the phone before recycling was the best way of recycling, if you want to recycle as many different materials as possible. The problem is, this way of recycling could only be cost-efficient if every product was as easy to dismantle as a Fairphone. So, should we tell smartphone producers to switch to phones that are easy to dismantle, or should we tell them to avoid using so many materials? Using two different kind (or colors) of plastics in a back cover, for example, is very hard for recyclers who want to recycle this plastic!
The other option would be to look at the mass of your product and the mass of the materials that would come out of a recycling process. This would allow you to calculate how “recyclable” your product is: “recyclability”=”mass of recycled materials” / “mass of product”*100. This is put very simple, because there are no calculation methods available yet (and many other issues). On behalf of our ministry I have ordered some consultants to come up with proposals to solve this, I can share the study when it’s finished (probably by the end of this year) if you’re interested.
I suppose this calculation could be very beneficial for a Fairphone 2: it allows for a theoretical disassembly and thus more materials to be recovered. However, according to the blogpost they got a higher mass of recycled materials if they didn’t disassemble the phone. So it depends on the question if the calculation gives a “bonus” for recycling small quantities of precious metals or not. Another issue we will have to tackle…
As you can see, we’re not really far yet. Discussions only started this year, so this is no surprise. But the sooner we get this guidance out, the sooner industry can start using it and we can start writing (European) legislation forcing producers to take recyclability in account!
