UL 969 Basics and categories PGJI2, etc.

Hi, my name is Oliver Stockton and I’m the Managing Director of Computer Imprintable Label Systems. We’ve been working very closely with UL over the past few years to get a thorough understanding of the complexities of UL 969 and with this understanding we can now pass information off to our customers using a series of short videos that we have put together for you.

In this first video, we’ll talk about the basics. UL 969 is the label and label systems category for labels that go onto products that are or need UL approval. UL considers that if a label has instructions, warnings or information that’s important to the product such as variable data including barcodes, serial numbers, rating information etc then UL considers the label to be a component part of the product therefore, will need UL 969 approval.

Under UL 969 there are different categories including PGJI2, PGJI8, PGDQ2, PDGQ8 and PGAA. We’ll dismiss PGAA for the moment because that’s more of a license arrangement between UL and the label manufacturer and printer regarding the printing of the UL logos. We will talk about that in a separate video.

Let’s start off with PGJI2. That’s the category where we as a label manufacturer will have had the label material approved by UL for use on your products so long as you secondary print the labels using a thermal transfer printer and ribbon or laser printer and toner that is recognized in the UL file. PGJI2 category to summarize, is the category where you will secondary print the labels whether we provide it blank or partially printed. PGJI8 is exactly the same thing but for the Canadian market, so if your products go into USA it will be PGJI2 and if your products will go into Canada, the label needs to be found under PGJI8. If it’s both markets, it most be found under both to be compliant.

If we were to manufacture and print the labels for you, this becomes primary printing, so this is a different category altogether. This is PGDQ2 or PGDQ8 for Canada. If all you do is receive the labels, peel them off and stick them on, they mustn’t be under PGJI2 or PGJI8, they’ve got to be PGDQ2 and PGDQ8. Now this isn’t always understood, so when a customer purchases labels and gets their products UL approved, they might just look for UL file number, everything’s fine, boxes get ticked and the product gets approval but it’s only when a UL inspector comes in and digs a little bit deeper that they see that actually the label is under the wrong file, therefore, there is a non-conformity.

We’ve looked back over several years of enquiries from people that have come in our direction and had a look to see what their reasoning was for contacting us. One big reason is because when the auditor goes in, they realize that the label isn’t actually conforming and their label manufacturer hasn’t got the right approval in the right category, so they come to us very quickly to see what we can do.

We’ve worked with UL to get a thorough understanding and we’ve also put a product range together of 48 different products which cover everything from conformable labels for curved surfaces up to high temperature labels for circuit board manufacture and everything in between. We’ve put together this product offering of blank labels, partially printed and completely printed so that hopefully we’ve covered the broadest gamut we possible can of all of our customers’ requirements.

I hope you found this video to be informative to start you off on the road to UL 969 but we say to you don’t try and figure it out for yourself, just give us a call or reach out to us by email or a form on the website and we will be more than happy to share our knowledge with you to see if we can get you set straight away.

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