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By Andrew G Kireta Jr.
Jul 01, 2025
What is ASTM’s most valuable product? That’s a question I’m regularly asked by our members, other standards developing organizations, our partners, and usually much to their chagrin – unwitting Lyft drivers or airplane seatmates.
Of course, it’s high-quality, agile, and responsive standards that address the challenges of today, in the context of today, to make our world work better. Right?
As a collective, that seems right. We have a catalog of over 13,000 technical standards that industry and the public rely on daily to ensure the consistency, safety, reliability, and performance of nearly everything around them.
At the individual standard level, does that still resonate? Is one standard more valuable than another?
That depends on your perception of value. If it’s revenue from the sale of the standards themselves, that might lean toward those for large, global industries with broad application across multiple markets and end uses – areas like petroleum, fuels, steel, cement, and concrete. If it’s safety, that could tend towards our consumer products standards, toy and children’s product safety, amusement parks and rides, or even cannabis. Or the standards on oil spill response highlighted in this issue of SN. If it’s reliability, that might get even more specific and granular like many test methods being developed and maintained by our E committees – maybe fracture and toughness or the measure of other technical mechanical and material properties that are vital across any product or market.
Perhaps you view value through the lens of innovation and transformation. The pages of this issue and past issues of SN are full of examples of this, highlighting broad transformations addressing global megatrends like sustainability and circular design. Or the impact of those trends on specific industries such as the adaptation of our 120-year-old standards on coal and coke (both features of this issue). Or more specific growth and technological transformations like standards around unmanned aircraft systems, robotics, or spaceflight – new standards in emerging and quickly evolving global development.
The value of any specific standard or set of standards is highly dependent upon the lens through which you view it. So, the answer to the question of what our most valuable product is, when viewed through the lens of the standards we produce, is highly subjective.
However, I submit that while all of them are extremely valuable, none are our most valuable product.
Consensus is our most valuable product. The standards and test methods are memorials. They’re documentation of the tacit agreement by our broad, diverse stakeholders that these are the principles to which they agree to operate, produce, regulate, innovate, conform, protect, and transform the world in which we live.
In the last issue, I spoke about the value of relationships and trust in forming and reaching consensus. Relationships are individual, our own commitment to each other and shared principles. Consensus is communal, our collective commitment to those principles. It’s that collective commitment, that consensus that underpins any value embedded in or extracted from the standards we develop and deliver. It’s that collective commitment upon which the value of our high-quality, agile, and responsive standards are built so that we can and do make the world work better.
It's that commitment that enables the world to respect, trust, and adopt our 13,000 globally relevant, international standards.
Now that’s valuable.
July / August 2025
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