Keith Lawton, an expert at AMEC's environmental and infrastructure business, talks about the Industrial Emissions Directive which will be introduced later this month
This month a significant piece of new European legislation will enter UK law, ultimately regulating virtually every area of industrial production across the country. It aims to offer the highest levels of protection for the environment and human health, while simplifying existing legislation and cutting administration costs across member states.
The Industrial Emissions Directive (IED) will bring together seven existing directives covering integrated prevention and pollution control (IPPC), large combustion plants, waste incineration, activities using organic solvents, and three directives on titanium dioxide production. It will apply to both existing and new installations and will, for the first time, regulate a range of new activities.
At a European level, it is anticipated that the streamlining of permitting, reporting, and monitoring – as well as the renewed cooperation with Member States to simplify their implementation – will lead to considerable savings in administrative costs of between 105 and 255 million euros a year.
However, at an industry level many are concerned that the IED will result in more stringent and prescriptive regulatory emission limits, which will restrict the discretion of regulators and result in extra cost to affected businesses.
In addition, parts of industry not previously covered, such as preservation and treatment of wood products and recovery and recycling of waste (where thresholds are met), will now require full Part A1 permits and any applications for derogation – as has been common practice under the previous regimes – will be more difficult. As a result, existing plant and processes may require upgrading to comply with the new legislation or, alternatively, detailed technical and economic arguments will be needed to justify any derogation.
In addition to including several new activities, the new legislation introduces the establishment and legal adoption of Best Available Techniques (BAT) conclusions. These will establish BAT for each sector and provide associated emission levels (BAT-AELs) that must be used by each member state as the basis for setting or revising permit conditions, including Emission Limit Values (ELVs).
The transposition of the IED will make it much harder to deviate from BAT Conclusions and industry will be required to justify, in a transparent and robust manner, any proposed derogations from the requirement to comply with permit emission limits aligned to BAT-AELs. In order to identify the BAT for each type of installation, technical experts from the EC, industry, and member states have been updating a series of BAT reference documents known as BREFs.
A total of 35 BREFs will need to be reviewed or written to cover all the activities encompassed by the IED. The European IPPC Bureau, which is leading the BREF review programme, is working on a transparent process whereby all BREFs will be reviewed by a technical committee of experts including regulators, scientists, government agencies, and industry. The BREFs will pass through two formal bodies (Article 13 Forum and the Article 75 Committee) prior to adoption and publication of the main BREF and associated (legally binding) BAT conclusions. Only two of these updated BREFs have been adopted to date – o ne for glass and the other for production of iron and steel. While there is uncertainty over the exact timetable for adoption of the remaining BREFs, they will be reviewed in a rolling programme over the next few years and adopted at a rate of three to six per year.
Given the importance of the BAT conclusions, industry is encouraged to participate in the review process, either directly as members of the technical committees or through their respective trade association, to influence and steer the content of the document and ultimately the outcomes. The status of the individual documents can reviewed at the EIPPCB link. It will be important for companies to check these ongoing reviews to understand the potential implications on their own operations and associated timescales.
The regulatory agencies will be required to review current IPPC permits and to revise or set new ELVs where these are currently above the limit set in the BAT conclusions. In many cases, companies will need to comply with lower limits. All permits with new or revised limits must be in compliance within four years of adoption of the BAT conclusions for any given sector. In addition, details must be provided on how site restoration of an installation, after its eventual closure, would be accomplished through reference to a “baseline report” of site conditions.
It is highly likely that these requirements could have a direct impact on the economics of many businesses. Although derogations can be granted on economic and environmental grounds, they are likely to be much more limited than previously was the case in the UK, and regulators do not expect that exemptions will be necessarily relevant or applicable to all industries. Businesses will need to robustly justify why any deviation from the limits is warranted.
The IED will be transposed into UK law this month, when it will be applied to new industrial installations, with existing installations being covered by January 2014. It will come into force for areas of new activity covered by the IED by January 2015 and for large combustion plants a year later.