Important outcome of consultations on industry emissions

Last week of November EFFOP representatives were in Sevilla for the final meeting in the Technical Working Group on the so called BREF for Slaughterhouses and Animal Byproducts. The meeting was led by European IPCC Bureau and attended by government officials, member states and European industry representatives.

The BREFs are a series of reference documents covering the industrial activities listed in Annex 1 to the EU’s IPPC Directive. They provide descriptions of a range of industrial processes and their respective operating conditions and emission rates. Member States are required to take these documents into account when determining best available techniques and regulating their industries.  The majority of BREFs cover specific agro-industrial activities; such BREFs are referred to as ‘sectoral BREFs’. However, there are also a number of ‘horizontal BREFs’ dealing with cross-cutting issues such as energy efficiency, industrial cooling systems or emissions from storage with relevance for industrial manufacturing in general.

In EFFOP we have worked intensively with the ongoing revision and EFFOP’s Technical Working Group (TWG) has played an active role in the BREF process , producing technical papers, position papers and 80 comments to the first Draft. In the Sevilla meeting the most important points were related to proposed values for odour, wastewater, and inclusion of steam boilers and during the week-long meeting we obtained satisfactory results on these major issues.

Once a BREF is reviewed and adopted, a Commission Implementing Decision (CID) (listing the BAT conclusions) is published for each BREF. The adoption of CID (incl. list of BAT conclusions)is mandatory in the permitting/licensing process and must be fully implemented within 4 years of publication.