Regulation of pollution
sources in some EU-countries
Hans-Roland Lindgren
Swedish EPA
Content of the presentation
• Present and planned regulation for large
pollution sources in the EU, short overview
• What is regulated by the directives in the
EU
• Presentation on how some EU countries
have regulated large, medium and small
pollution sources
EU-directives applicable on large
pollution source
• The Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control
Directive (IPPC)
• Titanium dioxide directives (82/883/EEC,
92/112/EEC
• Diretive on volatile organic compunds
(1999/13/EC)
• The waste incineration directive (2000/76/EC)
• The large combustion plant directive
(2008/1/EC)
A new directive is under way
• A new industrial emission directive is
under way merging all the directives
mentioned above
• The Council of Ministers agreed on a text
during the autumn 2009
• The EU Parliament will discuss the text
during the spring 2010
• Some new provisions are included in the
new directive
Some of the news
• Some possibilities to set conditions not
associated with BAT as temporary
derogations for testing of new techniques
• Baseline information on quality of soil and
ground water
• More stringent emission values for some
combustion plants than in the present
large combustion plant directive
What is regulated in the EU
• The EU directives establish the minimum
requirements for the EU countries
• The EU does not prescribe any institutional
structure or process to be used for permitting.
• EU has no directives for small and medium sized
enterprises (SMEs) except the cases where a
member country consider an installation cover
by the mentioned directives to be a SME
Belgium
• Permitting is a competence of the regions
• The Flanders region uses integrated
permitting both for large and SME sources
• Permits issued in Flanders use a
combination of general conditions,
sectorial conditions and installation
specific conditons
Germany
• In Germany the Länder are in charge of
permitting
• Germany rely to a large extent on general
binding rules (standards) both for large and SME
sources.
• TA-Luft and the Abwasserverordnung specify the
minimum requirements
• A federal permitting procedure law specify how
all media requirements should be merged for
IPPC-installations
Finland
• The three regions are responsible for
permitting for large sources (~2000)
• Thirteen regional environmental centers
issue permit for medium size installations
(about ~4000)
• Over 400 municipalities are in charge of
permits for small installations (~ 17 000)
• All permits are integrated. The number of
IPPC installations are ~880
The Netherlands
• The institutional setup and split of responsibility
is so complicated that it cannot be shortly
described (see my paper)
• 45 000 installations need site specific integrated
permits
• The rest ~350 000 are regulated by cross sector
binding rules
• The number of IPPC-installations are ~2 500
Sweden
• Permitting is split is split on five environmental
courts and 21 regional County Administrative
Boards (CAB)
• The courts issue permits for ~ 500 large and the
CABs for ~ 5 000 medium sized installations. All
permits are integrated
• Small installations need to notify the local
authorities who could prescribe conditions
• General binding rules are used for a small
number of sectors
• The number of IPPC-installations are about 800
The UK
• In the UK permitting is split on England and Wales,
Scotland and Northern Ireland
• The permitting differ somewhat between those parts of
the UK
• In England and Wales permitting for large and some
medium sized installations on the A1 list is a duty the
Environment Agency (~7 000 of which ~ 4000 IPPC)
• A2 list installtion get integrated permits from local
authorities
• B list instaltions only need air emission permits from
local authorities
Conclusions
• Classification of large, medium and small size
installations differ in the EU countries and does
not follow the IPPC-model
• Integrated permitting is use for the extremes
from all installations or just for the minimum
required by the IPPC-directive
• The degree of decetralisations of permitting
differs between different EU-countries