Industrial Emissions Directive needs to be more flexible says Cefic

Such a flexible approach is both justified and needed and should be taken into account when the European parliament next vote on the Directive, Cefic said. And to achieve the high level of protection that it aims to achieve, the IED ‘needs to be effective by leaving some room for subsidiarity, being experience-driven and cost-effective to ensure optimal societal benefit. A balanced implementation of these principles must be secured,’ the council added. The draft IED will update the existing Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Directive (IPPC), passed in 1996, which regulates how much pollution industrial installations can emit each year. Following the adoption of the draft IED on the occasion of the second reading by the European Parliament’s Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety in May, negotiations will take place between the European Council and European Parliament, before the Directive is due to be voted on in a plenary session in Strasbourg in July.hideThe IPPC is a complex ‘learning by doing’ system, which has required time and extensive collaboration between all stakeholders at European and national levels, Cefic continued. The IPPC had begun to deliver environmental improvements showing that it had a lot of potential; this trend should not be reversed by disproportionate changes in the IED, it warned. Cefic said that it supports regulations that stimulate innovative developments in order to reduce emissions and feels that the challenge ahead is to balance environmental, economic and societal issues to achieve the goal of environmental protection in a sustainable way. And this balance includes the recognition of different local conditions such as topography and climate as well as the wide variety of manufacturing processes and the different types of plants and installations, it continued. “The IED, therefore, needs to allow a fully justified flexibility based on an environmental, technical, as well as an economic assessment. In that respect, local competent authorities are best placed to implement and use, in a transparent and public way, the provisions of the IED to take into account these local variations,” Cefic urged. Over-simplicity can be counterproductive if local and specific needs are not taken into consideration—one size does not fit all, the council warned. This attempt to tackle emissions will only be a success if the new IED leaves a space for subsidiarity, empowering local actors to capture the complexity of the environment and find the best possible efficiency in each case—taking into account local characteristics when deciding how to manage emissions, it continued. “This proportionate implementation of the emissions regulations is all the more important since the IED follows an integrated approach, taking into consideration all emissions, their origins and destinations. The setting of a parameter must be proportionate so as to optimise the management of emissions criteria. The reduction of an emission limit must be shaped so as to avoid disproportionate growth of another emission value. All parameters cannot be optimised at once: proper attention must be paid to side effects so as to minimise them when possible,” Cefic added.

Industrial Emissions Directive needs to be more flexible says Cefic

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