DEFRA consults on European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register Regulation

Defra has invited views from EEF on the proposed implementation of the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR) Regulation and UN-ECE Protocol on Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers (PRTR) . The E-PRTR Regulation and PRTR Protocol requires the UK ’s current system for collecting data on emissions through the separate national pollution inventories to be changed.

Since 2001, the European Commission has collected data on mass emissions from all Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) Directive installations, and published a collation and analysis of the data in the form of the European Pollutant Emission Register (EPER). The UK has contributed to this system through the pollution inventories for England and Wales , Scotland , Northern Ireland , and Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) regulated offshore oil and gas installations, as well as estimations made by the Defra on behalf of local authority regulated IPPC installations in England and Wales .

EPER will replace E-PRTR from this reporting year onwards. E-PRTR stems from the UN-ECE PRTR Protocol, which was signed by the European Community and the majority of its member states (to the Aarhus convention).

The UK’s existing pollution inventories mirror the E-PRTR Regulation and PRTR Protocol quite well. There are, however, a number of ways in which these existing practices need to be extended in order to enable full compliance and thus a more sophisticated PRTR system in the UK:

E-PRTR data needs to be collected for several new industry sectors;
in respect of transboundary movements of hazardous waste, details of the name and address of the recoverer or the disposer of the waste and the actual recovery or disposal site, needs to be reported;
the reporting requirements for offshore oil and gas installations (via the EEMS) need to be fully aligned with those of the E-PRTR Regulation; and
the UK needs to establish a publicly accessible national PRTR, as opposed to the different inventories that currently exist for England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.

Defra’s consultation document sets out proposals for making these changes. It also discusses issues around the quality assessment of E-PRTR data, the treatment of confidential data, and arrangements for compiling and co-ordinating the UK’s EPRTR data submission to the European Commission.

The deadline for comments to Defra is 24 October.