Mr Alex Radway is an international environmental consultant and manager with extensive experience of pollution control for large industrial activities, waste water treatment, water quality control, and land contamination remediation. He holds a Master’s degree in Public Health Engineering from Imperial College London and a Master’s in Integrated Environmental Management from the University of Manchester. His specialities include industrial pollution control, the application and exchange of information on Best Available Techniques (BAT) and pollutant release and transfer registers (PRTR).
IED Sebia: Mr Radway, can you tell us more about your professional background, with over forty years of experience as an environmental scientist, pollution inspector, and environmental policy writer, working for the European Commission, Environment Agency of England and, more recently, for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)?
Mr Alex Radway: My initial professional experience covered the practical implementation of pollution control legislation – assessing operator permit applications, determining permit conditions and then enforcing the permits through a combination of informal advice and formal actions such as inspections and audits. Occasionally, that involved legal procedures including notices to carry out remedial actions and court prosecutions.
Based on that first-hand, practical knowledge, my career progressed into policy development for industrial pollution control. Initially, this was at a national level in the United Kingdom, but I then moved onto the European Commission in Seville (Spain), where I oversaw an information exchange and wrote a BAT reference document (BREF) for the industrial sector of Large Volume Organic Chemicals (LVOC).
Subsequently, I had two stints with the European Commission in Brussels (Belgium). My first four-year secondment mainly involved implementation of the IED and contributing to sectoral BAT information exchanges. More recently, I spent six years leading for the European Commission on Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers (PRTRs) both at EU level and internationally, where I led input to the UNECE Kyiv Protocol. This culminated in helping draft the European Commission’s proposals for revisions of the E-PRTR Regulation and the IED.
IED Serbia: Given your experience as a BREF author for the European IPPC Bureau, can you share your insights on how permit writers can effectively use BREF documents to set permit conditions under the IED? What are some of the key challenges and best practices in applying Best Available Techniques (BAT) for industrial emissions?
Mr Alex Radway: It is important to remember that it’s the BAT Conclusions, as published in the EU’s Official Journal, that are the standard for setting permit conditions. BAT conclusions are extracted from, and supported by a BREF, and that larger document can be a useful aid for understanding the intent of particular statements in BAT Conclusions.
All countries face the challenge of integrating BAT requirements into the framework of their national permitting regimes. The experiences of other countries may be informative for Serbia in understanding how to implement the IED/IED 2.0 and so it is beneficial that this project has expertise from a number of EU (and ex-EU) countries.
Likewise, the European Union Network for the Implementation and Enforcement of Environmental Law (IMPEL) is an international non-profit association of the environmental authorities of the European Union Member States, acceding and candidate countries, and potential candidates to join the European Community. IMPEL has produced a range of guidance material on IED permitting and I commend this to Serbian authorities as a good practical source of information.
And obviously, the definitive guidance for permit writers comes from the European commission itself. That guidance takes the form of documents on the Commission’s website and also on the rather hidden CIRCABC forum. Useful implementation discussions also happen in the Industrial Emissions Expert Group (IEEG) which brings together Member States and the Commission in a regular but more informal setting.
IED Serbia: For almost 30 years, the European Union has applied integrated pollution controls on large industrial facilities – firstly via the 1996 IPPC directive and then the 2010 Industrial Emissions Directive (IED). These controls have contributed to significant reductions in the emission of headline pollutants – notably sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulates to air – but implementation of the legislation has not been without its problems. These are deficiencies that the IED 2.0 aims to address.
Firstly, there has been inconsistent implementation of BAT conclusions in permits – both between Member States and across industrial sectors. This undermines one of the central tenets of EU legislation, namely creating a level playing field for competition. To address this, the IED 2.0 will now require permit writers to set emission limit values that more closely reflect the best BAT performance i.e, that lowest value in the BAT-AEL range. In limited cases where formal derogations are needed, the permit writer will have a more structured set of criteria to assess before granting.
Secondly, IED permits have until now given little attention to the issues of resource use, circular economy and decarbonisation. The added IED 2.0 requirements will be a new challenge for permit writers and operators, because these topics expand the scope of traditional industrial pollution controls, and also because much of the requirement is yet to be fully defined i.e., there will be secondary legislation on the detail of Industrial Transformation Plans.
In summary, IED 2.0 presents permit writers and operators with many new challenges that will require significant consideration.