EIA Award for European Pollutant Emission Register, April 2005

At its annual conference held in London in April 2005, the European Information Association's award in the best new electronic information source category was given to the European Pollutant Emission Register, which was launched by the European Commission and the European Environment Agency in February 2004. Bernd Mehlhorn from DG Environment and Andreas Barkman from the European Environment Agency flew in to accept the award jointly at the presentation ceremony on the 14th. The database is the first European register of industrial emissions to air and water and currently covers some 10,000 medium to large industrial facilities with data on 50 different pollutants in the EU15, plus Norway and Hungary who contribute voluntarily, Not only has all this information been collated and recorded, it has also been made publicly available on the Internet. Working with the European Commission, the European Environment Agency has managed the collection of the data from the individual countries and the development of the site, and now hosts the Register on its own website at http://www.eper.cec.eu.int.

The content includes information on a wide span of industrial facilities ranging from mining operations, refineries, production and processing plants to pig farms. The emissions data can be searched by a number of different access points, including the name of the pollutant, a particular activity (such as the chemical industry), or a specific industrial site - or indeed a combination of criteria. What is particularly innovative is the possibility of searching not just by name, country, postcode or address but by map search of the site, with the facility to display a satellite image of the location and zoom in for closer detail.

Now an individual can find out what emissions are being generated in their own area; businesses can benchmark themselves against their competitors; and most significantly from an environmental perspective, the public awareness resulting from the dissemination of this baseline of data should exert pressure to encourage reductions in emissions.

Data currently available is drawn from country reports of 2001. Data from the second cycle of reporting carried out in 2004 will be made available on the site towards the end of 2006 and will this time include the EU25 as well as Norway and Hungary. Essentially this is a very public naming and shaming by country as well as at individual industrial plant level.

The current register is just an important first step and the Commission is committed to further development. The EU is to ratify the UN Economic Commission for Europe's Protocol on Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers by 2009. As a result the current register will be upgraded to a European PRTR (for connoisseurs of EU abbreviations and acronyms). In practice this will mean that even more information will be covered - more than 90 pollutants, new activities (increasing in number from 56 to 69) including for example agriculture, and recording also land pollutants. Data on what is done with waste and waste water will also be recorded, and the reporting cycle will be reduced from three years to one. Even before then we can expect to see technical improvements to the website, with for example colour satellite images instead of black and white.

EPER is already exerting pressure for compliance with existing pollution limits and for improvements in emission reduction. It is some measure of its success to date that the register has already generated a huge amount of interest and has had more than 230,000 hits from all round the world with both DG Environment and the EEA receiving numerous requests for further information from places as far apart as Canada and Tuvalu.