European Pollutant Emission Register, November 2004

A few months on from its launch in February 2004, the European Pollutant Emission Register (EPER) is already proving a hit and has attracted more than 100,000 visitors. Hosted by the European Environment Agency based in Copenhagen, the register was established by Commission Decision 2000/479/EC of 17th July 2000, based on article 15(3) of Council Directive 96/61/EC concerning integrated pollution prevention and control. The Decision specifies that triennial reports should be produced on the emissions of industrial facilities into the air and waters and that the information should be made publicly available on the web. Annex A1 lists limits for 50 pollutants where reports must be made if the threshold is exceeded. Annex A3 lists 9,387 medium to large industrial plants whose activities are to be included. These are located in the EU of the 15, plus Norway and Hungary. The first reporting year was 2001 with data being made available in 2004. The next reporting year is 2004 and will include the new member states. The resulting data will be made public in 2006. It is the responsibility of member states to quality control the data submitted. EPER will form the basis for a comprehensive new register to include data on waste transfer once the EU ratifies the UN-ECE Protocol on Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers.

The register can be searched using five different approaches: facility level, industrial activity, member state overview, pollutants, or map search. Alternatively users can browse by choosing all facilities and selecting a country from the dropdown menu on the bottom left of the screen. Using the facility level search it is possible to search by country, year, pollutant (selecting from the list of 50), facility name, address or activity (again selecting from a list). The other search options offer similar permutations of the available data. It is worth noting that for name and address searches it is recommended that an asterisk is used before and after the term as the search otherwise looks only for exact matches. The most intriguing access route is the map search where you can zoom in on a specific location and identify which type of industrial activity is recorded. Satellite images can be displayed in black and white or colour. Data from other searches can be displayed in summary or in detail, and downloaded in CSV or XML format, or printed out. In addition to the searchable data, the review report is mounted on the site and there are links to national registers. Perhaps such publicly available information will shame polluters into compliance.

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