European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register

 The committee adopted the report by Hans BLOKLAND (IND/DEM, NL) broadly approving the proposal  under the 1st reading of the codecision procedure, subject to a number of amendments. Many of these were drafting amendments aimed at improving the coherence and clarity of the text. The other main amendments were as follows:

- a new clause was added to Article 5 stipulating that releases of pollutants falling into several categories of pollutants as specified in Annex II shall be reported for each of these categories. The committee argued that, as some substances fall into multiple categories, an operator could choose to spread the emission over these categories, meaning that the threshold value would not be exceeded in any of the categories. To prevent this, the operator should be required to report the emission for all relevant categories;

- it was important to distinguish between routine and accidental releases;

- when collecting data from diffuse sources, international approved methodologies should be used whenever these are available;

- it should be specified in the proposal that the information shall be available on the Internet free of charge;

- the report to be published by the Commission every 3 years shall be submitted to Parliament and the Council, together with an assessment of the operation of the European PRTR;

- the threshold level for releases of  PCDD + PCDF (dioxins + furans) in Annex II should be lowered from 0.001 kg (1g) to 0.0001 kg (0.1g). MEPs pointed out that the emission of dioxins causes health and food safety problems around many waste incineration facilities. If the level were lowered, this would cover most of the waste incineration facilities that do not yet have effective flue gas clean systems and would also cover around 70% of the large metal processing industries.