Future of permitting: update on the BREF process

The Environment Agency have contacted operators who have agreed to take part in data collection for the waste treatment BREF process this week, to clarify final pieces of information. The BREF (Best available treatment REFerence document) will be used as a basis for future environmental permitting regulations once implemented, so is extremely important to the future of the industry.

We understand that the officials working on the BREF will be conducting site visits throughout April, though we don’t yet know what sites will be involved. A first draft of the waste treatment BREF is likely to be circulated around September this year. We will of course let members know when it is available to review.

Chapter 5 comments

Anaerobic Digestion is covered in Chapter 5 of the draft BREF. The latest versions we have are available to review below – if you can send me any comments by 27 March (via matt.hindle@adbioresources.org) I will feed these in to the Agency.

• Draft of proposals applicable to all forms of biological treatment
• Draft of proposals applicable to AD

The EA have recognised that some of the terminology is quite loose at present, and will push for this to be clarified.

For now, the idea of including ‘optimum’ values has largely been rejected by the Technical Working Group. They could be revived at some point – in which case data from existing operators will be particularly important.

Find out more

The UK is being represented in the BREF process by the EA’s Howard Leberman. Howard has kindly agreed to update members at our next regulatory forum – you can find out more here: https://adbioresources.org/events/adba-regulatory-forum