Revision of the Industrial Emissions Directive (scope extension): Joint statement from the European non-energy extractive industry on the European Parliament’s Amendments to the Draft Report
Together, Aggregates Europe-UEPG – CEMBUREAU – EUROGYPSUM – EUROROC – EXCA - IMAEurope represent the largest part of the non-energy extractive industry in Europe with members in the 27 EU countries.
Having considered the draft report and the amendments tabled by the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) Committee, our industries would like to share their thoughts and recommendations on a number of issues in relation to the revision of the Industrial Emissions Directive (IED).
As sectors, we strongly believe that the inclusion of the extractive industry under the scope of the revised IED should be based on a list of extraction and treatment processes instead of a list of commodities. Therefore, we support the development of an exhaustive list of emissionintense processes which have IED-relevant emissions in order to achieve a high and efficient level of environmental protection. Elaborating such a list would provide further clarity on the negligible emission level from most processes in sectors such as construction minerals.
Having that in mind, our sectors:
• Strongly support Amendments 121, 354, 359, 1623, 1625, and 1628, as we believe that the elements introduced in the Draft Report by MEP Radan Kanev, together with other amendments also aiming towards a process-based scope enlargement, would provide a robust and efficient framework for including the emission-intense extraction and treatment processes in the IED. Nevertheless, in our view, the text could be further improved to add clarity to these provisions. For example, the generic term “environmental impact” could include several aspects of the environment such as biodiversity or visual impact, which are not in the scope of the IED. Referring instead to “emissions to the environment” would be more suitable in the context of the IED. Besides, providing a definition of construction minerals and making explicit reference to their exclusion from the IED’s scope on the basis of their negligible emissions profile would further facilitate the implementation of these provisions, whilst fully complying with the European Commission’s impact assessment.
• Oppose those amendments which bear a high risk of confusion, such as the proposals for using open lists of raw materials (minerals and metals) and those that lack clearly established definitions (i.e., Amendments 1624, 1626, 1627, 1629, 1630, 1631). We believe that linking the IED scope enlargement with the end use of processed minerals and ores is contradictory to the purpose of this legislation, which aims to reduce emissions from industrial sites wherever they occur, regardless of the downstream applications.
Our associations would welcome any further discussions on the above points, to achieve the most appropriate and effective legal framework.
