The IPPC General Guidance for the Food and Drink Sector has been issued. This guidance should be used by operators when preparing their IPPC applications. The guidance takes into account the information contained in the BAT Reference document (BREF) issued for this sector by the European Commission.

It is one of a series of sector guides covering all of the industrial (or agricultural) sectors which fall under IPPC. In common with most of the IPPC guidance it is joint guidance with the Environment Agency, SEPA and the Northern Ireland Environment and Heritage Service (NIEHS).

In order to demonstrate that the Best Available Techniques (BAT) are being proposed to satisfy the Regulations it is necessary, in principle, for the operator to assess a wide range of options and to balance costs and benefits of each to conclude which are BAT. To avoid this being done for every installation the sector guidance lays down, at national level, Indicative BAT Requirements. If the operator complies with these, no further assessment is needed. Justifications in the application are generally only needed where the operator wishes to depart from these indicative standards.

The guidance lays down a 3 part structure which enables the applicant to show how the techniques measure up against the Indicative BAT Requirements list the resulting emissions and compare them with the benchmarks provide an impact assessment of those emissions on the environment.

The techniques are laid out under a series of headings (management systems, raw materials and water use, waste minimisation, control of releases to air, land, water, groundwater, odour, energy, noise, accidents, monitoring etc). For each of these, the sector guidance lays down:

• what information should be supplied in the application;
  
• the indicative BAT standards

To view the IPPC General Guidance for the Food and Drink Sector please click on the link below.

IPPC S6.10 General Guidance for the Food and Drink Sector (consultation) PDF (2 Mb)