Service status

A sophisticated criminal cyber-attack has had a major impact on the way SEPA works. We are working through all the services that we provide to understand what we need to do in the short and longer term to restore services. We are approaching this work with a sense of urgency.

• Check the service status
• Approach to Delivery of Services 
• Information about the cyber-attack

Service status update: Data returns

SPRI returns for the 2021 calendar year are due by 28 February 2022.

We will contact SPRI operators by email using the SPRI contact’s address in January 2022 to confirm contact details. We will then provide an excel form for each site, to be returned by email to SPRI.Administration@sepa.org.uk by 28 February 2022.

Where we don’t receive a response by email, we will look for a suitable alternative and may contact you by phone or letter to request more information.

Scottish Pollutant Release Inventory

The Scottish Pollutant Release Inventory (SPRI) is a Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (PRTR) and has the primary purpose of making publicly available officially reported annual releases of specified pollutants to air and water from SEPA-regulated industrial facilities. It also provides information on off-site transfers of waste and waste-water from these facilities. 

The SPRI data is collected, quality assured and made public under the requirements of Freedom of Information and can be compared with PRTR information from other countries. SPRI datasets from 2002 to the present year (except 2003) are available and reported annually.

Operators of sites carrying out specific activities (67 activities covering 10 major sectors) above defined capacity thresholds are obliged to report to SPRI on an annual basis. The activities and thresholds are largely determined by European reporting requirements but some thresholds have been lowered to be relevant to pollutant releases in the UK and Scotland.

SPRI data is available on Scotland's Environment Web.

This is a data analysis tool which allows you to view summarised information by industry sector for pollutants and waste transfers. Data can be downloaded in bulk, including at a site level. It is updated annually when the previous years data is published. 

An Experimental Official Statistics Publication for Scotland – 2019 data.

We have released figures that show emissions of pollutants to air and water and off site waste transfers reported by operators of industrial sites under the Scottish Pollutant Release Inventory (SPRI) for the 2019 calendar year. Some historic data is included for comparison. For the 2019 calendar year 1,327 sites were required to report to SPRI.

Emissions of carbon dioxide and methane from the SEPA-regulated industrial sites which report to SPRI continue the decrease seen over the past decade. Carbon dioxide emissions fell by 57% between 2010 and 2019; methane fell by 44%.

Emissions to air from sites in the Waste and waste-water management sector show the opposite trend, with carbon dioxide releases up by 76% since 2010. This is partly due to the increase in incineration of waste. However, their emissions of greenhouses gases remain small relative to the energy sector.

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