There is also a second draft of the revised Mineral Oil and Gas Refineries (REF) BREF and the deadline for receiving comments on that is 23 May 2012.

To contribute, please download the questionnaire below and send your response by the 18 May to the project coordinator, Duncan Giddens.

For information please contact the IMPEL Secretariat.

The European Commission published a Communication on Wednesday 07 March in response to a December 2010 Environment Council request that member states and the Commission enhance and improve the implementation and enforcement of EU environment legislation. The Communication focuses on knowledge about the state of the environment and how to tackle challenges on the ground. The Commission says that better access to good quality and comparable information, better complaint handling and access to justice will help to reduce the costs of  non-compliance which is estimated at € 50 billion.   Of particular interest to IMPEL is the Commission’s references to: “…the closing of information gaps on compliance promotion and enforcement…including potentially promising complementary ones involving incentives”, the improvements to be considered for inspections and surveillance including the use of the IMPEL Review Initiative (IRI) mechanism, and through capacity building by strengthening secretariats and enhanced cooperation between networks.

For the European Commission’s press statement please see: Better implementation will lower costs and improve the environment.

Best practice examples of relevance to IMPEL include the IPPC portal and advice and consultation given by regional authorities to companies before submission of applications in the Czech Republic, the Environment Agency’s (England & Wales) environmental permits regime and the electronic document management in Austria.

“For the area of environment as a more sector specific area a comparably high number of contributions for best practices were received as well. This might inter alia be caused by the perception of being a rather burdensome area in parts of the business community, although the results of the EU measurement of administrative burdens had shown that the administrative burdens in this area both in terms of total amount and in share of burdens across areas had been lower than expected. On the other hand this perception might also have led to increased efforts in this area to come up with the least burdensome implementation of the respective legislation. In addition, with IMPEL [authors highlight] an organisation has been established which also promotes the exchange of best practices in this area. Finally, it is an area where eGovernment solutions are gaining momentum.” Europe can do better, pp62-63.

Full details can be found on the European Commission’s Reducing Administrative Burden’s webpage.

However, some major waste streams also find their way to African countries. Mainly the ELV and E-waste streams. The treatment of these streams there raises some doubts and better collaboration between the involved authorities is required. Recent developments have initiated the first contacts between IMPEL TFS and African countries. Firstly the INECE conference in Cape Town, April 2008, attended by representatives from key countries in Africa. Followed in June 2009 by two INECE workshops on E-waste and the Seaport project held in Ghana. Furthermore a representative of the Basel Convention Regional Centre from Nigeria attended the IMPEL TFS Conference in Sofia in 2008.