The European Pollutant Emission Register (EPER) was the first European Union (EU) register of industrial emissions into the air and water. Established by a European Commission Decision of 17 July 2000, it required Member States to produce a triennial report that covered the emissions of 50 pollutants (which were to be reported if the threshold values had been exceeded). The data from 2001 and 2004 and the reporting process itself were evaluated according to specific criteria, and the results have been published on the website: http://eper.ec.europa.eu/eper/EPERReview.asp

The E-PRTR – the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register –succeeds the EPER. It is based on Regulation (EC) No 166/2006 and is intended to fully implement the obligations of the UN-ECE (Economic Commission for Europe) PRTR Protocol, which was signed in May 2003 by 36 countries and the European Community.

The obligations under the E-PRTR regulation extend beyond the scope of EPER primarily in the following ways: more facilities are included, more substances to report, additional coverage of releases to land, off-site transfers of waste and releases from diffuse sources, public participation and annual (instead of triennial) reporting.

Management System and Data Management Implications

As an extensive list of substances must be monitored, E-PRTR reporting can have significant implications for industrial facilities. To report effectively, a data management system is useful for:

• Recording chemical uses and releases
• Setting up an E-PRTR configuration to use the sources of data in the implementation
• Evaluating reporting thresholds to determine the chemicals to be reported
• Running the report to create an E-PRTR Submission
• Generating the E-PRTR Submission