Legislation

The processing sector have a number of legislative drivers that are driving businesses involved to consider resource efficiency from product design, use and its supply chain. A summary is provided below but for further information on who to contact for further information and guidance and details on the legislation is available.

Key amongst them include

• REACH - Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals. This legislation involves the management and control of chemicals and obliges the manufacturers and importers of substances to provide a defined set of information in the form a registration dossier.
• Hazardous Waste Regulations - Requires producers of hazardous waste to review its management and deposal of hazardous waste on site to high extracting standards.
• Producer Responsibility Obligations - If your business handles more than 50 tonnes of packaging in a year and has a turnover over £2million, you must comply with this legislation to register with the Environment Agency and agree a obligation to recover or recycle a certain amount of packaging waste.
• Solvent Emissions Directive / Solvent Emissions Regulations (2004) - Emissions of solvents from certain industrial activities, including chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing processes, are regulated under these legilations and require operators to implement a solvent management plan and to take a solvent reduction approach to meet emission concentration limits or in some cases, mass emission limits.
• Pollution Prevention Control - Many chemical and pharmaceutical companies are regulated under the Pollution Prevention and Control (PPC) regime, which implements the requirements of the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) Directive in the UK. Fundamental to IPPC is the requirement that each site must operate according to predefined Best Available Techniques (BAT), the details of which are given in a BAT Reference (BREF) document for its industry or sector, published by the European IPPC Bureau. The use of BAT helps to define what is considered as operational best practice across the industries. It also introduces the concept of ‘benchmarking.’