Establishing BAT
To establish BAT, here are the essential steps your country may refer for how to effectively design or review their approach to establishing BAT or similar concepts:
Pre-requisites:
- Select relevant industries for the BAT-based environmental permitting process,
- Set-up multi-stakeholder groups to determine BAT, representing the government, industry and NGOs.
- Collect information on pollution prevention and control techniques, emission and consumption levels
- Evaluate techniques and data collected
- Adopt or adjust the BAT determined by other countries and made available in their BAT Reference Documents to your needs as appropriate. Some of which are:
- The BAT Reference Documents (BREF) of other countries
- The BAT identified as guidance for the implementation of the Minamata Convention on Mercury and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants
- The World Bank Group’s Industry Sector Guidelines
- Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants: Guidelines on BAT and Provisional Guidance on Best Environmental Practices
To establish BAT, your country could:
- Gather data on available techniques through, e.g., sector-specific questionnaires, literature review and stakeholder meetings.
- Engage a variety of stakeholders to assess the environmental, economic and social aspects of available techniques, e.g., through sector-specific Technical Working Groups.
- Publish information on the techniques identified as BAT in BAT Reference Documents.
Relevant tools
Below is a list of tools relevant for implementing this topic :
- OECD: BAT for Preventing and Controlling Industrial Pollution - Activity 2: Approaches to Establishing BAT around the world (2018)
- Minamata Convention: BAT/BEP guidance documents
- Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants: Guidelines on BAT and Provisional Guidance on Best Environmental Practices Relevant to Article 5 and Annex C of The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (2007)
- World Bank Group: Industry Sector Guidelines
- OECD: Report on OECD Project on Best Available Techniques for Preventing and Controlling Industrial Chemical Pollution: Activity 4: Determining BAT, BAT-AELs and BAT-based permit conditions (2020)