ETC/ATNI Report 6/2019: EEA-33 Industrial Emissions Country Profiles. Methodology report.

The industrial emissions country profiles present the emissions of air and water pollutants and greenhouse gases in fact sheets for each country. The significance of industry, given by gross value added, energy consumption and water use, as well as generation of waste are added to the presentation. The trend in emissions and waste generation are given in relative numbers. The scope of industry in this respect includes in short all industrial activities reported under the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR) excluding agriculture (activity code 7.(a) and 7.(b)). The data sources to the country profiles include Eurostat, the E-PRTR, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reported under the Monitoring Mechanism Regulation (MMR) and air pollutant emission inventories reported under the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP).

11 Sep 2020

Torleif Weydahl, Katrina Young, Kathryn Hampshire, Justin Goodwin, Marthe Granger, Bastian Zeiger, Bastian Zeiger, Daniel Montalvo, Daniel Montalvo

Prepared by:

Torleif Weydahl (NILU), Katrina Young (Aether), Kathryn Hampshire (Aether), Justin Goodwin (Aether), Marthe Granger (EEA), Bastian Zeiger (EEA). 

The industrial emissions country profiles summarise key data related to industry: its relevance with respect to economic contributions, energy and water consumption, as well as air and water emissions and waste generation. The country profiles are developed for the EEA-33 countries which includes the 28 EU Member States together with Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey.

 The present revision (v. 3.0) of this report includes data available at date of release. This year, a new reporting, the so-called EU-Registry and thematic data reporting, is introduced in order to gather the former E-PRTR, LCP and IED reportings and finally replace them. The 2018 data are not yet readily available. Nevertheless, more quality checks have been performed on the latest E-PRTR database in order to have the cleanest final E-PRTR dataset possible. Hence, the industrial emissions country profiles are enriched with the most up-to-date data sources while still only covering the years up to 2017.

 This report describes the underlying methodology to the industrial emissions country profiles that are presented as a Tableau story on the EEA webpages ([1]).

 

The scope of industry in this respect includes in short all industrial activities reported under the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR) excluding agriculture (activity code 7.(a) and 7.(b)). The data sources include Eurostat, the E-PRTR, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reported under the Monitoring Mechanism Regulation (MMR) and air pollutant emission inventories reported under the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP), each of which have their own data categories. A recently developed EEA-mapping which align these different categories is used ([2]). The data sources and industry scope is presented in full detail in the Annexes following this report.

 The water and air pollutants including greenhouse gases are selected based on criteria related to their relative impact. Emissions of heavy metals to air and water have been combined by weighted averages using both eco toxicology and human toxicology characterisation factors ([3]). The amounts of hazardous and non-hazardous waste reported under Eurostat is presented, but excluding the major mineral waste that dominates the mining and construction sectors.

 The data quality is evaluated and gap filling of Eurostat data is performed when needed. A method for E-PRTR outlier handling is proposed and applied where appropriate.

 The significance of industry, given by gross value added (GVA), energy consumption and water use, as well as generation of waste are presented in the Tableau story as a sector percentage of EEA-33 gross total as well as percentage of country total. The trend in air and water pollution is presented as totals per pollutants relative to the latest year (2017). For the latest year the emissions are also given as percentage per sector relative to country total. The details on how the presented data is processed and aggregated is described in Annex 2.

 The report is to a large extent based on previous methodology reports for “Industrial pollution country profiles”, but is also further developed to reflect feedback received through Eionet review and general requests from EEA and the European Commission. 

[1] https://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/industry/industrial-pollution

[2] https://cdr.eionet.europa.eu/help/nomenclature_emission

[3] USEtox, 2017, 'USEtox (corrective release 2.1)' https://www.usetox.org/model/download/usetox2.1 accessed May 2019