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The Best Available Techniques (BAT) concept first emerged in the 1960s. It primarily serves as a tool for preventing industrial pollution and setting conditions for Integrated Environmental Permits for larger industrial installations. BAT include technological, technical and managerial solutions aimed to prevent or control pollution and provide for high resource and energy efficiency (EE) of production processes and minimisation of waste. Lessons learnt by various countries prove that the BAT concept has potential for a much wider application, going beyond pollution prevention and control. This paper considers opportunities opened up by BAT with respect to achieving several of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). These opportunities form a ‘BAT flower’, petals of which are discussed in the paper. Internationally, the BAT concept is becoming an effective environmental policy instrument, and is gradually strengthening its position in the development of industrial policy. Stringent BAT requirements do not jeopardise industrial development and economic growth, but help harmonising progress towards SDG 8: Sustainable Economic Growth. Smart application of BAT requires reduction of pollution and enhanced EE. This also provides for the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions though regulatory instruments for climate change mitigation and industrial pollution often are separate, both at the national and international levels. BAT-based programmes for EE enhancement and GHG emissions reduction function in the European Union (EU), the United States (US) and Canada, making BAT a powerful instrument for energy and climate policies used to achieve SDG 13: Climate Action. Circular economy entails gradually decoupling economic activity from the consumption of finite resources, and designing waste out of the system. BAT require minimisation of waste in all technological processes and provides advice for replacing raw materials by waste in many industrial sectors (metallurgy, construction materials industry, energy generation, etc.). Thereby BAT contribute towards achieving SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production; in particular, through the reduction of releases of chemicals, BAT support target 12.4. Important results have been achieved within green chemistry due to the application of techniques reducing or eliminating the use or generation of hazardous substances in the design, manufacture and application of chemical products. Increasingly, countries apply green chemistry principles to identify BAT. Chemical products are used in all sectors of the economy; and are crucial for both industrial and rural development, protection of terrestrial ecosystems and prevention of soil degradation. Implementation of BAT is required by international and regional conventions, such as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution, the Minamata Convention of Mercury and the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic. This helps promote SDG 17: Global Partnership for Sustainable Development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Russia, industrial policy is the strategic effort of the government to encourage the development and growth of the manufacturing sector aimed at making it innovative, internationally competitive and sustainable. New regulatory instruments have been gradually developed and used for 5-7 years; this period is sometimes addressed as ‘the national neo-industrialisation’. In advanced industrial countries, environmental modernisation theory is often considered as a possible solution to the key environmental problems. It assumes that regulation can help to minimise environmental impacts while making industry more competitive. In theory, this can be achieved if regulation encourages the development and application of innovative technologies and production techniques. Environmental industrial policy (EIP) as the effort to encourage the fundamental change in resource efficiency and environmental performance of the industrial sector, has to help companies to overcome the considerable barriers to innovation which prevent them from moving beyond ‘end-of pipe’ techniques to consider cleaner technologies, from complementing technological change with organisational change and from exploring the strategic as well as the operational opportunities for improvement. The concept of Best Available Techniques (BAT) and Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) is seen as one of the key instruments of the modern EIP. Since industrial sectors show substantial variation in resource consumption (efficiency) and pollution impacts, and EIP instruments applied to encourage industrial development and to minimise industry's burdens on the environment need to be ‘tailor-made’, supporting innovation and cleaner production and leading to the internalisation of external costs caused by pollution and over-consumption of natural resources. Internationally, there are examples of combined economic and environmental improvement in industry as a result of the implementation of BAT and IPPC, particularly where expert community and even environmental inspectors have helped to develop the capacity of regulated companies to respond to the regulation. Still, EIP while encouraging technological and organisational changes, often fails to establish the environment as a strategic concern in industry. This is why special incentives are needed to promote the radical innovations that are associated with the environmental modernisation in the longer-term. Forming its EIP, Russian policy makers study lessons learnt by the international community moving the industry toward the best performance that is technologically possible and environmentally sustainable and look for the informative macro-indicators that can prove (or disapprove) that the industrial strategy and business environmental reform can be compatible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Best Available Techniques (BAT) have been used as the instrument of the industrial emissions minimisation and environmental modernisation of industry since the 90s. Researchers and practitioners believe that the most advanced methods of the BAT assessment have been developed and implemented under the European Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) and Industrial Emissions Directives. BATs in the European Union are defined and revised through an official framework: the Sevilla Process. It sets a step-by-step procedure of information exchange among stakeholders supported by data analysis and expert judgements. In the Russian Federation, BATs are established through a similar process involving experts, regulators, industry as well as non-governmental organisations, universities and research centres. When BATs and BAT-associated emission (BAT-AEL) and performance levels (BAT-EPL) are defined and systematised in the Reference Documents on Best Available Techniques (BREF), regulatees need to assess their performance and to make sure that the installations are compliant with the officially established BATs. Therefore, two groups of BAT assessment methods are distinguished. They differ in scope (industrial sector or installation level), area of application (national, sectoral or installation) and objectives. Regulators and practitioners look for methods that are applicable at industrial sector level with a qualitative or quantitative approach, or at installation level in order to assess and compare performances or to find the most appropriate technique in a given situation. In Russia, BAT assessment objectives at the industrial sector level include: (1) analysis of sector-related performance and emission levels; (2) comparison of candidate BATs and BAT-AELs; (3) determination of sectoral BATs and BAT-AELs and establishing legally bind requirements. All application areas include adaptation of the internationally approved methodologies and development of the national approaches (including those specific for the new IPPC areas not covered by the European BREFs). At the installation level, BAT assessment objectives comprise (1) performance comparison between the installation and BATs; (2) applicable technique(s) selection; and (3) performance evaluation according to local conditions. At both levels, multicriteria decision-making process has to be applied. At the installation level, performance comparison with BATs is required to determine whether significant improvements are necessary or can wait. In order to quantify the performances of BAT, energy, material flows and environmental aspects have to be analysed. The success of the selection of techniques through multi-criteria decision-making depends on the choice of criteria and their weighting made by a group of BAT experts. Consideration of local conditions for application at installation level is important in selecting ways to apply or discard BATs determined at national scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Russian Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) legislation has come into forth at the beginning of 2018. In 2015-2017, 51 Information and Technical Reference Books on Best Available Techniques (BREFs) had been developed and officially approved. About 6,500 installations of various sectors had been registered as IPPC (or Category I) installations. In 2019-2025, all of them will be obliged to demonstrate compliance with requirements of Best Available Techniques (BATs) set by respective sector BREFs and to obtain Integrated Environmental Permits (IEPs). To provide for the professional and unbiased assessment of IEP applications and render support of the national environmental authorities, it is suggested forming a special body managed by the Russian BAT Bureau, namely the Society of BAT Experts. Chartered BAT experts will represent knowledgeable, experienced, competent and committed BAT professionals. Leading teams and departments, advising governments and working as hands on practitioners, they will use their specialist knowledge and broader technological, technical and environmental engineering understanding to apply sustainable thinking throughout their daily working life. But most importantly, members of this Society will be called to assess IEP applications of Category I industries in sectors where they are most experienced and can provide their professional advice. The core of the BAT Expert Society has already begun working: 51 BREFs developed just for 3 years had been prepared by knowledgeable, experienced and committed sector and multidisciplinary experts who demonstrated their ability to run comparative assessments of the environmental performance and resource efficiency of Russian industries, select candidate BATs and reach agreement with stakeholders on sector BATs and BAT-AELs. This, high level of skill and experience, independence and discipline of BAT experts have already been proven. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU Reference Books of Best Available Techniques and the RF Information and Technical Books on Best Available Technologies (Techniques) are technical documents presenting factual technical, environmental and economic information, reflecting the outcomes of the information exchange under requirements of the EU Industrial Emissions Directive and the RF legislation in the field of environmental protection (namely - in the area of Best Available Techniques (BAT) and Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC)) and standardisation. The main actors of the two BREF development processes are rather similar, and in both cases the role of the European IPPC Bureau and the Russian BAT Bureau is to coordinate the exchange of information and to ensure that information is collected and processed according to the guidance documents in order to draw up or to review the BREFs. For each BREF, the scientific staff of the European IPPC Bureau and researchers working at/with the Russian BAT Bureau lead the work of sector-oriented or inter-sectoral TWGs. The Russian BREFs are very similar to the EU ones both by their structure, contents, and criteria for selecting BATs and BAT-associated emission levels (BAT-AELs). Both in the EU and in the RF, chapters containing descriptions of BATs and BAT-AELs are the crucial elements of BREFs; in addition, BAT conclusions are published in the EU as Commission Implementing Decisions. The expert judgement remains the key principle of setting quantitative requirements to BAT-associated emission levels. To optimise the number of pollutants regulated and to attract attention to the most substantial ones, a concept of marker parameters has been developed and used for drawing up BREFs and setting BAT-AELs in Russia. Marker parameters are individual or integral parameters, characteristic of applied technological processes, reflecting peculiarities of these processes and significant for assessing production environmental performance and resource efficiency. They are selected using clear criteria and justified for each BREF/IPPC-regulated production process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]