Historical overview and main features
Industrial Emissions
In order to ensure that vehicles or other mobile goods could be traded and used all over EU, it was necessary to fix EU-wide emission limit values which each vehicle had to comply with. In contrast, the situation with industrial installations was different: as industrial installations did not themselves circulate within EU, the legislator in Directive 2010/75/EC limited itself to requiring that they comply, as regards the emission of air pollutants, with the best available technique not entailing excessive costs.
This formula gave local, regional and national authorities sufficient flexibility when they issued permits for an industrial installation, to fix emission limit conditions that took into consideration local economic, social and environmental considerations. Progressively, EU-wide orientations were elaborated to specify, for the different industrial installations, what was meant by the "best available technique".