Publications

This report gives an overview of three workshops which were held in May and June 2001 in Berlin following the submission of the Umweltbundesamt (Federal Environmental Agency) study "Substituting Environmentally Relevant Flame Retardants: Assessment Fundamentals“ (Umweltbundesamt Texte [Federal Environmental Agency publications] 25/01 – 27/01; Vol. I in English: Umweltbundesamt Texte 40/01).

The extensive detection of hazardous substances in wastewater discharges of the industry requires a concerted combination of chemical and biological analyses beyond those established in the German Wastewater Ordinance or any other European water regulation/legislation.

With the Twelfth Ordinance on the Implementation of the Federal Pollution Control Act, which came into force on 3.5.2000, the Hazardous Incidents Ordinance in the version of 20 September 1991 was reformulated.

On September, 24th, 1996 the Council of the European Communities issued Directive 96/61/EC on Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC-D) [25]. This directive aims at the integrated reduction and prevention of environmental pollution emitted by industrial installations with a high potential of emissions into the environmental media air, water and soil.

More than four years ago the European Union (EU) decided to start negotiations on accession with possible new member countries. The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia were the first countries to be accepted into the formal accession process. There countries are accordingly the called Accession Countries.

The present study, "Substituting Environmentally Relevant Flame Retardants: Assessment Fundamentals", was commissioned by the German Federal Environmental Agency (Umweltbundesamt, UBA) and prepared during the period from September 1998 to December 2000.

Between 1990 and 2000 greenhouse gas emissions in Germany and the UK decreased by more than 18 % and about 12 %, respectively. Thus, Germany and the UK appear to be among the few industrialised countries which are on track to meet the emission reduction targets they have committed themselves to under the Kyoto Protocol and the subsequent European Union’s Burden Sharing Agreement.

Multi-nutrient fertilizers have increasingly gained importance in the last decades mainly for economic reasons, but also due to technical and physiological aspects. According to the type of manufacture, they are divided into mixed fertilizers and complex fertilizers.

This document comprises the contribution of Germany to the exchange of information in the European Union on the use of Best Available Techniques (BAT) to control the environmental impact of industrial processes and describes the production of urea.

The annual world production of sodium carbonate (soda) amounted to approximately 31,5 million tons in 1993. The main share is synthetic soda. Nowadays it is only manufactured by means of the Solvay technology, which – as it uses NH3 as auxiliary material – is also called „ammonia soda process“. Approximately 35 % of the world production is natural soda, mainly manufactured in the USA.

The manufacture of sodium perborate takes place as tetrahydrate at first, which is converted in a second process to monohydrate by means of dehydration. Both compounds, the tetrahydrate as well as the monohydrate can be used for the production of detergents. The monohydrate is also used for the manufacture of dishwashing detergents.

Two different types of processes are used for the production of titanium dioxide in Germany : the sulfate process and the chloride process. In Germany, titanium dioxide is produced at four plants, three of them apply the sulfate process, one of them uses the sulfate as well as the chloride process.