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These are the appropriate measures for the environmental management of a regulated facility with an environmental permit to mechanically treat metal waste in shredders.
1. You must have and follow an up-to-date, written management system. It must incorporate the following features.
You plan and establish the resources, procedures, objectives and targets needed for environmental performance alongside your financial planning and investment.
You implement environmental performance procedures, paying particular attention to:
You check environmental performance and take corrective action paying particular attention to:
Senior managers review the management system to check it is still suitable, adequate and effective.
You review the development of cleaner technologies and their applicability to site operations.
When designing new plant, you make sure you assess the environmental impacts from the plant’s operating life and eventual decommissioning.
You consider the risks a changing climate poses to your operations. You have appropriate plans in place to assess and manage future risks.
You compare your site’s performance against relevant sector guidance and standards on a regular basis, known as sectoral benchmarking.
You have and maintain the following documentation:
If required, you have and maintain the following documentation:
1. Your site must be operated at all times by an adequate number of staff with appropriate qualifications and competence.
2. The design, installation and maintenance of infrastructure, plant and equipment must be carried out by competent people.
3. You must have appropriately qualified managers for your waste activity who are either:
4. Non-supervisory staff must be reliable and technically skilled. Their skills may be based on experience and relevant training.
1. As part of your management system you must have a plan for dealing with any incidents or accidents that could result in pollution.
2. The accident management plan must identify and assess the risks the facility poses to human health and the environment.
Areas to consider may include:
3. You must assess the risk of accidents and their possible consequences. Risk is the combination of the likelihood that a hazard will occur and the severity of the impact resulting from that hazard. Having identified the hazards, you can assess the risks by addressing 6 questions:
4. In particular, you must identify any fire risks that may be caused, for example by:
This list is not exhaustive and you must have a fire prevention plan that identifies the risks at your site and meets the requirements of our fire prevention plan guidance.
The depth and type of accident risk assessment you do will depend on the characteristics of the plant and its location. The main factors to take into account are the:
5. Through your accident management plan, you must also identify the roles and responsibilities of the staff involved in managing accidents. You must provide them with clear guidance on how to manage each accident scenario.
6. You must appoint one facility employee as an emergency co-ordinator who will take lead responsibility for implementing the plan. You must train your employees so they can perform their duties effectively and safely and know how to respond to an emergency.
You must take the following measures, where appropriate, to prevent events that may lead to an accident.
1. You must have clear and detailed procedures for pre-acceptance and acceptance of waste and for rejected and quarantined wastes.
2. These should be produced and maintained as set out in the waste pre-acceptance, acceptance and tracking appropriate measures section.
3. You must keep apart incompatible wastes. Examples could include but are not limited to:
4. You must make sure you contain the following (where appropriate) or route to the effluent system (where necessary):
5. You must be able to contain surges and storm water flows. You must provide enough buffer storage capacity to make sure you can achieve this. You can define this capacity using a risk-based approach, for example, by taking into account the:
6. You can only discharge waste water from this buffer storage after you have taken appropriate measures, to control, treat or reuse the water.
7. You must have spill contingency procedures to minimise the risk of an accidental emission of raw materials, products and waste materials, and to prevent their entry into water.
8. Your emergency firefighting water collection system must take account of additional firefighting water flows or firefighting foams. You may need emergency storage lagoons to prevent contaminated firefighting water reaching a receiving water body. This should be considered as part of your fire prevention plan.
9. You must consider and, if appropriate, plan for the possibility that you need to contain or abate accidental emissions from:
If this is not advisable on safety grounds, you must focus on reducing the probability of the emission.
10. You must have security measures in place to prevent:
11. Facilities must use an appropriate combination of the following measures:
12. There are 3 fire prevention objectives. You must:
13. You must have a fire prevention plan that meets the requirements of our guidance.
14. You must maintain plant control in an emergency using one or a combination of the following measures:
1. You must have and implement a contingency plan and management procedures to make certain you comply with all your permit conditions and operating procedures during maintenance or shutdown at your site.
2. Your contingency plan must also contain provisions and procedures to make sure that you:
3. Your contingency plan must include plans and procedures for circumstances where you cannot send your wastes to other sites due to their planned or unplanned shutdown.
4. If you produce an end-of-waste material at your facility, your contingency planning must consider issues with storage capacity for end-of-waste products. Iron, steel, aluminium and copper produced in accordance with the end-of-waste regulations remain waste and subject to waste controls until they are passed to the next holder.
You must make your customers aware of your contingency plan, and of the circumstances in which you would stop accepting waste from them.
5. You must consider whether the sites or companies you rely on in your contingency plan:
6. Where circumstances mean you could exceed your permitted storage limits or compromise your storage procedures, you must look for alternative disposal or recovery options. You must not discount alternative disposal or recovery options on the basis of extra cost or geographical distance.
7. You must not include unauthorised capacity in your contingency plan. If your contingency plan includes using temporary storage for additional waste on your site, then you must:
8. Your management procedures and contingency plan must also:
9. Your management system must include procedures for auditing your performance against all these contingency measures and for reporting the audit results to the site manager.
1. You must consider the decommissioning of the plant at the design stage and make suitable plans to minimise risks during later decommissioning.
For existing plant, identify potential decommissioning risks and take steps to address these. You should make changes and design improvements as and when plant is upgraded, or when construction and development works are carried out at your site.
Examples of design improvements could include avoiding using underground tanks and pipework. If it is not economically possible to replace them, you must protect them by secondary containment or a suitable monitoring programme.
2. You must have, and maintain, a decommissioning plan to demonstrate that:
3. Your decommissioning plan should include details on:
4. You should make sure that equipment taken out of use is decontaminated and removed from the site.
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