EU states agree to cut smog and acid pollution
© 2000 Reuters Limited
June 23, 2000
BRUSSELS - The 15 countries of the European Union agreed yesterday to strengthen new limits on the amount of health-damaging air pollution their industries can emit - going further than a 1999 pan-European agreement.
The commitments, which the European Parliament still has to agreed on and which are calling for even stricter limits, aim to ease the city smog causing breathing difficulties, reduce acid rain and cut river and lake pollution.
The draft legislation sets individual limits for each country for sulphur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), ammonia and volatile organic compounds, the same pollutants targeted by a United Nations protocol that European governments signed in Gothenburg, Sweden, in December.
The member of the EU executive in charge of the environment, Margot Wallstrom, had been pushing EU countries to go further than the Gothenburg protocol, which was also signed by central and eastern European countries.
"We want to congratulate countries that went further than the Gothenburg protocol," Wallstrom told a news conference. "This will mean a significant contribution to tackle the kind of air pollution that really affects human health."
Alongside the emissions limits that must be reached by 2010, the ministers approved draft legislation to clean up emissions from EU power stations and large industrial boilers, among the biggest sources of of SO2, NOx and dust.
The new rules would make emissions limits for modern plants twice as strict as they are at present. Plants licensed before 1987 would be covered by EU legislation from 2008 for the first time.
Wallstrom said the package of measures would take the EU more than half way towards meeting its health-related targets for summer smog and two-thirds of the way towards meeting acidification targets.