Air pollutant emissions affect air quality, can form acids in the environment or promote the excessive accumulation of nutrients (eutrophication) in ecosystems. Human health can also be burdened by this.

As an operator of certain industrial plants, you must therefore regularly declare the air pollutant emissions emitted by your plants to the competent authority.

The emission declaration must be submitted to the competent authority in electronic form every 4 years (by 31.05 of the year following the declaration year).

The emission declaration contains information on relevant air pollutants, i.e. on the

• Kind
• quantity and
• spatial and temporal distribution of emissions.

The Federal Immission Control Act (BImSchG) provides information on which companies must submit an emission declaration.

As an operator of certain industrial and agricultural enterprises requiring approval, you are obliged to submit an emission declaration on a regular basis (§ 27 BImSchG).

Please note the following requirements:

• Installations requiring approval are defined in the Fourth Ordinance on the Implementation of the Federal Immission Control Act and can be viewed in Annex 1 of the Ordinance (4th BImSchV).
• As the operator of a plant listed in § 1 of the 11th BImSchV, you are not obliged to make a declaration.
• Operators of installations requiring approval who operated their installations during the declaration period are obliged to submit an emission declaration (§ 4 paragraph 3 of the 11th BImSchV).
  • If the plant is commissioned, shut down or temporarily not operated during the declaration period, the declaration period includes the parts of the calendar year in which the plant was operated.
• As an operator of a plant requiring approval, you can apply to the competent authority to be exempted from the obligation to submit an emission declaration if, in individual cases, your plant can only cause air pollution to a small extent (§ 6 of the 11th BImSchV).

Submit emission declaration online:

In order to simplify the electronic reporting of environmental data, you as a reporting company can submit your data online via the "Betriebliche Umweltdatenberichterstattung" (BUBE). BUBE is operated as a cooperation between the 16 federal states and the federal government under the Administrative Agreement for the Development and Operation of Environmental Information Systems (VKoopUIS).