Abstract
The European Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Bureau produces reference documents on Best Available Techniques, called BREFs. These documents give technical and descriptive information about the installations that represent a significant pollution potential in Europe. However, they do not provide an assessment of the Best Available Techniques, which is a decision to be made by the competent environmental authority. The present work proposes a decision-making process for assessing Best Available Techniques based on the Analytic Network Process. Seven evaluation criteria, grouped into three clusters, have been proposed. The process is applied to a case study and the results are described and analyzed. As a main conclusion, this paper describes a robust and scientific method for a better implementation of the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control approach. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.