tegandrew
Tourist
Reged: 07/09/05
Posts: 44
Loc: Sydney, Australia
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Placemark collection updated on 27 July 2008 with corrected locations for 737 sites based on community feedback via the website linked to from each balloon.
EPER is the European Pollutant Emission Register - the first European-wide register of industrial emissions into air and water.
This placemark collection contains information on the annual emissions of 11,099 industrial facilities in the 25 Member States of the EU and Norway for the year 2004.
Each balloon contains information on the name, address and activity (sector), as well as a table of emissions to air and water (direct or via a sewerage system).
To help compare one facility with another I have created a visual representation of the emissions from each site by extending a coloured polygon above the site. The width of the polygon is proportional to the number of substances emitted (reported) by each site. The height of the polygon is proportional to the size of the emissions. Red is for air emissions, blue for direct to water and yellow for indirect to water (sewerage). To calculate the height of the polygon I calculated the lognormal Z-score of each substance emitted relative to EU25 emissions. I then added the exponential of the log Z-scores for all the emissions of each site.
A red marker is used for the top polluters - these are sites that have an emission in the top 5% for that substance. There are 1076 such sites. These top 5% of emissions to air, water and land are highlighted in bold in each table. To avoid clutter with 11,000 placemarks I have used regions so that only the top polluters will always show and you need to zoom into about 1000km altitude to see the rest.
The coordinates provided by EPER are not always accurate. To improve this I used the Google Maps API to geocode all the premises that had an address and substituted the geocoded coordinates where there was either a good match or there was clearly some error with the coordinates. 2041 sites were geocoded in this way. Recognising that this would not have totally solved the problem I have also created a website that is linked to by each placemark where anyone can correct the location of a site.
Edited by tegandrew (07/27/08 07:06 AM)
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heamit
Master Cartographer
Reged: 10/26/06
Posts: 2333
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What a fascinating post. tegandrew! Thank you!  
5 stars from me for sure! 
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geveN
Cartographer
Reged: 03/08/07
Posts: 278
Loc: New Zealand
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hi tegandrew,
your post is as relevant as the posts on climate change and water level rising.............it seems that the GEC is one of the most informed/knowledgeable forum on the internet! thanks to posts such as this one. five globes from me.
How about more similar information on other parts of the world.
geveN
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geveN
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tegandrew
Tourist
Reged: 07/09/05
Posts: 44
Loc: Sydney, Australia
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This placemark collection is in the Google Earth Community Layer as of April 7 and I am now receiving lots of location corrections. Thank you everyone and I will update the collection this weekend.
Unfortunately, EPER has changed its URL address from http://www.eper.cec.eu.int/eper/ to http://www.eper.ec.europa.eu/eper/  and there is no redirect.
This means that all of the direct links from the GEC layer won't work. I have updated the collection with the new link, so please download it to get the greatest benefit from EPER.
Here's hoping it will be less than 4 months for the next GEC layer update. 
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tegandrew
Tourist
Reged: 07/09/05
Posts: 44
Loc: Sydney, Australia
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EPER issued a data update on 27 March 2008.
The collection above has been updated with this new data.
Major changes:
- 2292 sites have been removed, mainly small farms in Belgium and Cyprus and many sites in Germany and Portugal that were re-added with slightly different details.
- 2112 sites have been added, Norway is now included and it seems that Germany and Portugal have renumbered their sites.
- some corrected location data.
The poor quality of location data in the EPER database is becoming well known. This interesting paper discusses the problem in Spain (but no corrected coordinates are provided).
The comparison of emissions between sites is based on the (incorrect) assumption that the data is normally distributed. I believe it is much closer lognormal and EPER uses the Weibull distribution in its review report. I am planning to recreate the emission comparison using lognormal Z-values as curve fitting a Weibull distribution is a bit beyond my toolset. Are there any statisticians out there with tips or suggestions for making a fair comparison between sites?
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tegandrew
Tourist
Reged: 07/09/05
Posts: 44
Loc: Sydney, Australia
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As discussed in the above post, I have recalculated a comparison between sites assuming a log-normal distribution.
After some further reading and consideration I decided that using a normal distribution to compare sites was problematic as there are some very small emissions and very large ones. In order to linearise the data I took the natural logarithm of each emission, calculated the Z-scores using the sample mean and standard deviation, then summed exp(Z) for each site and medium (air, direct water, indirect water). I believe this provides a much more accurate means of comparing sites.
The updated collection has been added to the original post. I have also changed the way I have highlighted large emissions. These are emissions greater that 1.645 times the standard deviation. This is equivalent to the top 5%.
On this basis, the top 20 European pollution emitters are:
ILVA S.P.A. - TARANTO, Italy (Metal industry)
U.S.Steel s.r.o., Slovakia (Metal industry)
NOVACARB - LANEUVEVILLE-DEVANT-NANCY, France (Basic inorganic chemicals or fertilisers)
KEMIRA GROWHOW UK LTD - CHESTER, United Kingdom (Basic inorganic chemicals or fertilisers)
Zakady Chemiczne POLICE SA - Police, Poland (Basic inorganic chemicals or fertilisers)
Mittal Steel Ostrava a.s. - Ostrava, Czech Republic (Combustion installations > 50 MW)
ASSOCIATION OF LOCAL AUTHORITIES OF GREATER THESSALONIKI - , Greece (Disposal of non-hazardous waste and landfills )
Aluminium Pechiney Usine de Gardanne - GARDANNE, France (Metal industry)
BASF Gruppe - Ludwigshafen, Germany (Basic inorganic chemicals or fertilisers)
Narva Elektrijaamad AS - Vaivara vald, Estonia (Combustion installations > 50 MW)
Zakady Górniczo-Hutnicze S.A - Bukowno, Poland (Metal industry)
PPC S.A, SES AGIOY DHMHTRIOY, Greece (Combustion installations > 50 MW)
AB "Kaisiadoriu paukstynas" - Kaisiadorys, Lithuania (Poultry, pigs and sows )
voestalpine AG - Linz, Austria (Metal industry)
MITTAL STEEL POLAND S.A. - Dbrowa Górnicza, Poland (Metal industry)
YARA Sluiskil BV - SLUISKIL, Netherlands (Basic inorganic chemicals or fertilisers)
SOLVAY QUIMICA S.L. - CANTABRIA, Spain (Basic inorganic chemicals or fertilisers)
NTG (Paper Mill) Ltd - LANCASTER, United Kingdom (Pulp, paper or board production)
SIDMAR - Sint-Kruis-Winkel, Belgium (Metal industry)
Brunner Mond B.V. - Delfzijl, Netherlands (Basic inorganic chemicals or fertilisers)
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