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Pollution prevention advice and guidance

Our advice to industry and the public on your legal responsibilities and good environmental practice.

The Environment Agency, in partnership with the Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), has written a range of Pollution Prevention Guidance Notes (PPGs).

Each PPG gives advice on the law and good environmental practice, to help reduce environmental risks from business activities. PPGs:

  • are used by our staff to help customers when we visit businesses and when we answer queries;
  • provide up-to-date technical and legal compliance advice to help achieve consistent good environmental practice;
  • set out our national position on a range of activities;
  • are used to support compliance with permit conditions.

We've written other quick-reference technical information notes on a range of topics, including the storage and use of emission reduction solutions (for example, AdBlue) and wheeled waste container cleaning.

Obtaining copies of PPGs

You can download PDF copies of our guidance from the links below.

Hard copies of most PPGs can be ordered, subject to availability, in one of the following ways:

Please check our online versions regularly to make sure you have the latest copy.

Guidance updates

As we review and update our guidance we will consult widely to make sure it meets the needs of our readers. Information about our current consultations is available online.

We welcome feedback about these guidelines even when we aren't reviewing them. Please email us if you have any comments or suggestions for improvement:

We've changed the order of our guidance on this page to follow the activities in Is your site right? 10-point checklist and in the document Pollution Prevention Pays. 

Guidance on general good environmental practice

Guidance for storing and handling materials and products

See also:

See also: 

Guidance for managing your waste

Guidance for site drainage, dealing with sewage and trade effluents

Guidance to help you plan to deal with accidents and emergencies

Guidance for specific businesses

Downloading this guidance:

As with all large PDFs this guidance will download and work more quickly if you:

  • Download it using a fast internet connection, for example, download it and save it when you are in an office, rather than using remote access, such as 3G.
  • Wait for the guidance to fully download and then save it to your hard drive or memory stick, rather than trying to open and use it before saving.
  • Ensure you have an up-to-date version of Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader/Writer.

Using this guidance:

You can type directly into the checklists to record actions and references. If you have Adobe Writer then you can save any changes you make. If you have Adobe Reader you can only print your changes.

If you have any further queries, please contact our National Customer Contact Centre on 03708 506 506 (Monday-Friday 8am-6pm).

  • Managing concrete wash waters on construction sites guidance (issued June 2011) (PDF, 112KB)
    We have produced additional guidance about dealing with concrete washwaters on construction sites.

    Environment Agency Technical Information Notes

    Tell us what you think

    We welcome feedback about the guidance for these topics. Please email us if you have any comments or suggestions for additional guidance we could consider directing people to:

    Withdrawn guidance and further pollution prevention information

    Information about guidance we’ve withdrawn, and alternative sources of pollution prevention information.