"In response to growing health and environmental concerns, industrial sectors are being subjected to increasing European environmental legislations, as in the case of the European IPPC Directive (Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control). Companies falling short from meeting the IPPC requirements risk penalties such as substantial fines. Unlike large enterprises, small and medium sized companies lack the necessary human resources and in-house technical knowledge to keep updated with such legislations. In order to abide to the law, these companies are obliged to seek assistance from environmental consultants. These services are very costly and time consuming, due to the extensive material required to compile IPPC applications. The ENVIRON-MENTOR project aims to assist environmental consultants in guiding their clients to implement environmental normative and standards in an efficient manner. ENVIRON-MENTOR will offer a web-based environmental consultancy toolkit (utilizing artificial intelligence techniques) to the participating end-user SMEs in order to help them in their daily activities. Apart from IPPC, ENVIRON-MENTOR will offer support on environmental management systems (EMS) and provides guidelines for EMS standards such as EMAS and ISO 14 000. ENVIRON-MENTOR will also target the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) by providing an automated platform for the trading of greenhouse gases. This will enable environmental consultants to offer an efficient emissions trading service to their clients. Guidance to these environmental normative and standards will be provided by using a knowledge-base expert system and multi-agent system targeted for this scenario. Four participating environmental consultants, an IT software company and three RTDs from eight different countries have joined forces to develop this system."