Best Available Techniques (BATs) in Europe have become crucial for the industrial sectors concerned with the Industrial Emission Di rective (IED) and for other sectors like the nuclear industry. In the IED, the creation and revision process to define a list of BATs which will be used as a reference by operators and environmental authorities is known as the “Sevilla Process”. The decisi on process is based upon exchange of information between stakeholders, analysis of data and expert judgement. Several methods to assess technique performances compared to BATs from reference documents or to support the determination and the application of BATs have been developed. However, existing tools integrate either the European or the local level but not both levels. This situation makes the application of BATs highly dependable of expert judgements. In order to contribute to strengthen the robustness of BAT determination and application, the authors argue that there is a need for an integrated method to help to define a list of BATs and to support the decision for their application. This paper first introduces the context in which the BAT concept is u sed. In a second section, a methodological approach to analyse an industrial sector so as to identify its key environmental issues is presented. Then, the results of this sectoral analysis are used to select installations considered as representative of th ese issues in a view of illustrating the current situation in the sector and fuelling the discussions between experts. To illustrate the latter section, examples from the Food Drink and Milk and the nuclear industry are given. Finally, the proposed methodo logy to analyse an industrial sector and to select installations which are representative of key environmental issues is discussed and perspectives for selecting BATs are given.