Air pollution, the EU opens a new infringement procedure against Italy

On Wednesday 13 March, the European Commission launched a new procedure towards Italy, through which, by highlighting the failure to comply with the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union issued in 2020, it will be able to decide to refer Rome to the Court, with the request to impose financial sanctions.The infringement procedure comes for failure to comply with the obligations on air quality and gives to Italy two months' time to respond and fill the gaps that have been identified.The proceedings initiated yesterday are added to the referral of the last June relating to non-compliance with the directive on waste water, launched by the Commission because, despite the progress made, it believed that the efforts carried out by the Italian authorities were still "insufficient" to deal with the problem of water pollution.

The proceedings against Italy were notified with the monthly infringement package for the month of March.It was launched under Article 260 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union for the “continuous failure to satisfy The judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union of 10 November 2020", with which the same Court noted the failure to comply with the obligations relating to EU Air Quality Directive.These are located within the European Green Deal, than with his zero emissions goal “requires full implementation of air quality standards to effectively protect human health and safeguard the natural environment.”With the Air Quality Directive, the EU obliges Member States to respect the concentration limits of polluting agents such as particulates, adopting the necessary measures in order to reduce as much as possible the duration of the period in which the maximum threshold is exceeded. established value.Specifically, according to Brussels, despite the Court's ruling, in 2022 in Italy there were "twenty-four zones” which exceeded the daily pollution concentration limit values, while one area exceeded annual limits.

The infringement procedure on air quality is added to an already initiated procedure relating to water quality, notified to Italy in June 2023.This had already been advanced in Rome initially in June 2018, only to be recalled in July 2019.With yesterday's sanctions package, the Commission decided to refer Italy to the Court of Justice of the European Union due to failure to meet the requirements of the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive.This aims to “protect people's health and the environment by requiring that urban wastewater be collected and treated before being discharged into the environment”.According to the Commission, Italy has failed to fulfill its obligations under the Directive 179 agglomerations, while in another 36 it is yet to come a collection system has been developed of waters;in another 142 agglomerations, Italy is still unable to treat the water correctly which is collected, and in 12 of them the water is discharged into sensitive areas;finally, in 165 agglomerations, Italy fails to monitor satisfactorily that the water discharged respects, "over time, the required quality conditions".

The procedural notifications that arrived yesterday from the European Commission's monthly sanctions package merely validate a problem rooted in Italy, to such an extent that it seems to take on a structural character.The question of air quality has ended up at the center of the discussion several times, and has always highlighted the terrible weather conditions in which the citizens of the Bel Paese find themselves, especially those residing in the Po Valley, which is the area with the higher number of premature deaths relating to pollution, and even more specifically in the area of Milan.Also regarding water pollution, and especially with regards to the concentration of PFAS, Italy has a rather urgent problem:what was initially believed to be the isolated case of Veneto, in fact, it did not turn out to be such, so much so that serious water contamination by PFAS was also discovered in Lombardy and in Piedmont, and it is feared that the affected area is even larger.What makes the issue is structural it is not only the observation of the existence of a problem, but the lack of will in wanting to address it, as the case of water contamination in the Piedmont region, which seems to have been ready to sweep the dust under the carpet and sacrifice the protection of citizens' health in the name of its own reputation.

[by Dario Lucisano]