The Implementation of IPPC Directive in the Mediterranean Area

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In Europe industrial activities are amongst the main causative factors of pollution. Until 1996 European Member States adopted separate regulations and multiple authorizations to address pollution control and prevention, and different laws separately dealt with air, water and soil issues, thus providing only partial solutions to the problem. The Council Directive 96/61/EC of 24 September 1996, on Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC Directive1) aims at the integrated pollution prevention and control within European Member States (Schoenberger, 2009) starting from the activities listed in the annex I of the Directive (Honkasalo et al., 2005), which consider all environmental aspects (air, water, soil, waste, etc.) as a whole and unique integrated system. According to this approach, the Directive introduces a single authorization (Styles, et al., 2009) the Integrated Environmental Authorization – the so-called “permit” to regulate the “environmental behaviour” of IPPC-related activities, to determine parameters of environmental aspects and establish measures to avoid or reduce environmental impact. Thanks to this Directive, European Member States shall correctly manage all aspects of industrial activity likely to generate environmental impacts, under the same administrative procedure in order to be granted the above mentioned permit. The industrial activities listed in annex I of the law include six main topics: energy production, production and processing of metals, minerals, chemical, waste management and others activities – e.g. pulp and paper, pre-treatment or dyeing of textile fibres or textiles, tanning of hides and skins, intensive pig and poultry farming, surface treatments of substances, objects or products by means of organic solvents -. The Directive is addressed mostly at large installations, and indicates production capacity thresholds that exclude the smallest installations (Samarakoon & Gudmestad, 2011). This law lays down measures to prevent or, whereas not viable, to reduce emissions in air, water and land from the above-mentioned activities, as well as measures concerning waste, in order to achieve an overall high level of environmental protection (European Commission, 2008). The Directive thus provides an holistic approach to pollution prevention.