Solofra leather tanning district, go-ahead given for water purification

The sprinkling waters of the leather tanning district of Solofra will be able to be conveyed to the purification plant in Carpisano. The news was made official by the Regional Minister for the Environment of Regione Campania, Giovanni Romano, who has, therefore, accepted the requests coming from the territory and became the promoter of this solution.

One of the critical points of the Solofra district, which is one of the three leather tanning centres in Italy, as well as source of interest for the Campania economy, was related not only to the high costs for the environment for all the firms of the sector, but also to the increase in expenses coming from the segregation of the sprinkling waters and their transfer with specific tank trucks to suitable plants.

“We wonder – Romano says – if, with the realization of the important infrastructural interventions of adaptation that we have already done, it would be possible to rethink the Commissioner’s Order that in 1995 forbade the use of the purification plant”. The technical preliminary investigation has confirmed that the reasons leading the Commissioner Jucci to issue the provision for the segregation of sprinkling waters have failed. “We are pleased – he continues – that the Regione’s interventionism and the model of regulation adopted could represent a real help for the district economy, in stopping the drain on firms in the field of leather tanning”.

“It was an intensive work that – the Regional Minister for the Environment continued – involved the Regional Administration offices, but also Arpac and the other local Institutions concerned. A preliminary investigation gave us the possibility to verify the existence of the technical conditions that will allow the end of enormous sacrifices for the leather tanning firms, forced for 18 years to use tank trucks to transfer refluent waters”. It emerged, in fact, that the Solofra purification plant is technically suitable to receive and treat these sprinkling waters, that the separation of the industrial drainage system from the other sewer systems has been completed and, therefore, the refuse “segregation” is no longer necessary. “The procedures, carried out rigorously according to current laws – Romano concludes – are perfectly consistent with the rules of the sector: the release of production waters into public sewer has been determined by a rigorous verification of their quality and of their assimilability to urban waste (and no longer, therefore, to liquid waste)”.