Soil Protection in the EU According to the Directive on Industrial Emissions (IED) and Croatian Practice

Background and Purpose: Soil protection against pollution in EU is mostly covered in a new Directive on industrial emissions (IED), adopted on November 24, 2010 as a follow up of the IPPC Directive. For all industrial facilities that fall under IED, the Directive obliges the establishment of a complex system of management of contaminated soil at the national level, in order to facilitate the implementation of the principle of “polluter pays” furthermore to reduce the risk of contamination of soil and groundwater. Material and Methods: This paper presents an overview of soil management system that should be established in each EU country to fulfil IED requirements. It consists of a meta-analysis of IED requirements and current state and drawbacks of soil protection in Croatia including present state of legislation, responsibility of authorities, soil surveys and remediation activities. Results and Conclusions: IED set the obligation on the industrial operator before the start of production to prepare a report on the initial state of soil as a necessary requirement for obtaining environmental permit. It set obligations for monitoring of soil and groundwater status in the location of industrial facility for a period of ten (soil) and five years (groundwater). After the cessation of production, and in the case of exceeding critical limits of pollution, the operator is obliged to perform remediation or restitution of land in the state as it was at the beginning of production. Management of contaminated soil according to IED requirements obliges the Croatian government to establish a complex multi-level system. At first it requires better definition of responsibilities between two ministries; Ministry of Environmental and Nature protection and Ministry of Agriculture. IED requires enactment of adequate legal basis (i.e. Soil protection act) and the establishment of operational instruments for the implementation of soil protection, such as a register of contaminated soils and the accreditation of soil remediation experts