Contaminated sites

What we use

The regional register of contaminated sites: the list of areas where a survey found pollution above the legal thresholds and where a clean-up procedure is open or has been closed with the authority's certificate.

So far we have imported two regions:

• Lombardy, which publishes 1,077 contaminated sites and 3,067 already cleaned up, in the public domain, with the municipality and the street;
• Piedmont, which publishes 1,500 sites under CC BY 4.0, with the point where each one lies and the substances found.

Other regions will follow one at a time: each Region keeps its own register, in its own format and under its own licence. Both keep themselves up to date: Piedmont rebuilds its file every month and the report picks it up within a week, Lombardy publishes one edition a year.

How we use it

The report says how many sites are recorded in the municipality of the property and how many have been cleaned up. Then it depends on what the Region publishes:

• in Lombardy it lists the open sites with their name, their type (disused industrial areas, illegal landfills, fuel stations and so on) and their street;
• in Piedmont it lists the open sites within one kilometre of the address, nearest first, with the distance, the cause and the substances found. It keeps sites with clean-up under way apart from those still under investigation, where the pollution is still being looked for: they are almost half.

Sites that have been cleaned up are counted but not listed: those are closed cases, and lining them up with the others would make the municipality look full of open problems.

How far they are from the home

In Piedmont the distance is measured from the point the Region uses to mark the site: it is the authority's figure, not an estimate of ours. For a large area the boundary can be closer than the point, and the report says so.

In Lombardy the register gives the municipality and an address written by hand by different offices over twenty years ("via Pertini", "vie Zama/Salomone"), which is why the count stays by municipality. Turning that address into a point can be done, but it has to be measured first: where there is a house number you get within a metre, where there is only a street name you get within hundreds of metres, and a contaminated site put in the wrong place inside a report is far worse than a contaminated site not shown. In the meantime the street is there, written as the register writes it: anyone who knows the area will recognise it.

Where there is no coverage

Outside the regions we have imported, the report says that we have not looked, which is different from "there are no sites". No open national list exists: ISPRA gathers the data from every region in the MOSAICO project, but what it publishes is a viewer, not a service you can download from.

Limits

• The register lists recognised sites, that is the ones where a survey and a procedure took place. An area never surveyed is not in it, and that holds in every region.
• The count by municipality describes the municipality, not the street: in Milan there are hundreds of sites and they concern few addresses.
• To find out whether an area really affects the property you are buying, ask the municipality or the regional environmental agency (ARPA), which hold the file.

Official pages: Regione Lombardia open data and the contaminated site register on the Piedmont Geoportal.