Industrial emissions: transposition overdue, and the Italian text says less

If your plant runs a pyrolysis unit, a forging hammer, a forging press, a cold-rolling line or a battery cell line, a date went past on 1 July that concerns you and that nobody sent you: the deadline by which Italy had to bring into force the rules pulling those activities into the authorisation regime for industrial emissions. As at 27 September 2026 no transposition measure is recorded as notified for Italy. It expired all the same.

The deadline, word for word

Directive (EU) 2024/1785 amends 2010/75/EU on industrial emissions and 1999/31/EC on landfill. Published on 15 July 2024, it is in force since 4 August 2024 — the date recurring in every transitional paragraph. Article 4(1), in Italian: «Gli Stati membri mettono in vigore le disposizioni legislative, regolamentari e amministrative necessarie per conformarsi alla presente direttiva entro il 1º luglio 2026.» — the laws, regulations and administrative provisions needed to comply, by 1 July 2026.

The activities coming in for the first time

Annex I to 2010/75/EU — the list that triggers the permit — is rewritten in several places. Point 1.4 now covers gasification, liquefaction or pyrolysis of coal and of «altri combustibili in installazioni con una potenza termica nominale totale pari o superiore a 20 MW» (other fuels in installations with a total rated thermal input of 20 MW or more). Point 2.3 gains letter (aa), «attività di laminazione a freddo con una capacità superiore a 10 tonnellate di acciaio grezzo all’ora» (cold rolling above 10 t/h of crude steel), and letter (ba), «attività di forgiatura con presse per fucinare la cui forza è superiore a 30 mega-newton (MN) per pressa» (forging presses above 30 MN per press). Point 3.6 is new: extraction and on-site treatment of fifteen minerals, from bauxite to lithium to tungsten. Point 2.7 is new too: «Fabbricazione di batterie, diversa dal solo assemblaggio, con una capacità di produzione pari o superiore a 15 000 tonnellate di celle di batterie (catodo, anodo, elettrolita, separatore, capsula) all’anno.» (battery manufacture other than mere assembly, from 15 000 tonnes of cells a year).

Seven Member States out of twenty-seven

As at 27 September 2026 a query on the Cellar database, cross-checked against the EUR-Lex transposition page, returns seven Member States: Czechia 33 measures, Sweden 16 (all notified on 16 July 2026), Finland 10, Lithuania 7, Belgium 1, Greece 1 (declared partial), Austria 1. The Czech figure includes measures notified from 2004 onwards: pre-existing rules linked to the directive, not thirty-three new acts.

For the other twenty, Italy among them, the page reports zero measures, and our query returns zero rows with the positive control passing: on Sweden it gives sixteen. That says no Italian measure is recorded as notified on that date; it does not say no Italian rule exists, because the database records communications to the Commission, which can lag behind national legislation.

The point 2.7 the Italian text does not have

On 15 September 2026 the Commission published a questions-and-answers communication on the directive (C/2026/4834), over fourteen thousand words. Q46 lists the activities covered by Article 3(4) — the transitional paragraph granting «entro quattro anni dalla pubblicazione delle decisioni sulle conclusioni sulle BAT […] o entro il 1º settembre 2034, se anteriore» (four years from the decisions on BAT conclusions, or 1 September 2034, whichever is earlier) — and among them puts «fabbricazione di batterie (allegato I, punto 2.7)». Q53 repeats it.

The Italian text of Article 3 does not say so. Paragraph 4 covers installations carrying out the activities «di cui all’allegato I, punto 1.4, punto 2.3, lettere b) e b bis), e punto 3.6». In its roughly 1,170 words the string «2.7» never appears, nor does the word batterie: we counted.

So we opened the same paragraph in the other languages. English: «points 1.4, 2.3(b), 2.3(ba), 2.7 and 3.6». Swedish: «punkterna 1.4, 2.3 b, 2.3 ba, 2.7 och 3.6». French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch do the same. Seven versions out of seven, among those we read, place battery manufacture in that paragraph. The Italian one does not.

So this is not a divergence between the Commission and the directive: the Q&A is aligned with the seven versions we compared. The Italian text stands alone. Which version prevails is not ours to settle: a European act has twenty-four texts, all equally authentic. The operational fact is simpler: whoever in Italy reads Article 3 finds a paragraph that does not name them.

On 22 September, five days ago, a corrigendum appeared (L 2026/90789), in the Italian and Hungarian versions only: it corrects two passages on water service operators — recital 19 and Article 7 — and leaves Article 3 alone. Which still carries, in paragraph 2, «detengono un’autorizzazione prima del 1º luglo 2026»: luglo for luglio, once.

The Q&A, for its part, states its own limits: «Non è giuridicamente vincolante, in quanto soltanto la Corte di giustizia dell’Unione europea può fornire un’interpretazione autentica del diritto dell’Unione.» (not legally binding; only the Court of Justice can give an authentic interpretation of Union law). And it warns that it takes no account of proposal COM(2025) 986 of 10 December 2025, amending 2010/75/EU «con lo scopo di semplificare alcune prescrizioni e ridurre gli oneri amministrativi» (to simplify requirements and cut administrative burden).

What can be prepared meanwhile

Which rule applies to you today is a legal assessment, signed by whoever does that for a living. Before it, three things can be put in order.

The inventory. Every plant activity set against revised Annex I, with the number deciding the threshold beside it: thermal megawatts, kilojoules per hammer, meganewtons per press, tonnes an hour of rolling, tonnes a year of cells. Not the remembered estimate: the measured figure, with source and date.

The dates. The transitional paragraphs sort cases on three references: in operation before 4 August 2024; in operation and permitted before 1 July 2026; a complete application filed before 1 July 2026 and put into operation by 1 July 2027.

The version read. For each activity, which text you consulted, in which language, on which date: on point 2.7 the answer changes with the column you open.

How we close it

On the complying axis: that inventory is not a spreadsheet somebody updates from memory. It is a control running over your documents and systems — technical files, maintenance records, process data, permits in force — tying each activity to the Annex I row that catches it, with the threshold, the measured value, and the language and date of the text checked. When the Italian rule arrives, or a corrigendum shifts a row, the reference changes and the work is not redone: what remains is a dated trail for an inspection, not an opinion in a drawer.

On the deciding axis: the same setup holds in one operating model what today sits in separate archives — the plant register, process sensors, the maintenance system, the permit file, monitoring of both Official Journals. On that model AI agents run the repetitive checks and flag the gaps, with your engineer in command: he decides, the system brings him the case worked up. It holds for manufacturing as for energy, defence, public administration and healthcare. We do it on-premise, on standalone machines that need no deep integration into your network, or on our dedicated cloud, with data centres in Italy and premises we staff ourselves, always with shared management: you need no one in-house administering AI models.

How many activities in your plant could you tie today to a row of revised Annex I, with the measured number beside it? Half a day with one of our engineers tells you.

Sources

What we do not know

The database records notifications, not legislation: if an Italian measure existed and had not yet been communicated, the page would still read zero. We do not know whether one is in preparation: none is published. We compared Article 3 in eight languages, not twenty-four: we do not know whether other versions align with the Italian. We do not know whether a second corrigendum will reach this point: the one of 22 September corrected something else. The Q&A states it is not binding, and only the Court of Justice can say which reading holds. And we are not saying what follows today, for a single plant, from the expired deadline: that is a legal assessment, made by whoever signs it.