When Water Meets Industry - Stories of Entrepreneurs and the Environment in the Medio Chiampo District #852556

When Water Meets Industry. The Chiampo Valley tanning district develops disruptively in an area marked until recently by emigration and poverty. The industrial success completely obscures the environmental damage, which is generated by intensive water use upstream, by pumping from the aquifers, and polluting downstream, both on the surface and from underground recharges.
Awareness of the need to take action on depollution is related to key regulatory provisions, such as Merli Law 319/1976, as a result of which the large treatment plants for water discharged from tanneries are built. That of the Medio Chiampo, started in 1982, is an environmental infrastructure of public importance, a condition and guarantee for the unfolding of entrepreneurial histories of absolute excellence.
This story, though troubled in some critical passages, teaches that only the affirmation of a great industrial culture alongside the public regulator makes it possible to conceive an evolution of a great environmental culture.
Medio Chiampo with its system is there to show that the future can become sustainable if environmental technologies increasingly specialize the reuse and recycling functions of the resources used, shaping itself as a driver of the circular economy. The paradox is that one of the originally most polluted areas in northern Italy is levating a highly advanced repertoire of environmental innovations as the only way to consolidate its global competitive leadership.