Palermo, 19 April 2024 – “We share the need to ensure the environmental recovery of the quarries, but the value of 10 euros per square meter to be taken into consideration for the quantification of the intervention is so high as to make it extremely difficult, almost impossible, to obtain a surety. If things remain like this, many sites will risk closure with the consequent loss of thousands of jobs.” This was stated in a joint note by the Etna Lava Stone Consortium, the Sicilian quarrymen’s consortium (Consicav) and the Cna Sicily, commenting on the law recently approved by the Sicilian Regional Assembly.
“The law – they add – obliges the activities in operation to adapt, within one year, to the new financial guarantees required for the environmental recovery of the quarry. Recovery to which 50% of the fee that operators pay to the Municipalities has already been allocated. Why then double this cost?”.
“The excessive management burden of the authorized quarries, which has no equal in the rest of Italy, risks causing the collapse of the stone sector – they explain – given that many operators will soon be forced to close their activities due to the impossibility of obtaining financial guarantees so burdensome, with the risk of witnessing the resurgence of illegal quarrying, given that the sanctions provided by law for illegal activities, all things considered, are less severe than the financial obligations applied to authorized extractive activities”.
“The expectations of the extractive sector on this bill – they continue – were very different. The following were asked: a simplification of the authorization procedures, which have now reached biblical times; a reorganization of the offices responsible for mining authorizations and supervision, currently heavily understaffed; an adaptation of the Quarry Plan, in light of very important public infrastructures to be built in the coming years in Sicily, for which the demand for quarry raw materials requires an expansion of the sector; an extraordinary plan for the environmental recovery of abandoned quarries, given that the opening of the numerous construction sites would allow the excess earth and rocks from excavation to be used to fill the no longer active quarry pits, with notable benefits for the environmental redevelopment of these sites”.
“With this quarry reorganization law – they conclude – we run the risk of compromising the business continuity of many quarry operators and, at the same time, causing a collapse in the supply of raw materials which, inevitably, would jeopardize the realization of public infrastructures”.
Tags: Quarries Sicily Associations expectations extraction sector met
