La tassazione ambientale per la transizione verso un’economia circolare nell’industria siderurgica europea: il caso Taranto

The steel sector in Europe is going through a deep crisis due to the environmental impact that comes from steel production. The lack of investments and the lack of technological innovation are deeply undermining the sector. Consequently, this produces an increasing degradation of the environment and serious damage to human health, and a negative image of the territory. The Ilva case of Taranto (Italy) is the emblem of this. In fact, the obsolescence of the plants, the unsustainable production, the harmful emissions, and the incidence of diseases strictly linked to pollution to the detriment of the local population have for many years been variables to the detriment of the development of the territory. The European Union has prepared a series of measures that, inspired by the current principles of environmental protection, aim to provide adequate tools for protecting the environment and sustainable development. As is evident, sustainability today represents the cornerstone of development in its broadest sense. Indeed, the management relating to the flows of materials, information, and capital, and the cooperation between companies along the entire supply chain, transformation, and distribution, are called to integrate the objectives of the three dimensions of sustainable development, namely economic, environmental and social. By applying the principle of subsidiarity, the Union leaves States the freedom to choose the legislative instruments deemed suitable, intervening when internal policies prove inadequate. In Italy, there has been a long but constant evolution of environmental protection. There have been many difficulties for Italian tax law. In fact, the application of European fiscal instruments on the national territory in compliance with the constitutional principles in tax matters required hard work of doctrine and jurisprudence. Despite the difficulties, jurisprudence and doctrine have the merit of having taken "the environment" as an assumption for the tax. In this way, we can rightly speak of an environmental tax in the strict sense and not of a simple finalized tax with an extra-tax function. Moreover, it wants to highlight environmental taxation could represent an important boost to the implementation of valid sustainable development strategies and policies in support of the territories strongly affected by the negative impacts that the steel sector has produced over time.