The main aim of this course is the acquisition of the skill to analyse the industrial processes from the environmental point of view, to say to highlight the impacts and identify and define the possible actions to minimize them.
The knowledge of the technical language, peculiar to the emission and consumption reduction, is a further result.
This course is divided in two complementary parts:
1) the analysis of the environmental impacts due to the industrial activities, taking into account on one side the existing legislation, both at Italian and European Union level, to prevent and control them, and on the other the policies available to improve product environmental performance in terms of natural resource consumptions and emissions;
2) the application of techniques to prevent and reduce the aforesaid impacts, in particular for the treatment of pollutant gases, wastewaters and liquid and solid wastes.

Environmental impacts due to the industrial activities
This first part presents the tool to study the environmental impacts deriving from the industrial activities. In this frame, first above all it is mandatory to look at the inherent legislation, at Italian and European Union level. For this purpose, the frame of the updated legislative documents is given. As second phase, the policies for environmental protection are shown, in particular the internationally accepted voluntary actions that can be undertaken by industry to improve their environmental performance in terms of environment-friendly and energy-efficient products.
The time for this topic is in the order of 10 hours, necessary to deal with the following subjects:
- definition of the main impacts due to the industrial activities
- European and Italian legislation for industrial installations with a high pollution potential
- European and Italian legislation for gas emissions, wastewaters, liquid and solid wastes
- impact monitoring
- environmental performance and Eco-Management Audit Scheme (EMAS)
- Eco-label

Engineering applications for prevention and control of the industrial impacts
Prevention and control of the industrial impacts can be carried out applying specific engineering operations, as process-integrated, to say actions to decrease consumptions and emissions, or end-of-pipe techniques, for pollution abatement.
Time for this part is about 50 hours, to deal with these topics:
- principle of Best Available Techniques (BATs)
- techniques for pollutant removal from effluents (flue gases and wastewaters) and criteria for their selection
- application of the waste hierarchy to waste management
- treatments for liquid and solid wastes and criteria for their selection
- recovery, reuse and recycling of wastes.

During classroom practices, the students will analyse a given industrial installations in terms of mass and energy balances in order to define the impacts derived by specific operations and activities. As a second step, technical solutions to improve the environmental performance will be proposed.