The 26th and 27th of November, the Department of Agriculture, Livestock and Environment of the Government of Aragon, leader of the project, hosted a workshop with the participation of all project partners

The Department of Agriculture, Livestock and Environment hosted, on the 26th and the 27th of November the first interregional workshop for the LINDANET network, composed by regions affected by the contamination of lindane and lindane production wastes (HCH). Lead by the General Directorate of Climate Change and Environmental Education of the Government of Aragon, the meeting is part of “LINDANET”, an ambitious INTERREG EUROPE project that aims to joint efforts by the interchange of experiences and knowledge in order to establish an action plan oriented to the solution of the problem at regional level, as well as to raise social awareness.

The Government of Aragon leads this project, together with other five European partners of other regions affected by the same problem. Representatives of all of them have travel this week to the aragonese capital to participate in the 2-day workshop event. The project partners are: Government of Aragon (Spain), the General Directorate of Climate Change and Environmental Quality of the Xunta de Galicia (Spain), the Regional Development Agency of South Bohemia (Czech Republic), the State Office for Contaminated sites of Sachsen Anhalt (Germany), the Central Mining Institute (Poland) and the Experimental Zooprofilactic Institute of Lazio and Toscana M. Aleandri (Italia).

Each location has its own peculiarities. In some sites, there was a factory producing lindane with associated landfills, in some others, the contamination is scattered, either the contamination is associated to storages related to the intensive use in agriculture.

Thus, the main objective of LINDANET is to make a visible a problem that affect a considerable number of European regions, and to contribute to the solution. Additionally, the initiative aims to encourage other public management bodies to be more active so that the European Union destine more funds to solve the pollution of these sites.

This project has a duration of 42 months, from August 2019 to January 2023 and has a budget of around 1,4 million euro, 85% cofinanced by the European Union.

In a first phase, of two years and a half duration, the objective is to interchange knowledge on the situation and the context of each site. To to that, there will be three presential workshops, one related to “Governance, public policies and regulation”, another one related to “solutions and technical aspects” and a third one of “social and Health issues”. Finally, each partner will elaborate an Action Plan for its own location from lessons learnt during the interchange of experiences.

In a second phase, of one-year duration, each partner will implement the Action Plan elaborated in the first phase.