By 31 May each year, the F-gas declaration must be submitted pursuant to Article 16(1) of Presidential Decree (DPR) 43/2012.
The F-gas Declaration is an annual communication containing information on the quantity of fluorinated gas emissions into the atmosphere from stationary refrigeration, air-conditioning and heat pump equipment and stationary fire protection systems with a refrigerant gas charge of more than 3 kg.
The F-gas declaration must be submitted to ISPRA via the Sinanet portal by 31 May each year by visiting the website: www.sinanet.isprambiente.it/it/sia-ispra/fgas, where up-to-date instructions and frequently asked questions are available to help with registering on the portal and completing the declaration itself.
The entry into force of the new Regulation (EU) No 517/2014 did not change the structure, criteria or content of the F-gas declaration. The threshold value used to determine whether a piece of stationary equipment falls within the scope of the declaration remains set at 3 kg of fluorinated greenhouse gas; the new unit of measurement expressed in CO2 equivalent is therefore not applied for the purposes of the F-gas Declaration.
Failure to submit the declaration, or an incorrect declaration, carries heavy penalties under Legislative Decree No 26 of 05 March 2013.
The information to be entered in the declaration can be found in the equipment Register, which must be filled in by certified personnel during the periodic checks and work carried out on the equipment.
It is important to remember that only certified companies may work on the equipment.
Fluorinated greenhouse gases, widely used in a broad range of applications (refrigerants in air-conditioning and refrigeration equipment, extinguishing agents in fire protection systems, propellants for medical and technical aerosols, etc.), have a potential, in some cases a high one, to contribute to global warming of the planet, caused by the trapping of the thermal radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface between the surface itself and the troposphere (the so-called “greenhouse effect”).
For this reason, for a decade now the action of the Community legislator in environmental matters has been aimed at the containment, prevention and reduction of emissions of these gases into the environment, first through Regulation (EC) No 842/2006, then through Regulation (EU) No 517/2014, which repealed and replaced the previous measure.
Within this legislative framework, at Italian national level, Decree of the President of the Republic No 43 of 27 January 2012 has been in force for some years, through which the Italian legislator sought to implement Regulation (EC) No 842/2006.
The parties required to submit the declaration are identified as the operator, meaning the owner of the equipment or system, where the owner has not delegated actual control over its technical functioning to a third party.
As regards penalties, the penalties for failure to transmit, or incomplete or inaccurate transmission of, the information required by the F-gas declaration are laid down by Legislative Decree No 26 of 5 March 2013, “Rules on penalties for infringements of the provisions of Regulation (EC) No 842/2006 on certain fluorinated greenhouse gases”. In particular, administrative fines of between one thousand and ten thousand euros are provided for (Article 6(3) and (4) of Legislative Decree No 26/2013).
Finally, for the sake of completeness, it should be pointed out that submitting the F-gas declaration is only one of the obligations imposed by current environmental legislation on operators of stationary equipment containing fluorinated greenhouse gases; the other main obligations, sometimes varying according to the quantity of gas in the equipment, can be summarised as follows:
– The use of qualified personnel or companies (holding the appropriate certificate) for the installation, maintenance and repair of equipment;
– The prevention and repair of any gas leaks from equipment;
– Regular periodic checks for gas leaks from equipment;
– The installation of gas leak detection systems on equipment;
– The proper recovery of the fluorinated gases used as refrigerants or extinguishing agents in equipment;
– The keeping of specific records for the equipment.