On World Environment Day, the United Nations' main mechanism for promoting environmental awareness and action around the world, the international organization recalls that up to 40% of the planet's land areas are degraded. In this context, ensuring adequate environmental protection is key to preserving biodiversity and ecosystems, and requires the intervention of expert organizations having demonstrated that they are technically competent to perform the activity they carry out.

In Spain, the more than 400 ENAC-accredited bodies have demonstrated that they have the necessary technical capacity to carry out more than 500 environmental assessment and control activities, providing greater efficiency to protecting the environment and preserving marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Among the accredited activities, testing laboratories and inspection bodies perform important work to control and assess different areas that impact terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, such as testing and activities to control discharges: inland, groundwater and marine waters; landfill inspection or basic waste characterization and compliance testing inspections; contaminant quantification in soils, sediments, sludge and waste, studies to declare contaminated soils and sampling; testing and inspections to assess the ecological quality of the receiving environments (inland waters, marine waters, sediments, aquatic organisms...), among others.

 

Delivering confidence for protecting ecosystems

In the case of terrestrial ecosystems, ineffective waste management or inappropriate practices in industrial facilities can have irreversible effects on soil conservation. To avoid this, most of the Spanish autonomous regions have recognized the need for ENAC-accredited inspection bodies to be responsible for carrying out soil quality assessment associated with potentially polluting activities, facilities, or actions.

In the case of aquatic ecosystems, accreditation provides reliable sampling, testing and inspections to assess the ecological quality of the receiving environments – inland waters, marine waters, sediments, or aquatic organisms. Accreditation to inspect submarine outfalls (conduits through which wastewater is pumped, after being treated in treatment plants, to conduct it a certain distance from the coast) is one of the most representative examples of how accredited inspection provides greater guarantees to control discharges into the marine environment.

Moreover, the Spanish Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge’s Wastewater Discharge Inspection Protocol contemplates the figure of the Collaborating Body of the Hydraulic Administration (ECAH) as a receiving medium in terms of controlling and surveying discharges into the Public Hydraulic Domain and the water quality. It establishes ENAC accreditation as the only way to demonstrate its technical competence when applying the discharge inspection protocol. These bodies act at the pollution sources to minimize the impact the different activities cause on aquatic ecosystems. Moreover, RD 646/2020, which regulates waste disposal by landfill, establishes that, within the surveillance and control tasks in the operation and maintenance phases of the landfill, controlling the possible impact of dumping waste in groundwater must be carried out, requiring that it be performed by ENAC-accredited bodies according to the UNE-EN ISO/IEC 17020 standard.

Finally, and within the circular economy framework, more than 200 ENAC-accredited bodies have proven to offer companies and institutions a service with the necessary quality to consolidate their transformation towards this model at every step: in the design phase and production processes (for example, testing eco-design requirements; testing and certifying renewable energy elements and facilities or inspecting the sustainability of renewable energy biofuels and bioliquids); in the consumption phase (such as certificates and reports on sustainability, environmental impact or energy efficiency); and in the recovery phase (surveillance, inspection and control of landfills, waste characterization, certification of the amount of recycled plastic in non-reusable plastic packaging, analysis of reclaimed wastewater, among others).