500 million invested to cut emissions, waste and raw materials

The investments that the ceramics industry dedicated last year to research and innovation, with the primary objective of reducing consumption of energy, raw materials and emissions, came close to half a billion euro. For a sector that in the last ten years, if we exclude Covid's 2020, has always invested between 6 and 10% of its aggregate turnover in development and made the most of incentives - above all those of the Industry 4.0 Plan - to respond to the green challenge launched by Europe, expectations on the Transition 5.0 Plan were very high.

Not least because a very large sum is at stake (6.3 billion euro) to push the reduction of energy consumption through innovation.

Instead, after the exhausting wait for the implementing decree - which in the meantime has frozen investments for 2024 - the climate in Sassuolo is anything but effervescent, as Graziano Verdi, vice-president of Confindustria Ceramica, explains: "As with the Ets, we are faced with a measure that starts with a punitive approach to our sector, which has been investing in decarbonisation for decades, well before Brussels imposed it. And our factories, although energy-intensive, are at the forefront of sustainability. In this green transition phase, however, we cannot do without natural gas and I think this will be the case for at least another 20 years'.

Plan 5.0 was born excluding hard-to-abate companies, i.e. those that should be supported most in their efforts to reduce emissions. The correctives made during the conversion phase, in the decree of 6 August, reopened the spigots for interventions aimed at electrifying processes even in energy-intensive industries and for supporting investments that allow a company above the Ets parameters to go below the threshold.

But the knots remain, 'starting with the rule that only incentivises European technologies: those who have invested in photovoltaics know perfectly well that panels made in Europe were not and are not to be found now,' adds Verdi. The time it took to finalise the operational rules and the uncertainties that still remain also open up the question of deadlines: very few companies will be able to guarantee delivery of the plant by the supplier, to assemble it, test it and put it into operation by 2025 in order to be able to access the tax credit.