The industrial wastewater treatment plant serving the industrial area at Contrada Fiorentina in Nusco, in the province of Avellino, has been placed under preventive seizure by the Public Prosecutor's Office of Avellino. The measure was executed by the Carabinieri Forestali of Avellino and allows continued use by the operator, with a sixty-day deadline to restore proper operating conditions.

According to the prosecution, the plant was allegedly operated without regular disposal of sludge, with deficiencies in the purification, ozonization and emissions-abatement systems, and with discharges that needed to be brought into compliance.

The plant manager has been referred for alleged unlawful management and storage of waste and unlawful discharge of industrial wastewater. He is a person under investigation and is presumed innocent until a final judgment.

Complaints, monitoring and the investigation

The investigation follows complaints from local residents about persistent odors and doubts about the plant's treatment capacity. An earlier petition was reported to have gathered more than two hundred signatures, and by 6 August 2026 prosecutors had opened a file after residents' reports and regional requests for clarification of ARPAC monitoring data.

IrpiniaNews links the case to reports from around 400 residents and to ARPAC analyses that, in the newspaper's reconstruction, allegedly detected 40 pollutants and exceedances of regulatory limits. The original laboratory reports were not included in the material reviewed for this article, so those figures should be read as reported claims rather than confirmed technical findings.

No full text of the seizure order and no subsequent judicial ruling on the allegations were available in the sources consulted.

Odors, discharges and the environmental permit

The issues examined by the institutions concern both odor emissions and the compliance of discharges and respect for the environmental authorization.

The Prefecture of Avellino has reported attention to odor problems, ongoing monitoring and inspections, technical work to improve the plant's efficiency, and a permanent coordination table at the Municipality of Nusco to follow up on checks, planned measures and liaison among the bodies involved.

Campania's regional environment councillor said a conclusive ARPAC report was still awaited to verify compliance with the Integrated Environmental Authorization, known as AIA, and to define further action. That final ARPAC report had not yet been published in the sources consulted.

Regional funding for the ASI-area plants

The Campania Region has said it financed about 5 million euros for the refurbishment of treatment facilities in the ASI industrial area and declared its willingness to consider further measures once the technical picture is complete.

The precise company or body formally responsible for managing the Nusco plant was not clarified in the sources acquired, and it was not yet verifiable whether the sixty-day restoration had been completed.

What happens next

Three elements will determine the next phase. First, the sixty-day period granted with the authorized-use seizure for restoring correct operation. Second, the permanent table at the Comune di Nusco, where verification results and scheduled measures are to be reviewed. Third, the conclusive ARPAC report, which is expected to provide the technical basis for administrative and judicial decisions.

For residents, the practical points to watch are whether odor episodes decrease, whether discharge data return within limits, and whether the institutions publish the final monitoring results.