Ex Ilva, l’azienda prepara le operazioni di spegnimento

Acciaieria Italiana is preparing to shut down its Taranto hot area following a Cassation Court ruling that rejected Ilva and AdI's appeals against a Milan Court of Appeal decree ordering its shutdown due to pollution. By Thursday evening, the company informed Ispra and Arpa Puglia, the environmental watchdogs responsible for overseeing the operation, about its readiness to comply with the judicial authority's orders.

That evening, Ispra and Arpa technicians were already at the factory for one of their routine quarterly inspections of the plant's environmental compliance, but they only performed tests and did not initiate the shutdown. The next and final step will be to cool down furnace 2, which was kept at a minimum temperature waiting for Cassation to approve the shutdown.

Furnaces 1 and 4 will also be stopped, both of which were idle for several months. The shutdown of furnace 2 involves shutting off gas supply to the cowper, which will lower the furnace temperature from nearly a thousand degrees. Along with stopping furnace 2, whose last batch of steel was poured on October 8th to meet the decree's deadlines, furnaces 1 and 4 will also be shut down.

Furnace 1 is under sequestration since May 2025 due to a fire outside the plant, which the Cassation Court confirmed in June, while it was stopped in late February 2026 for maintenance, but it has not started operation yet. Batteries 7-8-9-12, which produce carbon coke for the furnaces, have been idle since the beginning of the year and will need to be bought on the market.

To complete the shutdown, it will take longer for the batteries to cool down compared to the furnaces. Ispra and Arpa Puglia have already inspected the hot area on the 15th and will do another inspection tomorrow. Regarding job losses, the unions are waiting for a call from the Ministry of Labor to discuss a joint procedure for an extraordinary integration pay-out, which will now have 8,622 workers, 6,964 of whom will be in Taranto.

The numbers are higher and adjusted to the new situation. Regarding the procurement process, a derogation budget of 4,200 units is already provided by the new decree law from October to June, but the Association of Enterprises Aigi wrote to the Ministry of Labor asking for changes in the admission criteria. "Either recognize," said Aigi's president Nicola Convertino, "the permanent integration pay-out for all indeterminate-term personnel who have accessed the facility," or consider that the local productive unit, even without working in the factory, has still contributed to the company's turnover, which is more than 50 percent.