Arpa stands for Agenzia Regionale per la Prevenzione e l'Ambiente dell'Emilia-Romagna (Regional Agency for Environmental Prevention in Emilia-Romagna ), it is an environmental control technical support body to the regional, district and local authorities.
Arpa's functions, activities and tasks cover all aspects concerning environmental control, including:
-monitoring of the various environmental components
-management and surveillance of human activities and their territorial impacts
-activities in support of the environmental impact assessment of plans and projects
-creation and management of a regional environmental information system.

Also of great importance are the activities undertaken by Arpa on behalf of local clients concerning soil, water and air quality improvement plans, complex territorial analyses, study and characterisation of ecosystems, research into themes associated with the development of environmental prevention in production cycles.
The Agency's activities are aimed at local, regional and national institutional customers, the business world and private citizens.
Arpa operates an environmental management and control system which integrates activities associated with verification of conformity to regulations and standards with study and analysis of the causes of degradation and their relative effects.

During our visit we have been shown the equipment and instruments of the lab and we have been explained their use. We saw the microbiology lab where they analyse water and food samples looking for bacteria. Particularly interesting was the use of Daphnia, a micro organism which can live only in non polluted water: it works as biological indicator of healthy water. We also visited the chemistry labs with high standard security rules because they handle flammable materials and acids there. It was also interesting to see the use of such sophisticated machines as the gascromatographers, mainly used for analysis of air.

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