Installations classées pour la protection de l'environnement (ICPE)

The origins of the public authorities' concern for the nuisances and risks that populations could suffer date back to the Napoleonic period with :

• the ordinance passed in 1806, requiring certain types of establishments to declare their activity on the grounds that it was intolerable that, for the benefit of an individual, a neighborhood should breathe foul air or even that a private individual should suffer damage to his property;

• the imperial decree of October 15, 1810, applicable to the whole country, lists a first series of unhealthy and inconvenient activities, dividing them into three classes of decreasing danger from the 1st to the 3rd ;

• the law of December 19, 1917 on dangerous, unhealthy and inconvenient establishments.

The first major change came when Parliament passed the Act of July 19, 1976, cancelling the previous law and subsequently incorporating it into the Environmental Code with its implementing decree of September 21, 1977.

This law abandoned the notion of "establishment" and replaced it with "installation" and "activity".

By introducing impact and hazard studies, it stipulates that all "risk" and "nuisance" aspects in the various fields (water – air – soil – noise – waste, etc.) are to be regulated by the authorization issued.

It takes into account not only the protection of workers on the study site and the surrounding population, but also that of nature and the environment, as well as the conservation of sites and monuments.

Last but not least, it has changed the nomenclature (cf. ), with only two categories of classified installations: those subject to "Authorization" (this dossier) and those subject to "Declaration" (cf. ).

The law was initially enforced by labor inspectors, then entrusted to the Mines Department, then to the Ministry of the Environment created in 1971, now the MEPAD (Ministère de l'Ecologie, du Développement et de l'Aménagement durables), via departmental prefects and the STIIIC (Service technique interdépartemental de l'inspection des installations classées de la préfecture de police de Paris) for the departments of Paris and the inner suburbs.