Transparency is an essential component of soil policy and ensures public accountability and awareness, fair market conditions and that progress can be monitored. Therefore, Member States should set up and maintain a national register of potentially contaminated sites and contaminated sites. Those registers should contain site-specific information and be made publicly accessible in the form of an online georeferenced spatial database. If registers are established at subnational level, Member States should provide for a coordinated national entry point to the different subnational registers with, for example, a centralised national website containing weblinks. The registers should contain the information that is necessary for the public to be informed of the existence of potentially contaminated sites and the management of contaminated sites. Given that the presence of soil contamination on potentially contaminated sites can, by definition, only be suspected, the difference between potentially contaminated sites and contaminated sites should be communicated and clearly explained to the public to avoid raising unnecessary concerns. Registers that exist on 16 December 2025 and that meet the requirements set out in this Directive should be deemed appropriate to meet the requirements set out in this Directive.
Text as published in the Official Journal, reproduced verbatim (including any typographical quirks of the source). For the authentic version, see EUR-Lex.
