Establishments

The first Seveso Plants Information Retrieval System (SPIRS) was established in 2001 by the JRC at the request of the European Commission's Directorate General for the Environment (DG ENV). This was a voluntary database to which the EU Member States could supply information on their Seveso establishments to the European Commission. In 2005, following an amendment to the Seveso II legislation (Directive 2003/105/EC), reporting of establishments to the European Commission's database became mandatory. This obligation was kept in the Seveso III Directive (2012/18/EU).

The early version of the SPIRS was a distributed database system aimed to provide access to risk related information from major hazardous industrial establishments in Europe to the European Commission. The last version of the database was called SPIRS 2.2. It was built in 2002 and remained active until 2012. In this version, the reporting countries used a local version of the database, developed a formatted file, which then had to be submitted to the JRC. The team at the JRC updated the European SPIRS database. At the time, the European SPIRS database was operated off-line in order to avoid intrusions.

When the new Seveso III Directive (2012/18/EU) came into force in 2012, it required some changes. New IT technologies were available as well. The European Commission decided to invest in a new reporting system, which would be available online.

In early 2013, the JRC, in consultation with DG Environment, designed and developed the framework for the new system to encompass information on establishments that are considered to present major hazards due to the potential accident risk associated with the presence of dangerous substances as defined by the Seveso III Directive. The new system was dubbed "eSPIRS".

In 2022 a legislative change took place which transfers the reporting of the establishment information to the European Environment Agency (CID (EU) 2022/1979). It is part of the EEA mandate to collect, process and analyse data related to pressures on the environment, environmental quality as well as on chemicals hazardous to the environment. It has been collecting information on impacts of industrial facilities under other EU legislation. As such, it was deemed appropriate to consolidate the information under the umbrella of the EEA. A project to transfer the reporting systems from the JRC to the EEA was initiated in 2023. As of January 2026, the EEA is responsible for maintaining the establishments database and providing the EU countries with a platform to share this information.