The Principality of Asturias' Government has recently approved a decree to strengthen and regulate environmental control of certain economic activities and create an Environmental Control Body Registry in the Principality.

The Decree creates and regulates environmental control bodies in the atmosphere, water, waste, contaminated soil and noise fields. To gain access to the Principality registry, inspection bodies are required to be accredited by ENAC as inspection bodies according to the UNE-EN ISO/IEC 17020 standard or as testing laboratories according to UNE-EN ISO/IEC 17025 standard.

So far, accreditation has only been required through environmental permits or other documents, now one more step has been added in order to provide more guarantees to environmental controls by regulating the accreditation requirement.

Protection and environmental control is a matter of great importance for both regional and national administrations, therefore, different administrative bodies are including the accreditation requirement in its provisions to achieve their public policy objectives.

In fact, both in Spain and in Europe, accreditation is widely used by legislators; proof of this is more than 170 national and regional provisions, as well as more than 100 at the European level, include accreditation as a tool to guarantee product and service reliability, develop safe markets and strengthen consumer protection.