The Minimum Environmental Criteria for awarding design services and building works, adopted by decree of the Italian Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security on 24 November 2025 and published in Official Gazette no. 281 of 3 December 2025. They wholly replace the 2022 edition (Ministerial Decree no. 256 of 23 June 2022) and absorb its corrective decree of 5 August 2024. In force since 2 February 2026, they are mandatory in public procurement under art. 57 of Legislative Decree 36/2023.
They apply to public awards of design and works-supervision services, maintenance services and the execution of works for building interventions: new construction, renovation, maintenance and upgrading. Compared with the 2022 edition the scope is wider: maintenance services and joint design-and-build awards are explicitly included. The earlier regime remained applicable only to integrated contracts and to works based on designs validated under it, and only where the tender notice was published within three months of validation: a window now closed.
The word 'minimum' misleads. Minimum environmental criteria are not a level of good intentions below which it would be unseemly to fall: they are tender clauses. Article 57 of the Public Contracts Code requires their application in public procurement, and that turns them from an objective into a requirement — a bid that fails them is not a less green bid, it is a non-compliant one.
Everything else follows from this, including why they concern the designer before the contractor. A substantial part of the criteria is either met or lost at design stage: if the design does not prescribe what is needed, and does not set out how it will be demonstrated, there is no recovering it on site — one can only observe that the requirement is not verifiable.
The previous edition — Ministerial Decree 256/2022, with its corrective of 5 August 2024 — is replaced in full, and the new text absorbs that corrective rather than layering over it. The most visible change is breadth: maintenance services and joint design-and-build awards are explicitly included, two cases that in practice cover much of the work on existing building stock.
| Front | Direction of change |
|---|---|
| Scope | From design and works to design, works, maintenance and joint awards. |
| Legal alignment | Aligned with the 2023 Public Contracts Code, which did not yet exist in 2022. |
| Construction products | Greater weight on environmental product declarations and on their verifiability. |
| End of life | Construction and demolition waste management treated as a documentary requirement, not an intention. |
| Social criteria | Site personnel conditions and ESG profiles enter the criteria alongside the environmental ones. |
The CAM do not merely ask that something be true; they ask that it be demonstrable with a defined document. This is where the real problems concentrate: a material can be excellent and still be unusable for the tender because the manufacturer has no environmental product declaration, or has one drawn up under different product category rules than those required.
Environmental product declarations are drawn up under the rules of UNI EN 15804, which sets what an EPD must contain and how it must be calculated so that two products are comparable. That link is what makes the CAM verifiable rather than declaratory, and it is also where they connect to the EU Taxonomy and to the construction products regulation: the same declaration serves several regimes.
From 2 February 2026, sixty days after publication in the Official Gazette of 3 December 2025. The earlier rules remained applicable only to integrated contracts and to works based on designs validated under the old regime, with the tender notice published within three months of validation: a window that is now closed.
Outside the transitional regime, it does not comply with the CAM in force. Since art. 57 of Legislative Decree 36/2023 requires their application in public procurement, the practical effect is failure to meet the tender requirements. It is the costliest mistake to make with this decree, and an easy one, because many guides and specifications still in circulation carry the 2022 edition.
Not directly: they are an instrument of public contracting. They do become relevant, however, for private works accessing incentives or financial instruments that refer to them, and they are by now a recognised benchmark outside procurement too for setting a threshold of environmental quality.
In the text of the decree and its annexes, published in the Official Gazette and freely available at the source given in this entry. It is a ministerial decree, therefore a freely reproducible text: it may be cited and summarised without restriction, unlike the UNI standards it refers to.