Europe has adopted new rules for urban wastewater treatment. What will they mean for our wallets, health and environment?
For professionalsObligations, deadlines and working materialsFor journalistsFacts, milestones, answers and media resourcesModern treatment plants will newly capture up to 80% of micropollutants – trace amounts of contraceptives, antidepressants or ibuprofen. These substances will no longer circulate through nature and threaten aquatic life, sources of drinking water or bathing waters.
Less pollution, more effective treatment and targeted monitoring. Explore six measures that help protect rivers and lakes used for outdoor swimming.
Anonymous, objective wastewater analysis can provide several days of warning of approaching waves of disease and reveal the silent spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in a region. This gives people and doctors more time to protect health and act before waiting rooms fill up.
Green roofs, trees, permeable surfaces and retention features help keep water in the city, relieve sewers and cool streets.
The Directive supports safe, hygienic and accessible toilets in public spaces and buildings, with particular attention to vulnerable and marginalised groups.
The new rules extend wastewater collection and secondary treatment to agglomerations from 1,000 p.e., helping smaller communities and the catchment as a whole.
Producers of covered medicines and cosmetics will pay at least 80% of the defined costs of quaternary treatment and related monitoring. Water customers will therefore not fund micropollutant removal alone.
Sewage sludge can be a source of phosphorus, a valuable raw material with limited global reserves. Recovering it enables the production of fertilisers for agriculture.
Wastewater treatment plants will no longer be only electricity consumers. By 2045 the sector should be energy neutral through savings, energy recovered from wastewater and renewable sources.
How Czech rivers have changed over the past 50 years, and why the work must continue.
Thick foam formed on the Vltava further downstream from Větřní and later also near Český Krumlov during the second half of the twentieth century. Overall water quality was extremely poor.
The main cause was the direct discharge of untreated wastewater from paper production. Pollution could be seen and smelled; in the worst affected stretches, both oxygen and aquatic life disappeared.
Conditions today are dramatically different and prove how significantly wastewater treatment has improved river quality. We do not want to return to the conditions of the past.
