Publication Category: Briefing Notes

Water services, including drinking water and wastewater, are essential to human rights, public health, environmental protection, and Europe’s climate resilience, competitiveness, and security. Europe’s overall security depends on water security, which in turn relies on resilient water services. Such resilience cannot be achieved without access to reliable, secure, and affordable energy. As energy security has […]

This briefing note describes the various pathways PFAS can take to accumulate in air, soil and plants. It identifies the main contributors of PFAS in waste water and how PFAS can end up in sewage sludge. We demonstrate how only a full PFAS ban can allow for the inclusion of sewage sludge in the circular […]

Individual and other Appropriate Systems (IAS) are waste water treatment systems for one or a few households. They are authorised in certain circumstances under the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (UWWTD) and especially when it would be disproportionally expensive to build a sewer network to connect the waste water to a WWTP in a rural […]

Local solutions to managing investment and maintenance needs of waste and storm water will protect people and the environment in an environmentally sustainable and financially feasible way. Integrated waste water and storm water management plans may provide waste water operators and urban planners with a strategy for managing water in the urban environment. Local solutions […]

This briefing note on nutrients and waste water management summarises how nutrients are currently managed within waste water and proposes ideas about the future of nutrient management within waste water management.

Effective asset management of water supply infrastructure and management of water losses from the distribution system are critical parts of the water suppliers’ role. An agreed EU framework for calculating a water balance is a critical first step in leakage management under the 2020 Drinking Water Directive. Leakage reduction is a tool for addressing water […]

The current regulatory framework for sludge is set across a number of different instruments at EU level, which tend to focus on the waste dimension rather than on the reuse of the valuable resources. Waste water operators already render the valuable resources found in sludge to be reusable. However, a regulatory framework is needed to […]

PFAS are a group of contaminants that have gained increased attention due to their potential to bio-accumulate, their environmental persistence, potential toxicity and, for many of them, high water solubility. They have been found in all environmental compartments, including wildlife and humans. Studies have identified waste water treatment plants as a pathway for PFAS to […]

Poly-and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a diverse group of synthetic fluorinated compounds. Due to the unique surface active properties and very high chemical and thermal stability, these substances have been widely used in many applications in industries and in products that we use in our daily life.  The persistent nature of these substances means that […]

The availability of sufficient and uncontaminated ground- and/or surface water for the production of drinking water is essential to everyone. The dry summer of 2018 (and for some countries, 2017 too) was a wake-up call for many parts of Europe. This is how drought affects drinking water, and how our sector and governance authorities can […]