Our Publications

As the pressure on water resources continues to grow due to climate change, more attention is being paid to alternative water sources. One viable alternative water source is urban waste water that has undergone necessary treatment to avoid health and environmental risks. To this end, the European Commission presented a regulation to define the minimum requirements Member States have to comply with in order to ensure the safety of water reuse practices across the European Union.

We welcome the legislative proposal which should contribute to increasing confidence in the reuse of treated waste water. However, we see major points to be improved on to make this regulation applicable and effective on the ground.

The European Parliament’s vote on the Drinking Water Directive will affect how much consumers pay for their water bills. We want MEPs to vote to save consumers money. 

In 2015, the European Commission published an Action Plan for the Circular Economy 1 . The accompanying Circular Economy Package with four legislative proposals was adopted in May 2018. EurEau strongly supports both the legislative elements and the action plan of the package. However, the Package lacks effective support measures for the European water sector, especially with regards to market access and financial support for innovative business models to recover materials and generate green energy in drinking water and waste water treatment.

In 2011, a manual and a short guide to the 3Ts was published. This briefing Note updates the existing paper on the 3Ts and provides a snapshot of the way the 3Ts were implemented among EurEau members in 2017.

EurEau supports the proposal of the European Commission to reduce the environmental impact of single-use plastics (SUP). Producers must be held economically responsible for the substantial economic damage wet wipes cause to the waste water infrastructure.

We support the underlining philosophy of the Drinking Water Directive to ensure the protection of public health and we uphold the goals the European Commission intends to achieve with the new proposal. We believe that European citizens’ trust in tap water needs to be further increased.
However various elements of the European Commission’s proposed text will have to be improved by the co-legislators to make the directive legally sound and implementable in an efficient and effective way.

The Water Framework Directive (WFD) set out a journey to achieve ‘good status’ for water bodies by 2015. The implementation of the WFD has revealed some issues, especially concerning the way the status of a water body is defined and assessed at Member State level. This position paper aims at describing the shortcomings in the tools for status assessment and the role played by exemptions, with a focus on the implications for water services in Europe. It also suggests possible solutions that could be part of the future revision of the WFD in order to uphold the main goal of the directive: the protection of European water bodies even after 2027.

If water is a public good, it is also true that providing water services is an activity with important technical, economic, managerial and regulatory aspects – whether carried out by public or private operators. Water services are essential in supporting the sustainable development of our societies, but still little is known about them. This is because the infrastructure is mainly underground, accessible only to few experts and sometimes situated in locations that are far from urban areas and protected for obvious security reasons.

This report will be helpful in providing a simple but comprehensive overview of water governance models in Europe, especially to those decision makers at EU and at national level who will work on the legislative instruments to reform water policy in the coming years.

EurEau is pleased to present our data survey, covering both drinking and waste water services in Europe. It includes national technical, economic and managerial data ranging from population connection rates to drinking water supply to waste water treatment levels to prices and governance. The results testify the diversity of the sector. They also show some of the immediate challenges our sector is facing, particularly regarding investment needs.

2017 edition.

Customers and citizens need a much greater understanding of the value of water, including water pricing policies and the governance of water services, namely which players are involved, who takes the decisions on how water services are managed and who is responsible for what. Achieving this will help ensure access to safe and sustainable water today and tomorrow.