10 July 2015.

Yesterday, in the last session before summer break, the European Parliament adopted the INI report on Resource Efficiency: moving towards a circular economy from the rapporteur Sirpa Pietikäinen.

This report is a good step for promoting the circular economy and more elements to support the water services in this direction have been included. EurEau specifically supports the following paragraphs:

- Paragraph 5 that calls to include water in raw material consumption calculations. Certain regions are specifically affected by water scarcity and the water industry support any action that can help to have a more efficient use of water resources to allow every citizen in Europe to have access to a safe and clean water resource.

- Paragraph 9 that calls for the involvement of local and regional authorities. Water is a public good that is very dependent on the local conditions (access to water resource, quality of the resource, dispersion of the habitat, age of the infrastructure, etc…). The local and regional authorities are therefore the most competent entities to manage this resource and to decide how water services can be implicated in the circular economy.

- Paragraph 57 that calls for the creation of incentives for the development of markets for high quality secondary raw materials. As already explained on this blog, the water industry is developing solutions to recover high-quality nutrients from waste water and sewage sludge. However, recovering these products is expensive and make the price of secondary raw materials much higher than primary raw materials. Therefore secondary raw material market needs to be incentivise to make it competitive and to allow the water industry to foster the investments in nutrient recovery technical solutions.

- Paragraph 64 that refers to nutrient recycling. Within the waste policy, an ‘end-of-waste’ status could be an opportunity for some high quality sludge based materials and products (including composted sludge) to be recognised as a useful fertiliser instead of ending in landfill. This status might currently be relevant to only a small proportion of sewage sludge production across Europe, but could be an incentive to improve the quality of recycled sludge, enhancing its image and acceptability. The ‘end-of-waste’ criteria should also focus on the output, through specification on final product quality rather than by prohibiting input materials as sludge.

However some considerations in paragraph 35 are more problematic as MEPs asked for strictly limiting incineration by 2020 to non-biodegradable and non-recyclable waste and for a program to ban landfilling, except for certain hazardous waste and residual waste for which it is the most environmentally sound option. Having these two requests without sound measures for control at source could lead to the absence of solution for sewage sludge that are not good enough to be reused as fertilisers.

EurEau is willing to participate to the elaboration of the new “more ambitious” proposal from the European Commission to design a proposal that will push for the circular economy while avoid dead-end for waste products that cannot be recycled.

More discussions to come…

Bertrand.

EurEau. Water matters. Resources matter