Brussels, 05/06/2015 (Agence Europe) - Water offers enormous potential for the circular economy and is potentially a goldmine for growth, employment and environmental protection, which the EU would be wise to make full use of, according to the European water sector experts, meeting in Crete on Friday 5 June.
Hence their urgent call to the European Commission to include water in the new 'Circular Economy' package to be announced before the end of the year and currently undergoing an exploratory public consultation (see EUROPE 11324).
The experts from EurEau - the voice of public and private drinking water and water treatment companies - feel that the initial Circular Economy package, which focused on waste management, could potentially miss out on the many opportunities offered by the sector, such as recovering nutrients for agriculture, recovering gas which can be put into energy networks and increased treatment and re-use of water.
The water sector currently contributes around €33 billion a year to the EU economy and provides well over 500,000 jobs, but EurEau argues that it has the potential for much more.
“The Commission has to unlock these opportunities through a mixture of legislation and incentives to create markets. This could lead to thousands of more jobs being created right across Europe”, says Bruno Tisserand, chairman of the EurEau wastewater commission.
The measures recommended by the sector include:
- sludge management to ensure synergies between the Sewage Sludge Directive and the Waste Framework Directive and promote the use of sewage sludge as fertiliser (currently only 39% of municipal biosolids are recycled into agriculture in the EU, which is not enough, given the amount of fertilisers used for crop production, says EurEau);
- creating incentives to stimulate the recovery and use of phosphorus from sewage sludge, as phosphorus is on the EU's Critical Raw Materials list;
- energy recovery to encourage the development and implementation of innovative solutions to optimise and recover energy from sewers and wastewater treatment plants. (Aminata Niang)