The ambassadors of the Twenty-Seven to the EU adopted on Monday 16 March the EU Council’s first-reading position on the European regulation establishing minimum quality criteria for the reuse of urban waste water for agricultural irrigation purposes – a regulation that had been the subject of an interinstitutional agreement (see EUROPE 12410/28).
Two countries cannot abide by this and have detailed their reasons in a statement. Greece, which has stricter legislation, reserves the right to go further (it argues that dilution of reclaimed water should not in itself be considered as a water treatment option allowing food business operators or farmers to dilute reclaimed water of any quality class for use as high-quality water).
Slovakia, for its part, considers that the health of the final consumer is not sufficiently taken into account due to the absence of compulsory labelling of the agri-food products concerned and the non-inclusion of a parameter on salmonella. The Commission, for its part, assured that it would ensure that the issue of microplastics would be dealt with in a cross-cutting manner, not limited to reclaimed water. See EU Council position: http://bit.ly/38X8i3d (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)