The European Alliance to Save Energy (EU-ASE) welcomes the opportunity to provide feedback to the European Commission’s publication of an inception impact assessment on the revision of the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (UWWTD).
While the Directive has played a substantial role in improving the quality of European water resources and reducing pollution levels in water bodies, we believe that Europe remains some way from full compliance with collection and treatment requirements and has made little progress with water reuse.
We believe the 29-year-old Directive should be updated to better address these critical issues and today’s challenges including climate change, resource scarcity, increased energy consumption and population growth.
Based on this, EU-ASE would like to highlight the following recommendations to support the Commission in its ongoing work on the UWWTD revision.
1. Digitalisation as a key opportunity.
2. Make use of data transparency and advanced data analytics for a knowledge based
approach.
3. Preserving natural water resources with smart water management.
4. Better legal framework for urban runoff and storm water management.
5. Carbon neutral waste water management.
6. Circular economy for water.
7. Supporting investments.