A Commission report published last week on the state of waste water treatment in the European Union shows that notable improvements in water quality have been achieved. It also reveals a number of shortcomings, most notably the treatment of waste water originating from large cities.
There are more than 23,000 towns and cities with a population of more than 2,000 in the European Union. The Urban Waste Water Directive requires them to collect and treat all the waste water they produce. The report shows that 93% of waste water in the EU is collected. Collection rates in the older Member States are near absolute while in the newer Member States collection rates range between 70% and 100% apart from Romania (47%) and Cyprus (49%).
The directive also requires all waste water to undergo biological treatment known as secondary treatment to significantly reduce the biodegradable pollution in waste water. Some 87% of waste water in the EU undergoes such treatment. A number of older Member States comply fully with type of treatment – except for Belgium, France and Portugal – while some newer Member States are progressing well and others – Cyprus, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia – must do more.
Water in sensitive areas – which covers nearly two-thirds of the EU – must undergo special treatment to eliminate nutrients or bacteriological pollution. Stringent treatment is in place for 72% of the population in sensitive areas. There are large discrepancies in older Member States with compliance rates ranging from 13% in Portugal to full compliance in Austria, Germany and the Netherlands.
More than 98% of the waste water generated by Europe’s 300 largest cities is collected. More than 90% of this water undergoes biological treatment. However, only 50% of waste water from large cities located in sensitive areas receives more stringent treatment. And four such cities do not carry out such treatment at all.
The report covers 18 of the 27 Member States that provided information by the 30 November 2008 deadline for the 2005/2006 reference years.
Until the 30th of November 2008, 6 Member States (Bulgaria, Italy, Malta, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom) have reported, but the data quality check was not completed by the 30th of November 2008, as significant changes of the datasets were still to be expected. Therefore they were not included in summary diagrams of thereport. However, a brief description of the provided information is given. Information for Malta is shown below:
Malta
Malta provided information under Article 15 of the UWWT-Directive in September 2008. The dataset reflects very high data quality with only minor modifications required to perfectly fit the data model behind the UWWTD-reporting. However, as Malta has not yet reacted to the proposed modifications, the data evaluation has not been finalised until the end of November 2008.
Malta applies Art. 5(1) and 5(2,3) of the Directive and has designated eight sensitive areas due to criterion a (N and P). From the six agglomerations . 2,000 p.e. with a total generated load of 584,000 p.e., only Malta North discharges into sensitive areas. There are several interim target dates for Malta to comply with Articles 3 and 4 of the Directive: the accession date, 2004, 2005, and 2006. The final deadline for implementation is 31 March 2007.
For more information please see the Fifth Report on the Implementation of the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive, the report is available here. [1]