This March, the Danube Water Program held a KnowNow webinar on the current review of the EU Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive and its implications for the water sector. Now everybody with a stake in the sector is invited to take part in a public consultation.

Adopted 30 years ago to protect the environment from the harmful effects of the discharges of untreated waste water, the EU Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (EU UWWTD) is among the oldest and also, in terms of costs of compliance, most expensive EU Directives.

In 2019, an evaluation concluded that it works well overall, but with room for improvement in some areas and a need for alignment with the environmental and climate ambitions of the European Green Deal, which motivated the subsequent review process.

Explaining the reason for and anatomy of the ongoing EU UWWTD review for a DWP KnowNow webinar audience, Nele Rosenstock, Policy Officer at the European Commission's Directorate General for Environment, also announced a twelve weeks open public consultation, starting late April. It is part of a broad impact assessment involving data collection, stakeholder consultations and analytic modelling in line with the EU's Better Regulation Guidelines.

The public consultation started on 28 April 2021. It is open to all citizens and the wider community of stakeholders, specifically those affected by the rules on urban waste water or who have an impact on urban waste water and technologies/technological development. This does of course include EU Member States and their public authorities at national, regional and local levels, industrial/economic actors, water associations at European, national and regional level, international organizations, NGOs, consumer organizations, academia, and r&d organizations or institutes.

This does also, in all likelihood, include you, dear reader. To contribute your opinions on possible improvements of the EU UWWTD and issues that it should deal with, please follow the link below to an online questionnaire. It is available in all EU languages and comprises questions that do not require any technical or expert knowledge, and others targeted at experts, focusing on the more technical aspects in the Directive's revision.

Those who find themselves unable to use the online questionnaire are encouraged to use the email address below to make contact. Note that to ensure a transparent consultation process, organizations and businesses taking part in public consultations are asked to register in the EU's Transparency Register.

Those who consider contributing to the open consultation are kindly reminded of the deadline. The consultation closes on 21 July, 2021 at midnight, Brussels time.