2022
Water boards and drinking water companies are cooperating
How can the Meuse become cleaner?
Water boards and drinking water companies are cooperating
The priorities of water boards and drinking water companies come together in the De Schone Maaswaterketen (Clean Meuse Water Chain, SMWK). Janneke Snijders of the Aa and Maas Water Board tells us about the advantages of this collaboration and what this collaboration has already provided us so far. “Due to the pharmaceutical residues issue, we are now casting our net wider than just our legal responsibilities."
The Aa and Maas Water Board in the province of Noord-Brabant purifies 300 million litres of water from wastewater every day. Via the wastewater treatment plants, the water returns clean into the ditches in the area and finally into the Meuse.
As clean water coordinator, Janneke Snijders is occupied with the substances in the wastewater and the techniques the water board uses for the purification. She mainly looks at the strategic aspect of this: "Matters such as: what must we do due to legislation, shall we do extra things, and what direction should we take? I also enter into discussion with businesses, citizens and action groups that discharge substances into the water to see how this can be reduced."
Within the De Schone Maaswaterketen (Clean Meuse Water Chain), Snijders coordinates the monitoring efforts of all the collaborative partners. These are twelve organisations that collaborate on cleaner water in the Meuse: water boards, drinking water companies, Rijkswaterstaat, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management and RIWA-Meuse. She states that the cooperative association is busy setting up three monitoring networks. “We're going to follow the water quality in the Meuse river basin with the goal of reducing the amount of chemical substances in the water."
The first is the substance monitoring method, in which 38 substances will be measured at 31 monitoring points. The focus is on pharmaceutical residues and industrial substances. "There are thousands of substances and we can't monitor them all, because it would cost too much money," explains Snijders. "This is why we have selected 38 substances: substances that appear frequently and that we are concerned about. Because they are not good for the ecology, for our drinking water, or both."
The second and third monitoring method consists of new monitoring techniques that the partners in the Clean Meuse Water Chain want to test. The second monitoring method is a screening technique to obtain a picture in one go of 2,000 or more substances that are in the water.
The third monitoring method must indicate the effect of the substances by looking at the reaction of certain organisms, like for instance water fleas or fish, on the water sample. Snijders: "Because you can measure these substances, it becomes clear which are above the norm. Finally of course you want to know whether animals or plants are killed, thus how harmful they are."
These three monitoring methods are implemented after the summer of 2023. These monitoring methods are applied simultaneously, so that the results can be compared. The monitoring will last for a year, so the measurements can take place during different seasons. Over the course of five years, it will be monitored whether the amount of chemical substances in the water has actually fallen and also what the effect of this is.
What substances, how and where
All participating organisations also have their own monitoring systems, Snijders reports. They monitor partly the same substances and other ones. "We'd like to look at the entire Meuse river basin: which substances come from abroad and which from the Netherlands?" says Snijders. This is already happening, but it will be done more intensively in the future. "Then it's very useful that we have agreed within the De Schone Maaswaterketen (Clean Meuse Water Chain) which substances we monitor, with what methods, where and how often. We've coordinated this with each other."
Snijders helps to resolve this kind of impasse, which is not always easy with so many cooperative partners. "But if you all agree, you can do much more than separately. We have put a great deal of money together to learn from this so we're not all inventing the same wheel." Testing new techniques out in different places for example, because the situation in a wastewater treatment plant is very different from in a stream or in the Meuse.
The cooperative partners each have different priorities and tasks and legislation to comply with. Besides purifying wastewater, the water boards also have tasks such as dike monitoring, controlling the water level, nature management in and on the water and checking the water quality for swimming. Snijders: "We as a water board do not produce drinking water, so we use different lists of substances from drinking water companies – originally we’re more interested in the effects on the ecology." For example, some substances are more harmful to humans than to fish.
Water boards only monitor the harmful substances that legally must be measured according to the European Water Framework Directive and once a year or every few years a couple of extra substances. "We can't monitor everything we want," explains Snijders, "because that would cost a lot of money, and for some substances there is not yet any norm. There are thousands of substances, so how can you make a good assessment? This is a big puzzle."
The substance monitoring network will also monitor harmful substances that fall outside this European Directive. Snijders: "Together with multiple experts, we can now make good choices and monitor substances that are important to both the ecology and the tap water. In this way, we take advantage of the experts at drinking water companies. This is why I'm so pleased with the De Schone Maaswaterketen. Since this collaboration started, we as a water board consider the water as a source of drinking water. This is really a different way of thinking."
Not all 21 of the water boards are involved as the Aa and Maas is. One reason for this is that, in other parts of the Netherlands, there are no initiatives like the De Schone Maaswaterketen in which all these various organisations cooperate.
Snijders can well imagine that, in the future, water boards will also supply purified wastewater to agriculture and industry, instead of these industries continuing to use drinking water for everything although this is by no means always necessary. There could well be the need for this due to the increasing drought caused by climate change: "Rather than the millions of litres of water that we purify every day going straight back into the channels, we could also reuse it. Then farmers and factories would not have to pump up groundwater, because drinking water companies need that too, especially if it hasn't rained much."
The De Schone Maaswaterketen collaboration started in 2015 with two projects. The first was a joint study into pharmaceutical residues. The second project was a pilot with a new technique to remove pharmaceutical residues from the water. "Pharmaceutical residues formed a new group of substances that we suddenly realised could be harmful," says Snijders. "The bacteria in wastewater treatment plants also remove part of the pharmaceutical residues from the water, but not all of them. This residues problem also prompted us to look more widely than only at our own legal tasks."
The pilot proved to be a success and, in March 2023, Minister Harbers of Infrastructure and Water Management opened the new Pacas (powder activated carbon in active sludge) plant of the water board at the wastewater treatment plant in Oijen. This new plant, the second in the Netherlands, removes pharmaceutical residues from the water using powdered activated carbon, a kind of pulverised Norit. The pharmaceutical residues adhere to the powder, which clumps together into a kind of sludge that is then incinerated.
Aa and Maas opted for this location because the wastewater is discharged here into a relatively small stream with vulnerable ecology. "The plant did cost millions, so we couldn't immediately implement one at all our seven purification plants," explains Snijders.
Pacas is a very good technique to remove pharmaceutical residues from the water, she says, but because the powder can't be reused, it's not the most sustainable solution. Another method is ozonisation, disinfection by treatment with ozone, but this unfortunately costs a lot of energy. This is why the water board is now investigating other techniques. Snijders: "It comes down to a choice between better water quality, but a not very sustainable method, or sustainable, with poorer water quality. These are difficult considerations."
The complex thing about pharmaceutical residues in the wastewater, she adds, is that they end up in the sewer via our urine and faeces. So, in contrast to companies that discharge harmful residues, you cannot easily prevent pharmaceutical residues ending up in the water. And due to the ageing population and increasing lifespan, steadily greater amounts of medicines are being used.
Pharmaceuticals in legislation
There is however a proposal to include pharmaceuticals in the Water Framework Directive in 2023 for the first time. This will concern diclofenac, a painkiller, and oestrogens. Snijders: "We’re becoming concerned when we find these substances in the water."
It's taken a while before pharmaceuticals appeared in the proposal, and there are only a few, explains Snijders, because: "It is a European Directive, so monitoring has to be done throughout Europe of what pharmaceuticals end up in the water, and there is of course a big lobby of pharmaceuticals manufacturers that doesn't want them on this list." She adds: "Europe has now finally taken notice of pharmaceuticals by including them in the legislation, although it has not yet been formally adopted. After this, all the countries will have to amend their own legislation and by then another two years will have passed."
As many pharmaceutical residues as possible
At that point, water boards will have the obligation to ensure that the water that comes out of the purification plants meets the new requirements, so there must not be too much of these pharmaceutical residues in the water. Snijders also mentions a proposal which states that, in the new European Urban Wastewater Directive, water boards must remove 80% of the pharmaceutical residues from the water. By this means, still more pharmaceutical residues will be looked at.
"This means we will have to start building plants to specifically remove these, and preferably as many pharmaceutical residues as possible," says Snijders. These techniques are however not yet sufficiently developed for application rapidly and at large scale, she adds. "This is quite challenging."
Purifying or tracking down discharges
Water boards are investing millions in advanced purification plants – why is there less money for tracking down the sources of pollution, in other words the source approach? "Both are important, but the source approach is a very complicated puzzle,” Snijders responds. "In recent years, research has made clear how alarmingly many substances are present in the wastewater and how harmful they are. Our measurement techniques have made huge progress, but in the meantime, we are not fully aware of all the substances that are discharged."
She mentions the substance group PFAS as an example. There is only one company in the Netherlands that produces PFAS, but it proves to be present in a great many products. If companies use these products, they discharge PFAS unawares. Many companies have no idea that they are using PFAS and therefore have not applied for a permit to do so. Besides this, more PFAS is released through domestic use of these products.
Not enough attention to the issue of permits
For a long time, the issue of permits has not received enough attention in the Netherlands, Snijders considers. "Our enforcement was inadequate and permits such as that of Tata Steel in IJmuiden ought to have been stricter in retrospect. In the places where the permits are issued, there are not always people with enough chemical knowledge to be able to assess how toxic it is."
Tracking down substances by measuring them in the water is therefore costly and time-consuming. "Fortunately, with the De Schone Maaswaterketen, we now have the opportunity to monitor many more substances than we could as a water board alone," says Snijders. "Besides issuing strict permits and tracking down contaminations, we must try to remove the substances that nonetheless end up in the drinking water."
Currently there is not any stimulus for companies to reduce their pollution. To change this, recently the proposal has been made at the European Commission to make companies, that discharge harmful substances or pharmaceutical companies that produce medicines, pay – in other words, the polluter pays principle.
Snijders considers this a good idea, because: "In this way, you put the responsibility on the company that develops a particular product. To ensure that the harmful substances are removed from the environment again, or by developing products that do not contain this substance."
She adds to this: "It's actually madness and unsustainable that anything may be discharged into the sewage system and that we then have to remove it afterwards. This is really somewhat back-to-front."