2022
Who discharges what
Who discharges what? A better picture of permits
A lot of contaminating substances end up in the Meuse. A selection of wastewater discharge permits in the the Meuse basin can be consulted, but unfortunately there is no complete overview. Director Maarten van der Ploeg and senior policy advisor André Bannink of RIWA-Meuse explain what they consider should be improved. "The grip on wastewater discharges must be firmer”.
RIWA-Meuse advocates for a complete and up to date overview of the industrial discharges in the Meuse basin. This information should be clear, transparent and publicly accessible. This is important in order to track down contaminating substances and stop harmful emissions more quickly. When a drinking water company monitors an excessive concentration of a harmful substance, the abstraction of water from the Meuse is usually temporarily stopped. "If that continues for too long, this might threaten the production of drinking water," explains Maarten van der Ploeg. "It's therefore essential to know what companies produce and what substances are being discharged into the Meuse basin. This will enable us to easier find out where the problem comes from and so save time too."
Direct and indirect discharges
Companies that want to discharge wastewater into rivers in the Netherlands must apply for a permit. In some cases, a notification suffices, depending on the types of substance and the quantities a company discharges. Permits for direct discharges into the surface water, which means into a river, channel, stream, canal or the sea, must be applied for to Rijkswaterstaat or the water boards.
Besides this there are indirect discharges via the sewer system, that finally end up in the river via the urban wastewater treatment plants, and also impact the water quality. These permits are issued by one of the 29 regional environmental agencies in the Netherlands that carry out tasks for municipalities and provinces.
The Atlas for a Clean Meuse has been launched in 2020, and it includes a database of permits for waste water discharges. This is an initiative of the Clean Meuse Water Chain, an association of the Dutch drinking water companies and water boards along the Meuse, Rijkswaterstaat, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management and RIWA-Meuse. In it, you can search on company, type of substance and permit issue, among other things. "A large proportion of the direct permits are already in it," states Van der Ploeg. “From Rijkswaterstaat and recently also from the water boards."
The indirect permits are not yet present. "It would be good to know which companies discharge streams of wastewater into the sewer system, to which sector these companies belong in and exactly what they discharge," emphasises Van der Ploeg. "This information is not easily accessible, but I suspect the number will be a multiple of the direct wastewater discharges. This should be readily available at the press of a button."
Companies’ permits to discharge substances should be publicly available. "It was in fact agreed in the Aarhus Convention, a European Convention that entered into force in 2001, that all environmental information should be open and publicly accessible," says André Bannink.
There should be paid more attention to the indirect discharges, Van der Ploeg considers. "Discharges into the sewers take place under the ground – you don't see them. Citizens don't complain about wastewater, while if a company makes a lot of noise or causes a stench they raise the alarm straight away. But at a given point these harmful substances come to light and then everyone is bothered by them."
Various parties are involved with regards to indirect permits, namely the environmental agencies, municipalities and provinces and this makes it complicated. After investigation of the environmental agencies in March 2021, the Van Aartsen Commission made 10 recommendations to improve the issue, supervision and enforcement of permits by environmental agencies.
Wastewater permits may not be older than ten years, and sometimes they must be updated within five years, depending on how environmentally impacting or how hazardous the discharged substances are. In 2019, Rijkswaterstaat conducted a random check to see how up to date the issued permits were. Three quarters of the permits proved to require updating. “Up to date also means that all substances that are being discharged including the quantities are in the permit," explains Van der Ploeg. "If something in the production process changes, this may affect the waste stream."
Rijkswaterstaat decided to inspect all the permits – around 800 – and revise them when necessary. According to the organisation this will take quite a while. Bannink: "Now that Rijkswaterstaat is busy on this update, you see that the water boards want to do this as well. Hopefully the environmental agencies will follow thereafter."
Van der Ploeg points out that recently, thanks to the Clean Meuse Water Chain, all kinds of exchanges are taking place between Rijkswaterstaat and the water boards on technical matters with regard topermit issuance. "Matters such as: what are you coming across? How will you deal with this? This is of course very valuable." Bannink: “Rijkswaterstaat now even has an ambassador for indirect wastewater permits. There wasn't one previously."
The Meuse doesn't only flow through the Netherlands, the river first flows through Belgium and France and receives water from tributaries including some in Germany. It would therefore be good, according to RIWA-Meuse, to have a combined overview of permits in these four countries. The Atlas for a Clean Meuse is a first step. "We are therefore taking steps in the Netherlands," says Van der Ploeg. "The permits in Flanders and Wallonia have also been mapped out partly and made digitally available by the water authorities. So there are opportunities to do this."
Why would it be good to have this information available? In case a drinking water company encounters a certain substance in the water, it will contribute to identifying which companies have obtained a permit for this substance, he explains. "As permit issuer you can look at the greater entirety of permits: if for example a large amount of a certain substance is being discharged in Belgium, that provides information that should impact the issuing of a permit in the Netherlands to make sure that the quality of the water does not deteriorate further in the Netherlands."
Who best could organise such an overview? The International Meuse Commission or the European Commission perhaps? It would be even better to have a summary for the whole of Europe, so including the Rhine and the other rivers.
Besides this, it would be good if European legislation is better coordinated, emphasises Bannink. "The European Industrial Emissions Directive is presently being tightened up. It would be good in this if an immission test could take place in Member States, in other words a check of what substances enter the water, an important step in the Dutch water policy for determining the effects of a residual discharge on the environment. The Netherlands have been doing since 2011. The section for the test at water abstraction locations has been significantly tightened up in 2019. RIWA proposed this together with Vewin at the time."
The European Commission is also busy on a revision of the Urban Waste Water Directive. Water boards hope this will give them more authority over who is allowed to discharge what into the sewer system.
Further, there are proposals to expand and refine the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR) into the European Emissions Portal. This is a European Union portal within which large businesses must declare what substances they discharge. "But if you currently search in that, you find few substances that we actually encounter in the Meuse," says Bannink. Now it contains only discharges exceeding 1,000 kg and from businesses that are subject to permits under the EU IPPC (Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control) Directive. According to RIWA-Meuse, it is important that smaller discharges and smaller businesses appear here too.
And once there is a picture of all these permits? "Then we'll see that there are many out-of-date permits and that not all substances that companies emit are included in the permits,” says Van der Ploeg. “In other words, permits are not up to date and incomplete. In many cases exactly those substances that threaten the production of drinking water are absent: the persistent, mobile and toxic substances. Thanks to new research there has been recently much attention to the fact that these substances are hazardous to health. This is another example why it is good to review permits regularly: you can include new insights about existing substances."
Bannink cites PFAS substances as an example. "We've known about these for over 50 years, but are only now discovering what problematic substances they are. This could also happen with other substances. So where at first no necessity was seen to impose discharge requirements on PFAS, now the strictest requirements are imposed. As long as we don't know how harmful substances are, they better should not be discharged."
In Flanders, much research has been done in recent years into PFAS discharges: how much is there and where does it come from? "One of the actions arising from this," reports Bannink, "is that baseline measurements are being conducted. In these baseline measurements one examines which harmful substances are there in the wastewater stream. When this is compared with the measurement results of the receiving water one can see how do these concentrations add up? Is it in order to allow the discharge, or is there already too much present in the water? Based on what we find in the water, discharge restrictions should be imposed.
In the current situation a company must report to the permitting authority what it plans to discharge. Companies are not always transparent about this, or don't know exactly what substances are released in a particular production process. Bannink: "It might be that a company applies for a permit to discharge cooling water for example, but doesn't know exactly what substances are in it, because the supplier of the cooling water treatment agent doesn't want to tell them as it is a commercial secret. Also, if different substances are discharged from what is in the permit, the permit issuer does not find this out."
A few years ago the Dutch Council of State pronounced that the permit applicant may only discharge substances present in the permit application. Bannink: "This was always the intention of the law, but now the Court has made it explicit that you must interpret it in this way. So now companies can get into trouble if they discharge substances that are not in the permit."
RIWA-Meuse would like to advocate that baseline measurements for wastewater streams are conducted in the Netherlands as well. "It would be good to look at PFAS," the Director of RIWA-Meuse considers. "But it would be even better to do thorough research into all harmful substances in wastewater streams and consequently amend the permit requirements to this."
Drinking water companies' expertise can also be used to assess which permits should and should not be granted. "The drinking water companies possess a great deal of knowledge about the substances, about what is harmful and less harmful, what is difficult to purify, and they have developed many advanced measurement technologies in their laboratories," says Van der Ploeg, who concludes: "To put it briefly, it would be very desirable, from our perspective, for companies to know exactly what they discharge. And a permit issuer should make every effort to know what is being discharged by companies. Incorporating this practice hopefully helps in getting better grip on harmful wastewater discharges."