Bringing urban wastewater back to LIFE

The EU took a major step closer to achieving its zero pollution ambition when the recast EU Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive entered into force on 1 January 2025. The new rules will 'further protect human health and the environment from harmful discharges of urban wastewater' - with LIFE projects already showing the way.

'New rules on treating urban wastewater will ensure the protection of citizens' health, drive innovation and promote circularity,' says Jessika Roswall, Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy. 'This will help Member States become more water resilient.'

From small villages to megacities, the Directive covers settlements of over 1 000 inhabitants. Environmental risks from harmful nutrients will be reduced, and new standards will be applied to the treatment of toxic micropollutants. Systematic monitoring of health hazards such as microplastics, forever chemicals, antimicrobial resistance and viruses is also now required. Rules improving the management of stormwater in cities are newly introduced, which will help tackle floods like those caused by the heavy rainfall in southern Belgium in 2021 and Storm Dana in Valencia, Spain.

The €2.9 million LIFE Reseau project, which concludes in February, retrofitted two wastewater and sewage treatment plants in Spain and Denmark with the latest 'smart infiltration and inflow' technology to cut untreated stormwater discharges. 'We have to go for the best technology in each scenario and embrace that technology,' says José Ramón Vázquez Padín from project partner Aquila. 'The water sector tends to be very conservative, but it's evolving faster than ever.'

New technology also featured in the €1.6 million LIFE CONQUER, which closed in October 2024. Smart nano-filtration devices removed agricultural nitrates and salts from groundwater and the resulting 'regenerated' water used to irrigate public parks in Murcia, Spain - a city notorious for its water shortages. Going forward, more than 140 000 m3 of reclaimed water will be produced each year for urban irrigation, with a further 350 000 m³ per year in nearby Zarandona.

The original Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive was adopted in 1991, just a year before the LIFE programme was born. Hundreds of LIFE projects have helped advance its goals of protecting the environment from adverse effects of waste water discharges, including LIFE POPWAT, which developed a new nature-based solution for removing up to 96% of hazardous persistent organic pollutants (POPs) from waste water in Czechia.

LIFE REWAT brought an entire Italian river basin back to life in collaboration with local farmers. 'The Cornia Valley has become an innovation laboratory for the sustainable and participatory management of water resources,' says project manager Alessandro Fabbrizzi. 'Above all, it has created a participatory approach, shared at every level and by the community, based on the value of water as a common good.'