2023-12-29 18:09:20
The file is moving forward. Not very fast, but he’s making progress. Nine months after the announcements by the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, aimed at encouraging the reuse of treated wastewater (REUT), during the presentation of the “ Water plan », a decree was published in the Official Journal, Thursday December 28.
Of the ” barriers » will be put in place
It regulates the system for the irrigation of agricultural crops and prescribes a certain number of measures intended to “guarantee the protection of public, human and animal health, and the environment”. It specifies in particular the level of health quality that must be achieved, depending on the types of crops, of this water from wastewater treatment plants, which is today massively released into the natural environment. The objective is to optimize resource management, while drought situations risk increasing.
The text has been awaited since this summer and has been the subject of numerous negotiations between the Ministry of Agriculture and that of Health, which has always been very reluctant about this practice. The decree thus introduces the notion of “ barriers “, allowing “ to use a lower quality of waste water on condition of mobilizing appropriate barriers to guarantee a sanitary state of the water adapted to the use”argues the Ministry of Agriculture, in a press release, giving examples.
For a winegrower, the barrier could mean drip irrigation or stopping the system before the harvest. A market gardener could, for his part, wash his produce with drinking water before selling it to consumers.
France remains very late
A decree published on December 21 in the Official Journal set a similar framework for watering green spaces, as requested by many local authorities. Another text is eagerly awaited by the agri-food sector which wishes to recycle water treated in factory treatment plants.
In total, a thousand projects could be launched by 2027, according to the government, compared to the 130 projects authorized today on an experimental basis. Around 300 are currently under study, a third of which are already being investigated by state services. This shows that expectations are high, particularly in the agricultural world.
In France, less than 1% of treated wastewater is reused, even though the practice is already widely deployed in countries experiencing chronic drought or water stress. In Israel, 84% of wastewater is reused. Spain is at 14%, or more than a third in the south of the country. In Barcelona, the reprocessed water is even reinjected into the groundwater, which supplies the population.
In France, the government’s water plan plans to reprocess and reuse 10% of wastewater by 2030.
A very high cost
This type of device is, however, not a panacea, estimates a report produced jointly by the administrations of the ministries of health, agriculture and ecological transition in July. “ Water reuse should not be seen as an isolated solution, but rather as an integral part of overall water resources management, taking into account the specificities of each territory. » he explains.
According to him, ” REUT is expensive from an economic point of view, but also environmentally, because it requires energy and chemical additives”.
From a financial point of view, the General Council for Food, Agriculture and Rural Areas (CGAAER) estimated in March 2022 the price of water from REUT for irrigation use in a range of 0, 8 and 1 €/m3, compared to 0.05 to 0.20 €/m3 for raw water, that is to say coming from the natural environment.
In industry and agriculture, there are therefore still many obstacles, economically, but also in terms of social acceptability. For local authorities, on the other hand, administrative relaxation should encourage the emergence of more consensual projects for the reuse of wastewater for watering green spaces, cleaning roads or even washing garbage dumpsters, which until now had to be done only with drinking water.
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