2023-08-21 06:58:16
This time there it is. Well almost. The government should publish by the end of August the long-awaited decree making it easier to reuse wastewater after reprocessing, for cleaning sidewalks, for example, or watering public gardens. It was one of the 53 measures of the water plan, announced on March 30 by the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron.
Today, only 0.6% of treated wastewater is reused in France (“guilty”, to use professional jargon), compared to 8% in Italy, nearly 15% in Spain, and even 84% in Israel. This delay is mainly explained by the absence of real needs, given a resource that has hitherto been very abundant, and the reluctance of the administration to embark on this path.
Simplify procedures
But the arrival of repeated droughts changes the situation and requires the optimization of water management. The government’s objective is to achieve 10% treated wastewater by 2030, with the deployment of a thousand projects by 2027. To achieve this, three major simplification measures have been decided. The first concerns the opinion of the Regional Health Agency (ARS), which until now has been the main source of blockages. If she objected to a project, it could not be done. From now on, its opinion will only be advisory.
The authorizations issued by the prefect will now be valid without time limit, compared to five years provided for in the previous decree of March 2022, which still only spoke of experiments. A period deemed too short to amortize the investments.
Then, the prior consultation of the local water commissions will no longer be mandatory, which should make it possible to speed up the processing of applications. “Making procedures more flexible does not mean that projects will be authorized blindly. Nothing changes in what is allowed or not”, assures an adviser to the Minister of Ecological Transition, Christophe Béchu. Thus, for the use of treated wastewater in the food industry, a decree should be published by the end of the year by the Ministry of Health, which has managed to keep control.
Anachronistic regulations
It is therefore a 180 degree turn made by the government. But the pressure was strong on the part of local authorities and water professionals, in the face of finicky regulations that appeared more and more anachronistic. “We reuse wastewater all over the world, with widely proven technical solutions. But in France, each time you have to act as if you were starting from scratch by responding to requests from four different ministries. “, explained recently the CEO of Veolia, Estelle Brachlianoff.
The mayor of Cannes, David Lisnard, also president of the Association of Mayors of France (AMF), for his part denounces a “economic and environmental waste”a regulatory arsenal « kafkaïen » and administrations that do not even speak among themselves. In his city, for nearly ten years now, instead of discharging it into the sea, he wants to use treated water to water green spaces, including a golf course, wash streets and dumpsters. After 1,026 analyzes proving the safety of the device, the authorization finally fell at the beginning of July.
Strong demand from local authorities
Without waiting for the government’s easing measures, many elected officials are looking to adapt their treatment plant by installing additional filters and connections to which the community’s tank trucks can be connected. According to the Professional Federation of Water Companies (FP2E), a hundred new projects have been under discussion since June.
For its part, Veolia has already installed around fifty specific treatment units over the past year, and plans to deploy 150 more by the end of 2024. In Suez, there is also talk of significant expectations on the part of municipal customers, but also industrialists or farmers.
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