The WOW! team finished the State of Art report on legislation in Europe and the partner countries of the Interreg NW Europe project: Germany, UK, Luxembourg, Belgium, France and The Netherlands. The objective of this report was to describe the main juridical and policy context for bringing raw materials from wastewater to the market, including national differences.
The report first describes the European Legal framework. Nine directives and regulations are described, amongst which the Water Framework Directive, the Sludge directive and Fertiliser regulation. Next, the report describes how the EU legal frameworks is implemented in the National legislation of each of the partner countries. The State of the Art report is one of the pillars for the National policy action plans.
The main conclusions of the state-of-the art report are:
- Despite excessive EU legislation, members states and regions have a significant amount of flexibility
- Interpretations of key definitions are often left to (national and European) courts based on case-by-case analysis (e.g. end-of-waste status). This leads to unclarity and uncertainty for STPs and initiators of resource recovery projects.
