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The recently published EC circular economy package has the ambition in closing the loop of product lifecycles and introducing a holistic value chain approach.

Water in a circular economy will bring new opportunities for water-related innovation pilot projects, including a water component into each relevant value chain and developing new business models in various industrial water-consuming sectors. If you have project ideas or suggestions, do not hesitate to contact Vlakwa.

Water is a cross-component of a circular economy concept. The EC circular economy package has a number of elements relating to standards and guidance. Among them, there are few relevant to water:

• “Development of quality standards for secondary raw materials to help integration of these materials back into production processes”. Therefore standards are needed to build a trust. It is obvious that water retains value after each use and is a carrier of valuable materials and energy. The extracted materials from used/waste water and its by-products can be further used as a secondary raw materials. Unfortunately, used water and its by-product – sewage sludge are not explicitly reflected in this part of the package.
• “Proposals on water reuse, for example for irrigation and recharging of groundwater stocks. The Commission promised a legislative proposal on minimum requirements for the reuse of wastewater.”

Water in a circular economy approach has to be considered as a product, as a resource, consumable, and as a carrier of the valuable materials (critical materials, such as phosphorus) and energy (heat energy and chemical energy). Water should be included in each part of the circularity cycle. For example, in product design and production part of the EC package measures or actions should be foreseen to obtain efficiency of water use that would lead to energy efficiency (as a minimum) and the design of the products that uses less water, involves less losses of water and opens the opportunity to reuse used/treated waste water again in the production and consumption phases.

Water is also a product that should be kept as long as possible pure with a longer durability of its purity to achieve better environmental performance of water and energy-related products avoiding pollution of its purity. Furthermore water retains the value after each use and returns back to the system or environment. By-products from wastewater, such as sewage sludge, have to be an explicit part of the Commission package, considering the extraction of a number of valuable materials and optimizing energy recovery and reuse encouraging economic incentives, developing guidelines on functioning business models and technological solutions. Therefore industrial/rural/urban symbiosis have to contain an important water component for targeted actions in innovation and investment with setting up a tangible legal basis, incentives as well as taking out the regulatory barriers.

VLAKWA as an active member of the WssTP, together with other European water actors, is planning a number of activities to strengthen the water part of the EU Circular Economy package. The Commission's proposals will now be discussed by the European Parliament and Member States in the Council of the EU, with major discussions to be prominent during 2016. The circular economy package is available here: http://ec.europa.eu/priorities/jobs-growth-investment/circular-economy/.

For further information or your opinion on the importance of water in the circular economy package please contact Violeta Kuzmickaite vk@vlakwa.be