A-Z: W for water

Hi! Welcome to A-Z! A-B-C-D... W for Water. Europe wants to protect water: water in rivers, like the Danube, and at your favourite beach, the water you drink and the water you pollute. Let's look at wastewater. There are about 30 European laws on water. The aim is to restore its cleanliness. All Member States must start doing it. Let's see if they are. No! Not that! This is a news programme, not reality TV! This is what happened before 2007. When you flushed a toilet in Brussels, the sewers discharged straight into the River Senne. But now all the wastewater from the Brussels region has to be treated in order to meet EU regulations. Every day 275 million litres go into this treatment plant. Imagine 100 Olympic swimming pools to be cleaned. To purify that volume, you must: 1. Remove all the large floating items. They are filtered out down to the last centimetre. 2. The grease that floats to the surface is removed and also the grit that settles to the bottom. And 3. Eliminate the organic material which decomposes in the water. Basically, the **** produced by people and animals, or rotting plants. Processing time: 10-18 days. As a result, the water is clean again. Cost of treatment: 0.04 euro cents per litre, times 275 million litres, equals 110,000 euros per day. The more we pollute, the more it costs to clean the river. The problem is that not all Member States can afford it. There are certain Member States, especially our new ones, that don't have the money at the moment to finance these expensive wastewater treatment plants. At the same time, what I deplore is that there are European funds that are not used. While waiting for EU help, we should pollute less. But how? Think about it before you flush! Bye!

EuroparlTV video ID: 053c18db-d7bc-42f1-a2d5-a0cf00b59405