Water treatment plants in Europe: new data viewer

Treatment of urban wastewater is crucial for protecting the natural environment against pollution. A new data viewer from the European Environment Agency (EEA) allows users to access data on urban wastewater and  treatment plants.

The new data viewer, part of the Water Information System for Europe (WISE) has been developed to facilitate the use and display of data already reported under the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (UWWTD). The new UWWTD data viewer allows users to create overview graphs and tables on a range of parameters – for example, the size distributions of treatment plants. Query results can be exported in Excel format for further analysis.

It should be noted that it is still possible see overviews for UWWTD agglomerations and treatment plants on the interactive WISE map viewer;  the underlying data can be downloaded from the UWWTD Waterbase.

Also, an overview is included of direct links to national websites for water/waste water information for public use, e.g.,  French, Irish. More direct sharing of data from such national systems is central in the Structured Information and Implementation Frameworks (SIIFs) to be progressively implemented for the UWWTD in the next years. The Environment DG European Commission, EEA and Member States are working together for this exercise.