The Brabant water board De Dommel wants festivals to clean the wastewater before it goes to the sewer. According to the board, large quantities of drug residues end up in the wastewater during festivals and the perpetrator, the festival organization, should pay for the costs of cleaning.
The water board confirmed this to Omroep Brabant. The Water Board moved on Thursday ring the bell about the issue in an opinion piece in the regional newspaper Eindhovens Dagblad.
Purification techniques
De Dommel will open a special installation next week that, among other things, filters medicine residues from the water.
The costs for this are 14 million euros. The water board is talking to hospitals, among others, about the possibility of preventing medicine residues from ending up in the sewer.
The same would apply to festivals, but drug residues require different purification techniques. These techniques already exist, but are expensive. The water board believes it is unfair that expensive installations should have to be built at the expense of the community every time there is a festival.
According to the board, making such a large investment just to remove the large peak of drug residues during the festival months cannot be explained to the taxpayer.
Responsibility
The water boards are responsible for the purification of sewage water. The treatment plants were originally built to remove organic substances from the sewage, but nowadays there are many more chemical substances in the wastewater.
This is how medicine residues, microplastics, PFAS and drug waste end up in the water. Some of it is filtered, but not all. This has negative consequences for the surrounding nature.
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