WWTPs play an essential role in cleaning our water, maintaining the overall resilience of aquatic ecosystems, and protecting biodiversity.
Biocarrier leakage from municipal and industrial wastewater treatment plants to the environment undermines this objective and contributes to the already significant accumulation of plastic waste in the marine environment. Given the widespread use of biocarriers in Europe, the transboundary nature of their pollution, and the increasing risk of leakage due to extreme weather events, there is a need for a harmonised and ambitious set of prevention measures among the Nordic countries.
This study, carried out in conjunction with the designers and operators of biocarrier-using WWTPs, identified a wide variety of actions to reduce the risk of biocarrier leakages, from the preliminary design stage to the monitoring of a functional WWTP operation.Â
Some of the recommendations are common sense and very inexpensive to implement. Their effect can be quick. Other measures, whether regulatory or related to the design of the plants themselves, may take longer to implement and be more costly.
Although the design of a WWTP is a compromise between the costs of achieving an optimal facility and the budget available, certain safety-related expenditures should not be ignored.
At each stage of the biocarrier life cycle, the training of designers, operators, regulators, or inspectors is the basis of informed and appropriate decisions concerning biocarriers in WWTPs.
Therefore, stakeholder implication is particularly important during the start-up phase for smooth operations from the outset.
From now on, and depending on their situation, it is up to stakeholders to implement the most obvious measures that can be carried out quickly and at low cost.