Waternet
- Classical challenges for water management are flood protection, the guaranteeing of quality and the guaranteeing of enough quantity of water.
- Current water management faces new challenges: circularity, biodiversity, climate resilience, energy transition and land use policy (including agricultural transitions)
- New policy focuses on a Zero pollution ambition
- To obtain zero pollution one has to start start the source where pollution is created
- Zero pollution ambition: shift responsibility to the whole chain to prevent pollution from happening
- EU policy can influence daily practices in industry and agriculture and contribute to a zero waste policy
Remarkable:
- Amsterdam Waternet has the ambition to make its own business circular for all that is bought and built within the water cycle
- Amsterdam waste water treatment can be fully circular
- Through biological processes that are 24/7 monitored, micropollutants are extracted from waste water.
- Some micropollutants are harvested and used to make and are and used to make other new products.
- Waternet startte Aquaminerals, a business with waste water treatment residu products.
- Phosphor is treated in such a way it is used as comopost for plants.
- Calcium is used to make facial scrub
- Amsterdam Pipes are pipes for electricity and water in the ground made from waste plastics
- Research is deeply embedded in daily practices
What is needed:
- More time for residu companies to grow and find their market before they have to comply to EU rules for procurment
- Make it possible to do business with local partners without having to do EU procurement processes.
- Make transparent process for using secondary materials in which waste can turn in to source material
- Transparent, complimentary, smart use of legislation, and non-legislation, that happens at different governance levels.
- Make definitions of waste, who owns the waste, who makes money through waste
Response Patrick Child: Check the Eco Design Directive and Circular Action Plan. They are now being made. Please have your government contribute to the discussions in the working groups. Also the chemicals framework is being reviewed currently.
Harbour Amsterdam
- How can we design an ecology between the different companies in the Amsterdam Harbour?
- Circularity fort the harbour is about space and energy
- Make distinction between waste and byproduct
- Current legislation is based on linear, old fashioned, concepts of industry
- There are thresholds in the development that need to be adressed
- Change taxation of raw materials to taxation of labour
- EU needs to create a level playing field in global developments
- For businesses in the Amsterdam harbour there are a lot of uncertainties and unpredictabilities:
- which technology will succeed?
- Which new rules can we expect?
- Which products will appear to be sustainable?
- How will the market evolve?
- To know coming regulation is important for entrepreneurs to be able to anticipate developments
- Data management is a big issue in product passports. Also several things are not included:
- End of use
- Raw matrials
- Waste
- Use of water and CO2
Remark Patrick Child: Batteries framework of the EU is a model how this will be approached by the commission
- Economic Affairs City of Amsterdam argues that we need “regulatory sandboxes” for making the transition work in the short time we have
- To innovate
- To make new economical interactions
- To make the right new laws
AMS Institute: on circular economy
- We should not only think about circular economy, but need to focus on ‘circular society’.
- A circular society is based on different values than current one. New use of space and time, of work and leisure, new ways of living.
- We have to move Beyond the pollutor pays
- It is about a redsitribution of cost & benefits
- To this end we need Integrated in laws and regulations that facilitate true pricing, true accounting, true taxing
- Tax people’s labour, not materials
- Make laws ate specific levels and for specific products, like wood
- Go from law as text to Law as service: Circulaw