Portugal’s main environmental association, Zero, has raised serious concerns that, despite investment in improving the nation’s haphazard sanitation systems, the current set up rewards polluters.Zero has been looking at data from 2016, contained in the annual report for water and waste services in Portugal, issued by the Water and Waste Services Regulatory Authority, and found that only 83% of Portugal's households are connected to a sanitation system and that only 73.78% of these dwellings are linked to a pipe-work system that is connected to a wastewater treatment plant.
In addition to much of the nation's sewage not getting as far as treatment plants, only 58% of the wastewater that is collected actually gets treated.
This means that almost half of Portugal’s domestic sewage ends up in the river system, in the sea or in covert septic tanks.
Zero also reports that only 1,704 of the 2,743 existing waste water treatment plants (62%) complied with the terms of discharge licenses.
This situation raises a number of issues, particularly for the Portuguese Environmental Agency (APA) - and the National Water Authority which monitors compliance with the permits it issues. Fees collected are based on the volume of treated sewage, thus rewarding those councils which dump.
Investment currently underway, under the Operational Programme for Sustainability and Efficiency in the Use of Resources (POSEUR), will help matters - but only slowly.
The programme’s management, blessed with considerable funds from the European Union, will improve connections to sanitation systems and is paying for the construction of new sewage treatment facilities and the upgrading of old ones.
Since 2017, €270 million was approved for investment to construct or refit 131 sewage treatment plants and to construct or fix 1,765 kilometres of pipe network, eventually connecting a further 274,000 people to a modern sewage system.
Currently, polluters benefit - so Zero is calling for a fundamental change in the application of the Water Resources Tax, in order to penalise councils and sewage management companies that postpone investment in modern systems and stick to the old ways of 'dump and ignore.'
The clear folly of basing the Water Resources Tax on the volume of treated water exiting sewage plants, thus ignoring the volume of untreated sewage that is dumped, must be recognised as those councils that strive for efficient pipe-work systems and modern sewage treatment facilities are paying more than those councils which are happy to dump their malodourous obligations into the sea or nearest convenient river.
