Make Water-Efficient Building the Norm, Sixty Dutch Organisations Tell Parliament
The group says voluntary appeals and shorter-shower campaigns are no longer enough, and points to Flanders, where rainwater reuse in new builds has been compulsory since 2004.
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A coalition of around 60 Dutch organisations is calling on the government to make water-saving compulsory in new and renovated homes. The group warns of “drinking water congestion,” a situation in which the supply can no longer keep up with demand, and says voluntary measures are no longer enough.
The call was made through a manifest, presented as a petition to the Tweede Kamer (the Dutch House of Representatives) by the Bouwtafel Waterzuinige Wijken, which translates as the “water-efficient neighbourhoods working table.” Its members include municipalities, provinces, water boards (the regional authorities that manage water), and companies from the water and construction sectors. The report was carried by the news agency ANP.
A warning of ‘drinking water congestion’
The coalition draws a direct comparison with the electricity network, where a shortage of capacity, known as grid congestion, has held up new connections and building projects. It warns that drinking water could become the next bottleneck, leaving new homes unable to count on a water connection as a matter of course.
“Drinking water threatens to become the new grid congestion, while the solutions are already available, from water-saving sanitary fittings to the reuse of purified rain and waste water,” said Martijn Dadema, a GroenLinks provincial executive in Overijssel and chair of the working table. “What is needed now is a clear national course, so that water-efficient building becomes the norm rather than the exception.”
Dadema put it plainly. “We are very explicitly asking: no more voluntary measures, no more just ads telling people to take shorter showers, but also simply making it part of the law.”
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What the coalition is asking for
One concrete idea is to flush toilets in new buildings with rainwater or used shower water, known as grey water, instead of clean drinking water. More broadly, the manifest sets out a series of requests: to speed up the government’s existing national plan for saving drinking water, to draw up a single national guideline for water-efficient building that municipalities, housing corporations and developers can follow, and to write water-saving and safe water reuse into law. Throughout, the group stresses that any reuse must come with safeguards for public health.
Learning from Flanders
The coalition points across the border to Flanders, in Belgium, as an example of what clear rules can achieve. There, collecting and reusing rainwater in new buildings has been compulsory since 2004, with toilets and washing machines connected to the rainwater system. Partly as a result, average drinking water use in Flanders is around 84 litres per person per day, compared with about 119 litres in the Netherlands.
The group also points to Dutch projects that already work. In Venhuizen, reusing rainwater has cut drinking water use by between 48 and 92 percent, depending on the size of the storage tank, while grey-water systems in 15 homes in the Blitseard district of Leeuwarden save around 300,000 litres of drinking water a year.
Testing before legislating
The organisations are not asking for rules to be imposed overnight. They want water-saving technologies to be tried out first in a limited number of example neighbourhoods, where solutions can be tested and monitored in practice, before being turned into national legislation. The coalition says independent bodies should assess whether the methods are safe before they are scaled up.
The bigger pressure on drinking water
Demand for drinking water is rising because of climate change, a growing population and the roughly 900,000 new homes the Netherlands plans to build by 2030. According to forecasts cited by the coalition, the country will need about 100 million cubic metres of extra drinking water a year by 2030.
The government has already set a target to bring average use down to 100 litres per person per day by 2035, from about 118 litres now, according to drinking water companies. The pressure was underlined in late April by the Council for the Environment and Infrastructure (Raad voor de leefomgeving en infrastructuur), an official advisory body, which warned that the future availability of drinking water is under serious pressure from climate change, pollution, and population and economic growth.