In the past, the car park in front of the indoor swimming pool in Braniewo, Poland, was heavily sealed – an urban heat island in summer and, in spring, an exacerbating factor for flooding. Today, a rain garden stores water, cools the surroundings, and enhances the area. So simple, so important, so transferable across the entire Baltic Sea Region.
>It is astonishing, really, that recycling swimming‑pool water has never been systematically tested before. In this sense, the pilot in Braniewo – set up by the local municipal administration in cooperation with the Gdańsk University of Technology – is a true pioneering achievement, with encouraging results.
>A pilot project on Bornholm demonstrates how forward-looking water recycling for agricultural use can succeed with well-established technologies. Even more importantly, it has sparked significant momentum in Denmark’s national policy debate.
>After several droughts, it became clear that the municipality of Kalmar in Sweden urgently needed a new water strategy. The other important conclusion was that in order to develop it quickly, everyone should just get down to work and test out alternatives. Here is a report from a place where there is a lot going on and everything is flowing in the right direction.
>At the first of two WaterMan Roundtables in Brussels on 16 January 2025, the discussion flowed openly and directly: Do we need specific water-recycling regulations for Europe’s humid regions? And to which extent can the existing EU Water Reuse Regulation (2020/741) be stretched to support other use cases, beyond its agricultural focus? It was the beginning of a dialogue with ambitions reaching well beyond policy detail.
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