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Foreword∗ Rivers are a characteristic of a country’s landscape, as they meander through fields, pass old cities and cross industrial areas. They attract one’s attention when studying maps, reminding us of the school days, where a country’s capital and main rivers did get ample attention, and in general they appeal to the imagination: the ‘rolling river’, playing its role in folk lore and songs. The appeal rivers still have to the public at large in one sense or other, can- not hide the common knowledge in our time that virtually all great rivers in our part of the world are seriously polluted. A pollution derived from the surroundings the river so pleasantly passed on its way to the sea: from the fields it gathered the run-off of manure and pesticides used on farms and nurseries, the cities contrib- uted their sewage water in quantities reflecting the number of their inhabitants, and finally, industry gave its waste in liquid form to the passing stream. In all ar- eas the high level of activity, leading to prosperity and growth in black numbers, inevitably leads to countervailing red numbers on the environmental side of book keeping: the disposal of waste in steadily increasing quantities into the waters of the nearby river, which never protests, but just keeps rolling along. In many instances the term ‘open sewer’ adequately describes the river in its current function. This apparently is the price we have to pay for economic de- velopment in our society. One can observe that developing countries are fast los- ing their state of innocence in this respect, in their zeal to copy the Western world also in this sphere. Not so long ago, a few decades only, in many European countries the seri- ous state of deterioration of national rivers was realized and in a common effort a dramatic change for the better began, by curbing disposal of toxic waste. The en- vironmental measures were focused on point sources, that is everything disposed of via pipes, connecting industrial and municipal sources with the river water, directly or indirectly. Thus, over the years, in regard to some toxic substances re- markable successes were achieved, with reductions of over 70 per cent (e.g. cad- mium in the Rhine). [xii] The cleanup of rivers became a standard element of national environ- mental policy (backed up, as always, by EC legislation). While authorities were gradually getting point source pollution more under control, with more or less realistic goals set for the near future, it increasingly became clear that the ultimate target, namely a clean river, would never be reached if the immense contribution to its pollution by non-point sources resulting from agricultural, municipal and ∗ In: J.M. van Dunné (Ed.), Non-Point Source River Pollution: The case of the river Meuse, Technical, Legal, Economic and Political Aspects, p. xi-xvii. (Proceedings Confer- ence, Rotterdam 1995). 2 MILIEU-AANSPRAKELIJKHEIDSRECHT industrial activities could not be energetically combated. With the acknowledgment of this task and challenge, a change of direction which took place on a world-wide scale, it soon became clear to environmentalists that the problems in this field dwarfed the ones known thus far. Taken from any angle - technical, legal, economic, political - the issues that arose proved to be far more complicated than those related to point source pollution. Instead of pipes, discharging substances in substantial quantities - and therefore, relatively easy to measure - one is confronted with an innumerable number of very small discharges by way of run-off, precipitation or part of waste water collected from local sources. The toxic contribution is hardly visible, and the actors usually are invisi- ble, and if made visible, can be counted in the thousands. The measuring tech- nique needed to map the intricate process of non-point source pollution in a spe- cific section of a river, requires a high degree of specialization and ingenuity, and as a consequence is time consuming and costly. The number of potential polluters involved also has its consequences in the legal sphere. There is safety in numbers, as we know, especially when prosecution is sought or an action for damages. The legal context, therefore, leaves the tradi- tional lawyer in distress: the normal rules of administrative, penal or tort law will prove too blunt to be effective in the prosecution of this type of polluter. Finally, the economic and political features of non-point source pollution are posing authorities considering environmental measures formidable difficulties. The reduction of this kind of pollution directly influences the specific source of economic activity, be it agriculture, industry or municipal house keeping, with a reduction of income as a consequence, usually in combination with expensive abatement measures. The financial aspects alone stress the need for solutions to be found which are acceptable to the groups of polluters involved, without having recourse to the use of traditional instruments the administration has. As will be clear from this general introduction to the subject of non-point source pollution, it is an outstanding topic for interdisciplinary study: technical, legal, economic and political aspects are intimately inter-related. Every separate and exclusive approach to this complicated matter in one of these disciplines is doomed not to find a solution which will be acceptable in society. Therefore, when in the course of a study directed at the pollution of the River Meuse, commissioned by the Municipality of Rotterdam in conjunction with some Dutch drinking water companies, the idea came up to organize an interna- tional conference, it was self-evident that it should be done on an interdisciplinary basis. The Meuse Research Project was set up in 1992 and is carried out by the International Centre of Water Studies in Amsterdam as far as the technical side is [xiii] concerned, and by the Institute of Environmental Damages in Rotterdam, Erasmus University, for the legal research. Incidentally, both institutes were in- volved in the Rhine Research Project, also initiated by Rotterdam, which started in the mid-1980s and has led to the conclusion of long-term environmental contracts by Rotterdam with industry in Switzerland, France and Germany, at the beginning of the 1990s. That research, dealing with point source water pollution with heavy metals, was the subject of two international conferences in Rotterdam, in 1990 and 1992.1 This book contains the Proceedings of the 1995 Rotterdam conference on non-point source water pollution. There are three parts, reflecting the themes of 1 The Proceedings have been published, see infra p. xxvi. FOREWORD 3 the conference programme: I The Meuse Research Project, II International and EC Aspects of Pollution of the River Meuse, and III Voluntary Agreements on Pollu- tion Reduction in Europe and the USA. A short description of the contributions to the themes follows here. First, Part I, The Meuse Research Project. The objectives and approach of the project are presented in the first, introductory chapter by Job A. Verheijden of the project’s Steering Committee. A consensus is sought between the Dutch drink- ing water companies and the parties involved in non-point source pollution of the Meuse, in France, Belgium and The Netherlands, on the basis of a sufficient re- duction of the pollution of the river water with pesticides, in the interest of the drinking water production, serving 1 million people in the region (out of 5 million in total, dependent on Meuse drinking water). The Meuse, linking the countries just mentioned, is one of the most polluted rivers in Western Europe, and Rotter- dam happens to be at the end-station of this great river, where it flows into the North Sea. An end-of-pipe position, so to speak. Thus, problems are created for water companies dependent on the Meuse river water for their production of drinking water. For example, in 1993 an excessive discharge of the pesticide di- uron into the Meuse forced the Dutch water companies to suspend the intake of river water for 45 days, causing a crisis in water production. The City of Rotterdam and the two drinking water companies (Water Company Europoort and Water Storage Corporation Brabantse Biesbosch) were joined in the Meuse project by 19 Dutch Meuse municipalities which have been confronted with pollution of their harbours with contaminated sediments, and also by De Biesbosch National Park, which suffered ecological damage. The damage, which ultimately may be claimed from the polluters (point and non-point), is an estimated total of Dfl. 20 million annually for the water companies, Dfl. 30 million for the Meuse municipalities, and Dfl. 1.5 million an- nually for the De Biesbosch National Park. The major point source polluters, 19 industrial and municipal sources, were addressed in the first phase of the project; in the second phase, which started in 1994, the focus was on non-point source pollution of the Meuse. Its contents are described in this foreword. [xiv] The technical research carried out in the context of the Meuse project is reported by several authors. Jan Dogterom and others, of the Amsterdam based International Centre of Water Studies, give an account of the pre-study on non- point source water pollution by herbicides, particularly in agriculture. It sought to establish a quantification of these sources, in an endeavour to find out whether a correlation could be demonstrated between the use and emission of herbicides in a well-defined hydrological unit and the load in the surface water of that same unit (immission). The research is aimed at the identification of a limited number of users of herbicides, and to see whether a prognosis can be made of the emission of individual compounds, based on crop specific use of the herbicides, the total area per crop in use, and the run-off, wash-out and drift coefficients.

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