Servicing Policy Packages for the Water Sector

Summary

Publication Year: 2015

Authors:

SPREE

SPREE: Servicing Policy for Resource Efficient Economy is a three-year project from 2012-2015 under the European Union’s Environment Program (FP7). The objective of the project is to design policy packages to achieve sustainable production and consumption patterns characterized by the transition from the purchase of consumer products to services in three sectors: water, transportation and food agriculture. The main product of the project is “Policy Packages for Transition to Service Consumption” which will help achieve a complete separation between economic growth and environmental damage while taking into consideration social considerations.

Summary

The Servicing Policy for Resource Efficient Economy (SPREE) is a three-year research project that was launched in July 2012 under the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7). Its overarching goal is to provide insights into how servicing can help EU countries to achieve a sustainable and prosperous economy characterized by the decoupling of economic growth and social prosperity from inefficient use of resources. Servicing, which facilitates the transition from selling products to providing services has the potential to address such a challenging goal of decoupling and hence was chosen as the core of SPREE research.

The Servicing Policy Packages is the key outcome of the SPREE Project. The Servicing Policy Packages in the Water sector is based on the project’s accumulated knowledge on the transition towards servicing and contributes to the development of policies to promote decoupling of economic growth and social prosperity from inefficient use of resources, through the facilitation of Gray-water Recycling (GWR) and Rain Water Harvesting (RWH) systems.

Water case study

The Water case study explores the potential to expand services around Gray-water Recycling (GWR) and Rain Water Harvesting (RWH) at the household level in order to reduce the use of potable ‘mains’ water in the household to essential uses such as drinking and cooking only, thereby reducing the environmental impacts associated with the provision of water through ‘mains’. The Water case selected is considered as a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) type of servicing.

The empirical work of the Base Case has focused on the South East of England. The Base Case in the Water sector and where attention was focused on in the initial Policy Packaging process (the Basic and Effective Packages) was the UK. Additional two case studies were carried out in Israel and Spain.

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