Details of the Irish extended producer responsibility organisation, required to be established under article 10 of the recast Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive, remain awaited.
As a recap, the recast Directive, which came into force on 1 January 2025, requires EU Member States to:
- collect and treat wastewater in all urban areas of more than 1,000 inhabitants;
- remove more nutrients that otherwise cause harmful eutrophication with tertiary treatment;
- remove micropollutants with quaternary treatment, financed by extended producer responsibility;
- make treatment plants energy-neutral and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 2045; and
- monitor wastewater for health parameters, such as SARS-Covid and anti-microbial resistance.
The recast Directive is expected to have a material impact on the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries because of its (by far) most controversial aspect, which is limiting the imposition of extended producer responsibility and liability for the costs of quaternary treatment to those industries only.
The recast Directive must be transposed into Irish law by 31 July 2027. The most recent update on transposition was provided by the Minister on 18 June 2025, when he confirmed that a national expert group had been established to support that process.
It had been anticipated that amendments to the recast Directive would be included in the Environmental Omnibus package presented by the European Commission on 10 December 2025 (see our article on this package here). The reason given by the European Commission, in the Q&A accompanying the announcement of the package, was that a study by the Joint Research Centre shows that costs of extended producer responsibility are expected to be similar to estimates in the 2022 impact assessment, taking into account inflation, new data on costs and the differences between the final Directive and the original Commission proposal.
The recast directive has been challenged in CJEU by Poland and in the EU’s General Court by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations and Cosmetics Europe. All take issue with the imposition of extended producer responsibility on the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries only. A domestic Irish challenge has also been initiated by the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association. None of the challenges have yet come to hearing.
We are continuing to monitor developments in these cases and Ireland’s transposition of the recast Directive.
Contact us
For further information on the recast Directive or advice on how your business may be impacted, contact Matheson partners Maeve Delargy, Ruadhán Kenny and Susanne McMenamin.