Streszczenie:

Infrastructure is the basis of economic activities both in urban and in rural
areas. It is also one of main conditions for improving quality of life. Among its
most important elements are: water delivery system, as well as sewage treatment
network and sewage treatment plants. These devices should create one composite
techno-economical system. Non-integrated water delivery contributes to bigger
waste of water, and without connection to integrated sewage treatment systems, it
can be a serious threat to the environment
In Poland, and in rural areas particularly, this situation is highly unsatisfactory.
In 2007, share of population connected to water network in rural areas was
73.3%, while for sewage network is was only 21.3%. In many communes, this
share was even less than 10%. One can mention a few reasons of this state,
mainly: lack of sufficient investment for 40 years after the 2nd World War, big
water deficit in rural areas (brought about by droughts and thus, big reduction or
decline of water level in shallow homestead wells, being a main water source), big
dispersion of rural settlements in the country, limiting economies of scale
achievement, and lack of resources available for local authorities.
The latter, having not enough resources for infrastructure development,
made a decisions to concentrate on water system firstly, while more costly waste
management was treated as a second-tier need. In consequence, bigger investment
in this field has just started since the half of nineties in the 20th century.
Despite this late investment, in December 2007 one could observe that the
total length of sewage network was still 4 times shorter than water network. Only
15.5% of rural administrative units were canalized. A quantity of household
wastewater purified was 5 times smaller than a quantity of water used. There was
also a small number of household sewage treatment plants (figure 4), which can be
a good response for dispersed rural settlements. Thus, cesspools (many of them
leaking), remain the main way of wastewater collection, being a serious threat for
environment.
However, there is a hope that this situation will change during next 7–10
years, mainly by obliging Poland to follow the EU Directive 91/271/EEC. This
law expects any European Union member state to create, till the end of 2015,more than 2 thousand inhabitants. In Polish National Sewage Treatment Program,
almost 1600 administrative units of these kind, were indentified. 1400 of them are
totally or partially inhabited by rural community. Releasing this program is, however,
determined strongly by local self-government activity and its ability to gain
sufficient financial resources for this purpose.