Norwegian Municipal Wastewater Facilities (≥50 p.e.): Treatment Characteristics, Discharge Parameters, and Arctic Classification

This dataset provides a compiled inventory of 2663 registered municipal wastewater facilities in Norway with a design capacity of ≥50 person-equivalents (p.e.). Facility-level information was retrieved from publicly available data provided by the Norwegian Environment Agency (Miljødirektoratet) on 2025-09-30, translated to English, and harmonised for analysis. The source data are freely available under the Norwegian Licence for Open Government Data (NLOD) and Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0), and this compiled dataset is shared under compatible open-access terms.

The dataset is released in two complementary formats:
(1) a GeoPackage containing spatial point geometries and
(2) a CSV table without geometry,
to support both GIS-based and non-spatial analytical workflows. The GeoPackage uses the WGS 84 / Arctic Polar Stereographic projection (EPSG:3995). Both formats include additional coordinate fields—latitude/longitude (WGS84) and UTM Zone 33 (EPSG:25833)—to ensure interoperability across mapping and statistical tools. Annotated R code describing the data preparation pipeline is provided as a PDF to document data provenance and processing steps.

Facility attributes include design capacity, treatment principle and treatment process classifications, discharge recipient category, selected annual discharge parameters from Norske utslipp (BOD₅, COD, TSS, TN, and TP; tonnes per year), and regulatory indicators such as monitoring requirements. To support Arctic-focused analyses, each facility is spatially linked to permafrost zonation (Obu et al. 2018, 2019) and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) Arctic boundary. Additional contextual fields describe municipal and county identifiers, responsible authorities, organisational information, and facility website links.

The dataset was developed in connection with CLIMAREST (DOI: 10.3030/101093865), examining wastewater treatment challenges and regulatory alignment in Norway under the revised EU Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive. It is suitable for research, policy analysis, spatial modelling, and infrastructure planning, particularly in Arctic and cold-region contexts.