|
Baltic Sea to benefit as St. Petersburg incinerator starts disposing of waste
Unit financed by EBRD and international community begins operations
St. Petersburg’s northern sludge incinerator, funded by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the international community, has begun operations today, allowing the city of four million to edge even closer to its goal of completely stopping the discharge of untreated effluent into the Gulf of Finland.
Nearly four years after the EBRD provided a €23.8 million, 13-year loan to finance construction of the €50 million project, St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matvienko pressed a button to kick the first of the incinerator’s three planned units into action at a ceremony north of the city.
The new incinerator’s mission dovetails with that of a major sewage plant in the south of the city, also financed by the EBRD and the international community, which was inaugurated in September 2005. Thanks to the SouthWest Waste Water Treatment Plant, the proportion of St. Petersburg’s effluent discharged untreated into the Neva River was cut down dramatically, to 15 percent.
Today is an important day for Russia and its neighbours as yet another component of St. Petersburg’s measures to cut the pollution of the Baltic Sea starts operating and the EBRD is proud to be associated with this project, said Bruno Balvanera, the EBRD’s representative in the Northwest Federal District and head of its St. Petersburg office.
The northern incinerator replaces a landfill whose has capacity has been exhausted and is one of the key projects funded under the Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership (NDEP) programme. This was launched in 2001 to mobilise help from the international community in tackling the biggest environmental problems in northwest Russia.
The Nordic Investment Bank (NIB) provided a €9 million loan for the project in addition to a €6.4 million grant from the NDEP. The UK Department for International Development (DFID) provided technical cooperation funds on a grants basis to finance the project’s environmental analysis. The European Investment Bank provided a €20 million loan to the project.
|
