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| Home > News & events > 2005 feature stories > New sewage plant to clean up Baltic Sea | ||||||||
New sewage plant to clean up Baltic Sea |
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Posters on the drive into St. Petersburg from the airport dubbed it ‘Europe’s biggest environmental project’. It was built to tackle one of the greatest sources of pollution threatening the Baltic Sea. Those who stand to benefit from the project are the 50 million people living around its shores. Sewage plant inaugurations normally do not attract VIPs, but the President of Russia, the President of Finland and the Prime Minister of Sweden all came to the opening of St. Petersburg’s Southwest Waste Water Treatment Plant because it is a model of international cooperation and because its impact will be felt far beyond the city itself. Of the plant’s total cost of €138 million, the EBRD loaned €35 million which was earmarked to fund construction work; another €50 million was donated by the European Union, Nordic neighbours and national agencies. Over 850 sub-contractors, mainly drawn from Russia but also from other countries such as Finland, Germany and Sweden, worked two-and-a-half years to build the plant, which had been left over unfinished from the Soviet era. In time, on budget It could have gone horribly wrong. The project was very big and extremely complex with a large number of participants, involving both the public and the private sector. But in the end it was completed in time and within budget, something that Finnish President Tarja Halonen stressed in her speech. Anyone who has ever had to redo a flat knows how rare it is for the contractors to complete it within the original budget. “It was possible thanks to open tendering and the high number of bidders for each contract. One of the great benefits of this process is that it taught local companies how to compete in international tenders,” said Lena Sjoblom, a St Petersburg-based EBRD banker who supervised the project for the Bank’s Municipal and Environmental Infrastructure (MEI) team. There was therefore much to celebrate when President Vladimir Putin’s helicopter disgorged the official guests to the sound of a military march played by a Russian navy band. An invited audience of 600 cheered as the valves were opened, releasing streams of dark, foul-smelling water into the plant’s filtering basins to be purified. Realising a dream The plant will halve the amount of untreated effluent being released each day into the Neva river -- and consequently into the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic -- by the city of St. Petersburg. The governor of St. Petersburg, Valentina Matvienko, boasted that her city’s ambition was to have the best environmental record in Europe. “Today marks the realisation of what this city had been dreaming of for decades. Very soon the time will come when we will be able to drink clean water from these (filtering) basins,” she said. Once the filtering process is complete, ultra-violet rays from equipment installed by a Russian company are used to kill all remaining bacteria. The plant is one of the first in Russia to use this process and St. Petersburg expects other Russian cities will follow suit. The St. Petersburg water authority boasts the water treated by the plant is already fit to drink, but a suggestion that the VIP guests be invited to swallow a glass of it in public was politely declined by the organisers of the September 22 inauguration. Taxpayers’ money well spent President Putin’s message was not only that the plant would improve the quality of life for the people of St. Petersburg and all those living on the shores of the Baltic, but that this project was a living proof that the money contributed by European Union taxpayers had been well spent. “EU taxpayers must know that their money has been used here in the best possible way. This is a brilliant example of cooperation which shows we can be effective in tackling common problems and that Russia is fulfilling its obligations to improve the environment,” the Russia president said. The figures say it all. The plant which treats the effluent from over 700,000 inhabitants is spread over 77 hectares, but employs a staff of just 45. The most political message came from Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson who, while praising the plant’s role in reducing Baltic pollution, made the point that much more could be done to turn the area into a “champion of growth of prosperity” and called for the removal of barriers to trade and investment. 85% of water treated Thanks to the plant, only 15 percent of St. Petersburg’s waste water is now discharged into the Neva untreated. The city’s goal is treat all effluent by 2008 and a new collector designed for this task has already been partially built. The EBRD is awaiting feasibility studies in order to determine its possible role in the new project. The Southwest Waste Water Treatment Plant is the first project to be completed under the Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership (NDEP), set up by four years ago to mobilise help from the international community for tackling the main environmental problems of Northwest Russia. It is its inclusion in the NDEP list that enabled the plant to attract nearly €50 million in donor funding, mainly from the EU’s TACIS programme, Finland and Sweden. In addition, loans for the project came from the EBRD, the NIB and the EIB, as well as various Nordic institutions. The NDEP mainly financed equipment. The man whose passionate conviction persuaded the international community to fund the project is a former Soviet submarine commander, Felix Karmazinov, who now heads the St. Petersburg water authority, Vodokanal. And the day it was inaugurated, it was from him that the greatest compliment to the EBRD came. “The EBRD is a great school, a great training. You are very difficult to work with, but we could never have done this without you,” a grinning Mr Karmazinov told First Vice President Steven Kaempfer at the end of the ceremony. Written by EBRD Press Advisor Richard Wallis. Contact
EBRD’s MEI team 3 October 2005 |
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