The Water Services Corporation has filed planning applications to upgrade its three sewage treatment plants and enable them to reclaim water for irrigation and industrial use.
Gone are the days when water is supplied for free. Water costs money and who uses it has to pay for it
Discussions are still under way with the Malta Environment and Planning Authority but in the meantime the corporation has applied for EU funds to cover the expense of installing new equipment, estimated at about €12 million.
The corporation has three new sewage treatment plants – at Iċ-Ċumnija in Mellieħa, at Ta’ Barkat in Xgħajra on the outskirts of Żabbar, and at Ras il-Ħobz in Gozo. They make Malta the first country in the Mediterranean and the seventh in the EU to treat all its sewage.
Together the plants produce an estimated 22 million cubic metres of treated sewage per year which is pumped out into the sea.
WSC chief executive Marc Muscat said the new equipment would further treat an estimated nine million cubic metres to produce water suitable for industrial and agricultural use, including batching plants.
This figure would be derived from all the sewage treated by the plants in Gozo and Mellieħa and a percentage of that produced by the Xgħajra plant, which is seven times larger than Mellieħa’s and 10 times the size of that in Gozo.
Mr Muscat said caution called for more in-depth analysis on the possible risks such as emerging pollutants, adding that studies were under way with the Malta Resources Authority.
The treatment and re-use of sewage has long been on the corporation’s agenda. Experiments on how sewage water could be treated to be re-used started in the late 1990s until, in 2009, the corporation’s engineers constructed an actual prototype of a commercial plant.
The model was used at the Gozo facility where it treated 100 cubic metres of treated sewage per day. This small plant was then moved to the Xgħajra plant,giving engineers results that were analysed and used to design a large-scale model.
These designs were finalised and are attached to the Mepa applications to upgrade the three plants.
The plants today treat sewage to a level good enough to be discharged at sea under the EU Wastewater Directive. The upgraded plants will continue to filter this water, in a similar way to the filtration system at the reverse osmosis plants, removing viruses and bacteria, until it reaches the standard of potable water.
However, although the reclaimed water will be good enough to drink, it will not be available to households as this would require a brand new infrastructure for distribution besides increasing the risks of cross-contamination with potable water from other sources.
Replying to questions on funding, Mr Muscat said the corporation “should not have a problem” to obtain the green light for EU funds because it had a “good record” with how it spent close to €100 million on the three sewage treatment plants.
Moreover, EU funds were used to upgrade the reverse osmosis plants in Pembroke and Lapsi. This upgraded equipment improved the quality of desalinated sea water by 30 per cent and reduced electricity consumption by 20 per cent.
“Now, the energy required for water production and treatment only amounts to four per cent of Malta’s national electricity production,” he said, adding that all his employees were constantly on the lookout for anything which could continue to reduce energy consumption.
Asked whether the corporation would be charging for the second class water, Mr Muscat said “there is no other alternative”. The corporation would meter it and whoever used it would have to pay for it.
“Gone are the days when water is supplied for free. Water costs money and whoever uses it has to pay for it,” he said.
Mr Muscat pointed out that the corporation was wasting a lot of its resources removing items illegally dumped in the sewage system, including ropes, small animals, animal parts, tarmac and gallons of used oil.
Asked to quantify this extra expense, Mr Muscat said the corporation incurred an extra €1 million last year because of these abuses in the Xgħajra plant alone. This cost covered just the energy andtransportation costs and did not include extra labour.
He said he hoped the law would change because the present one “was not a good enough deterrent”.