Sludge from animal farms is being deposited into the drainage system – substantially increasing sewage treatment costs for the Water Services Corporation, chairman Marc Muscat said yesterday.
Mr Muscat said discussions were underway with the authorities to resolve the problem, but in the meantime the corporation was “living with it” because “it doesn’t want to kill the pork industry overnight”.
Mr Muscat said the sludge and effluent was going directly into the system untreated. Although many pig and animal farms possess cesspits, there is no system in place to ensure they are cleaned and the contents disposed of.
“The waste generated by a pig farm is equivalent to that of 80 humans so this is a big headache for us. It is increasing costs because we have to treat it with the rest of the sewage we treat at our plants,” he said.
The issue was raised during a round table discussion on water organised by Alternattiva Demokratika with the participation of stakeholders, including the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, the Environmental Health Department and the Malta Resources Authority.
John Mangion, MRA’s director of water, said an inter-ministerial committee was discussing proposals on codes of good practice for the storage, treatment and disposal of waste, including that from pig, cow and other livestock farms.
The issues discussed yesterday revolved mainly around groundwater and the over-extraction from boreholes. There are 8,000 licensed boreholes in Malta and Gozo, 806 of them in private residences and around 6,000 that are used for agricultural purposes.
Hydrologist Marco Cremona said the authorities should impose a complete ban on the use of boreholes, adding that as long as water remained free no one was going to invest with the intention of turning sewage into effluent, which would benefit agriculture.
On the MRA’s efforts to meter every borehole from which more than one cubic metre per day is extracted, Mr Cremona said this was a “complete waste of taxpayers’ money” unless it was used for academic reasons.
It is estimated that around 18 million cubic metres of water is extracted for agricultural purposes, while the Water Service Corporation extracts between 12 and 13 million cubic metres a year to add it to purified water from reverse osmosis plants.
AD spokesman Carmel Cacopardo criticised the planning authority for failing to check if developers installed rainwater cisterns in new buildings, failing which rainwater was ending up in the sewage system. The WSC, he said, should refuse to connect new buildings to the water system if the cisterns were not built according to the Mepa plan.
AD chairman Michael Briguglio lamented how the authorities were turning a blind eye to big soft drink companies and bowsers which were extracting water from boreholes for free. Water had a price and everyone had to pay for it, he said.