Board to receive plans for €250m sewerage upgrade

PLANS FOR a €250 million upgrade to Dublin’s municipal sewage plant at Ringsend, which has been working at over-capacity since it opened eight years ago, are to be submitted to An Bord Pleanála today.

The work will involve extending the capacity of the plant to process the sewage of the equivalent of 2.1 million people on a seven-acre site within the curtilage of the current facility, and the construction of a 9km pipe to bring the treated waste-water outside Dublin Bay for disposal.

Assistant Dublin city manager Séamus Lyons has said the work needs to be undertaken for the State to meet its obligations under the EU waste-water treatment directive. Waste-water processed by the plant is discharged directly into Dublin Bay. Upgrading the existing plant to remove the undesirable “nutrients” from the waste-water pumped into the bay would be very expensive, Mr Lyons said.

The least costly solution was to move the discharge site to the point outside the bay where nutrient release is permitted.

The plant, which was opened in June 2003 at a cost of €300 million, brought to an end the dumping of more than 40 million gallons of raw sewage into Dublin Bay each day.

However, while the plant substantially improved water quality, a noxious smell persistently affected the surrounding communities of Ringsend, Irishtown and Sandymount for years after its opening, largely due to the plant’s inability to cope with the volume of waste pumped in from the city’s sewerage system.

In November 2003, the city council reached agreement with the government to extend the plant, which had the capacity to deal with the sewage of approximately 1.7 million people, but was receiving sewage equivalent to a population of 1.9 million.

Work on the extension could not go ahead until the odour problem had been resolved. Almost €40 million was spent on odour alleviation measures, and by the end of 2008 the problem was substantially addressed.

In July 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a waste-water discharge licence to allow for the extension and upgrade of the licence. To comply with the terms of the licence, work must be completed by 2015.