St. Petersburg sludge incinerator set in operation
On 26 October, Russia’s second largest city St. Petersburg inaugurated the Sewage Sludge Incinerator at the Northern Wastewater Treatment Plant. The construction of the incinerator was financed by a number of international financial institutions, including the Nordic Investment Bank.
The incinerator will help solve the problem of depositing wastewater sludge to the city’s landfill, as the amount of sludge exceeds the landfill’s capacity. The new incinerator will reduce the annual 250,000 cubic metres of sludge into 12,000 cubic metres of ash. The output of the incineration can be recycled as construction material. The incinerator will also decrease the environmental risks of transporting wastewater sludge through residential areas. Both the incinerator and the wastewater treatment plant are operated by the municipal water utility company Vodokanal St. Petersburg.
“NIB is involved in financing this project because it has been critical to find a sustainable solution for sludge treatment in St. Petersburg. By financing environmental projects in St. Petersburg and Northwest Russia, our Bank has an important mission to ensure a better environment in the Baltic Sea region,” says Johnny Åkerholm, NIB’s President and CEO.
The total amount of investments in the construction of the incinerator stand at EUR 90 million. In addition to NIB’s financing totalling EUR 13 million, loans were provided by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the European Investment Bank and BNP Paribas. The project received grant financing from the Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership (NDEP), the UK Department for International Development and the Finnish Ministry of the Environment.
The sludge incinerator is another step in a large-scale programme of investments aiming to stop St. Petersburg’s effluent discharged untreated into the Neva River and the Baltic Sea. Earlier, NIB acted as a lead bank for the financing of the construction of the city’s Southwest Waste Water Treatment Plant launched in September 2005. Both projects have been implemented and funded under the NDEP programme orchestrated by four leading multilateral financiers, the European Commission and the Russian Federation to address the pressing environmental problems in the Baltic Sea region, the Barents region and Northwest Russia.
NIB is a multilateral financial institution owned by eight member countries: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden. The Bank finances private and public projects in and outside the member countries. NIB has the highest possible credit rating, AAA/Aaa, with the leading rating agencies Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s.