Uisce Éireann and Celtic Anglian Water hosted the Forum’s Water Services Standing Committee meeting at their Ringsend plant this week.
Wastewater from Dublin has been treated in Ringsend since 1906. Built in 2005, the current plant is the largest in Ireland and was designed to cater for an equivalent of 1.64 million people, 40% of Ireland’s wastewater. The plant is currently undergoing upgrades as it is overloaded and therefore not in compliance with the EU’s Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive. The average daily load received at Ringsend Wastewater Treatment Plant in 2019 was 1.98 million population equivalent with peaks well in excess of that but the upgrades will see a capacity for 2.1 million population equivalent by the end of 2023 and further ongoing upgrades will deal with 2.4 million population equivalent by the end of 2025.
In addition, the treatment processes are being improved to include a greater emphasis in waste recovery that will be more in line with proposed new EU Legislation to change wastewater treatment plants to Resource Recovery Facilities. Phosphorous and Nitrogen are being precipitated from the waste and processed into struvite which is a fertiliser that is currently used to fertilise tillage crops. Struvite provides an alternative to mineral phosphorous fertilizer and it is becoming an increasingly important resource as mineral phosphorous is becoming less available and more expensive.
