Council rejects waste water sugges

DUBLIN City Council has dismissed a suggestion to extend a planned waste water treatment facility on land it has already purchased for the construction of a waste to energy facility.

A long-standing campaigner against the incinerator planned for the Poolbeg peninsula, Joe McCarthy, believes the council should scrap their plans for the controversial waste to energy facility.

He maintains the council should instead build their planned extension of the waste sewage treatment plant on the land they have earmarked for the construction of the incinerator. He claims the proposal could save taxpayers tens of millions of euro.

Dublin City Council recently submitted its proposals to An Bord Pleanála for a

?¬250 million extension of its sewage treatment plant in Ringsend.

It plans to carry out the work on a seven acre site within the curtilage of the existing sewage plant. The council envisages that the project will necessitate the construction of a nine kilometre long pipe that will enable the disposal of the treated waste water at sea.

However, Mr McCarthy believes that building a larger tertiary waste water treatment site on the land that is earmarked for the incinerator would bypass the requirement to construct the pipe.

He also holds the view that the controversial incineration project, which has so far cost taxpayers over

?¬80 million and has been dogged by contractual problems, is doomed to failure and should be scrapped.

He noted that the council has already spent some

?¬45 million on acquiring a 12 acre site for the planned facility and believes the local authority could recoup some of that money if it builds the tertiary plant on the site instead.

He claimed the council has estimated that it could cost between

?¬75 million and e100 million just to build the nine kilometre pipe.

He maintains that the council would not need to spend this huge sum of money if it extended the plant on the site planned for the incinerator.

“They plan to dig a pipe at enormous cost out into the middle of Dublin Bay,

? he said.

“But by building a tertiary plant on part of the incinerator site you would save the cost of this enormous pipe.

?

A spokesman for the city council described the proposal as a

“naïve suggestion

? and said it ignored the fact that the ultimate size of the Ringsend treatment plant is dependent on the size of the sewer pipes bringing the waste water to the plant for secondary and tertiary treatment.

“The sewer pipes bringing the wastewater from all over Dublin do not have the capacity to carry a higher volume of waste water and it would simply not be sustainable, for cost and practical reasons, to dig up the entire city to put in new, bigger sewer pipes,

? the spokesperson explained.

“This fanciful suggestion would also require an even longer outfall pipe,

? he added.

“The people of Wales would have cause for concern.

?