Learn how the reconstruction of the Minsk treatment plant

How is the reconstruction of the Minsk sewage treatment plant, said today, September 25, Deputy Director for construction – head of the project implementation group “Minskvodokanal” Kirill Antonov during a visiting seminar “On the effectiveness of the investment program of the city of Minsk in 2026” with the deputies of the Minsk City Council, reports sb.by.

Kirill Antonov noted:

The reconstruction of the Minsk sewage treatment plant is one of the major investment projects not only in Minsk, but also in the country as a whole. There are 15 water intakes in Minsk, 5 of them are in the city. Water is extracted centrally. With sewers, the situation is reversed. When consumers or businesses use the water, drain it into sinks, it gets into a gravity sewer system. Water is not pumped, moves through underground pipes due to the slope of pipelines.

What is the peculiarity of sewage treatment plants? According to the speaker, this is the point where water is collected, which was used by consumers in Minsk for a day. Wastewater treatment facilities are designed to safely purify and return used water to the environment. The water receiver is the Svisloch River.

- Its peculiarity is that the river is small. To make Svisloch look natural and beautiful, purified water is supplied 100 kilometers from the city. And at the point of mixing purified water and water Svislochi ratio reaches one to one. This implies special requirements for our work, since the river is very sensitive to how we worked on wastewater treatment, the speaker shared.

The technology of wastewater treatment was invented in the early twentieth century and has not changed much since then. There are two stages of cleaning. The first is mechanical. Here the water passes the processes of filtering on the grilles, standing in the sands and further defending on the primary sediments. No reagents are added here. Anything that can come out of wastewater comes out. And anything that can settle settle settles.

The second stage is biological cleaning. In the waste water is added the so-called active sludge, living bacteria that in the process eat contaminants in the wastewater. The result is purified water, as well as waste, which is called sewage sludge. This is about 700 tons and 40 dump trucks per day, which we export from the territory and bury in silt sites outside Minsk. The former silt farm was located 20 kilometers from the capital. Last year a new storage pond was built at a distance of 70 kilometers from Minsk. The sediment itself is a huge problem not only for our city, but also for any large metropolis and requires a special attitude, Kirill Antonov informed.

According to him, the reconstruction of the Minsk treatment plant has three main goals. The first is the efficiency of water treatment. This is an acute issue and is associated with the fact that the Svisloch River is a fairly small water receiver. Therefore, cleaning will improve in terms of nitrogen and phosphorus, which are the main elements leading to the flowering of water bodies. So, two to three times in terms of nitrogen and phosphorus purification will be improved.

The second point is unpleasant odors that come from mechanical cleaning facilities. There are many outdoor pools, primary sediments. All of them involve the release into the atmosphere of some foul-smelling pollution. Therefore, all mechanical cleaning facilities are closed as part of the reconstruction. Exhaust gases will be cleaned and safely released into the atmosphere. Some of these installations have already been put into operation. Primary sediments are all blocked, the deputy director for construction noted.

The third point that involves reconstruction is the treatment of precipitation. As the speaker has already noted, precipitation today simply thickens to the necessary extent and is concentrated in order to be able to transport them to silt sites. As part of the reconstruction, a new stage is added - the disinfection of these precipitations at a temperature of 55 degrees in artificial conditions.

- In the process of fermentation, the amount of precipitation decreases by 40-50%. This is due to the fact that part of the solids of precipitation goes into a gaseous state. Precipitation after fermentation is pasteurized, disinfected. And, as a rule, such sediment largely does not have unpleasant odors during prolonged storage, Kirill Antonov added.

The reconstruction of the Minsk treatment plant is expected to be completed in 2028.

Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Council on Urban Planning, Housing Policy, Land Use and Ecology Alexander Khizhnyak noted that Minsk’s investment program includes such super-large facilities as the reconstruction of the Minsk sewage treatment plant.

- I would like to note that the investment program of the city is the amount of financing of 2.6 billion Belarusian rubles, of which 2 billion 334 million are expenses for the design and construction of specific facilities. For a city like Minsk, this object, which we are visiting today, of course, is important for all residents of the city, because all wastewater gets here, here they are filtered, cleaned by biological treatment to the appropriate sludge, said Alexander Khizhnyak.

He added that one of the tasks of this reconstruction is to make the facility more technologically advanced, including over time getting rid of the unpleasant smell that worries citizens.

- We consider such objects in the investment program unique, the deputy concluded.