Improvement of sea water quality by means of WWTP revamping

Claudia Lasagna, Elisa Traverso, Roberto Milanesio

Iride Acqua Gas S.p.A. (IT)

Keywords: wastewater, sea outfall, theme map, seawater

The city of Genoa, located in the north-western part of Italy, not far from the French border, has about 650,000 inhabitants. Due to its particular setting (it stretches along a narrow area between the Ligurian sea and the Apennines) building one single wastewater treatment plant for the whole city would have not been suitable. In the mid ‘70s, when the first WWTPs of the city were planned, building one plant at the bottom of each of the eight major valleys that cut Genoa perpendicularly to the coast seemed the right solution.

In 1995 AMGA, the Genoese company for gas and drinking water distribution, started managing the wastewater treatment plants owned by the Genoa municipality. Some of the plants were very old and little improvements had been carried out since they had been built in the ‘70s. Thanks to national and international funding AMGA could start a wide programme of maintenance and repairs, as well as a monitoring campaign with the aim of assessing how such interventions may affect the quality of the Ligurian sea, that is the recipient body of the effluents discharged by the WWTPs. The present work describes what changes have already been carried out at the Valpolcevera plant and how GIS-related data have been and will be used in order to check the quality of surface and sea water in the surrounding area.